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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... characters , and inter- pretive possibilities that Hollywood has been more than eager to exploit . Conversely Hollywood has courted social credibility and even political power by supporting projects that portray , interpret , and , in ...
... characters , burying characters in complexities , utterly confusing characters , often leaving characters sus- pended in a nihilistic void in which history either has no meaning or has too many meanings to comprehend . Film diffuses the ...
... character complains , " they tore down my past and built a shopping center . " Perhaps that irony best characterizes this subtext of cynicism that moves throughout both eighties social and film history . America in the eighties is ...
... characters , each of whom represents one of those points of view . Del Vecchio's platoon in The 13th Valley is the most highly educated , articulate , introspective collection of black and white grunts imaginable . In other ways ...
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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 |