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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... eighties , which dictate the chapters of this book , are either carry - overs from , or similar to , the issues and chapters in The Films of the Seventies : A Social History . For example , where the Vietnam War was central to the x ...
... central polemic concerns of The Films of the Seventies : A Social History was that despite the long - standing and consistent charges of the film industry's traditional exploitation of historical fact and realism , Hollywood ( a generic ...
... central to the methods of the New Historicism . LaCapra predicts that " all forms of historiography might benefit from modes of critical reading premised on the conviction that documents are texts that supplement or rework ' reality ...
... central to the concept of metahistorical analysis.25 Modern social history fits White's definition of the contextualist posi- tion : " the informing presupposition of Contextualism is that events can be explained by being set within the ...
... central to a definition of late - twentieth - century " sociocultural history " that is " motivated by a justifiable revolt against an abstracted history of ideas " and " has sometimes proceeded under the banner of a populism ( history ...
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 |