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. |
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... begins with a New Historicist model for the participation of film in the writing of a fuller history . It then proceeds to examine the individual historical texts that film wrote during the eighties . This book examines what Edward ...
... begin in 1980 with the ascendance of the Reagan administration and continue of a piece throughout that decade . The victory of the Reagan agenda changed everything in Ameri- ca and by as early as 1982 had also changed the very nature of ...
... begin with an analysis of the textuality of a social event or trend or theme that has generated filmic representations . Next , it will proceed to critical analysis of the visual / verbal representation of that social text in specific ...
... the Vietnam War in movies begins in 1976 with the film Taxi Driver , the first of the films , which include Coming Home , Rolling Thunder , Who'll Stop the Rain , and Heroes , to portray troubled Vietnam 20 The Films of the Eighties.
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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 |