The Films of the Eighties: A Social HistorySIU Press, 1995 - 335 pages In this remarkable sequel to his Films of the Seventies: A Social History, William J. Palmer examines more than three hundred films as texts that represent, revise, parody, comment upon, and generate discussion about major events, issues, and social trends of the eighties. Palmer defines the dialectic between film art and social history, taking as his theoretical model the "holograph of history" that originated from the New Historicist theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. Combining the interests and methodologies of social history and film criticism, Palmer contends that film is a socially conscious interpreter and commentator upon the issues of contemporary social history. In the eighties, such issues included the war in Vietnam, the preservation of the American farm, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, changes in Soviet-American relations, neoconservative feminism, and yuppies. Among the films Palmer examines are Platoon, The Killing Fields, The River, Out of Africa, Little Drummer Girl, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Silkwood, The Day After, Red Dawn, Moscow on the Hudson, Troop Beverly Hills, and Fatal Attraction. Utilizing the principles of New Historicism, Palmer demonstrates that film can analyze and critique history as well as present it. |
From inside the book
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... actually participate in it . Thus it is also most fitting that the central figure of eighties social history , Ronald Reagan , was a former film actor who repeatedly employed film images and references to advance his historical goals ...
... actually partici- pated in those changes . In the film industry , from the early seventies on , businessmen have been in control . The period from 1975 ( immediately following the success of Jaws ) to the present has been a cycle in ...
... actually influence , and participate in the social history of its time . Over the course of the decade , major sociohistorical issues accumulated referential bodies of films that formed coherent " texts . " Other issues— such as the ...
... actually predicted disastrous events such as the gas leak in Bhopal , India , that killed thirty - four hundred people in 1984 and the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion in 1986. Simultaneously , however , these films lobbied for the ...
... actually " sets the social agenda . " Two other foreign voices , those of directors Terence Davies and Alan Parker , strongly agree with the power of Hollywood film to deal with social history . Davies remembers seeing the Hollywood ...
Contents
16 | |
The Coming Home Films | 61 |
The Terrorism Film Texts | 114 |
The Nuclear War Film Texts | 179 |
From the Evil Empire to Glasnost | 206 |
The Feminist Farm Crisis and Other Neoconservative | 246 |
The Yuppie Texts | 280 |
Film in the Holograph of New History | 308 |
Index | 325 |