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
Results 1-5 of 38
... cold war manuevering against Russia . Both were acutely nuclear holocaust conscious : the fifties in the first glow of the atomic age , and the eighties in the final realization that the fate of the earth ( to purloin Jonathan Schell's ...
... cold war maneuverings of detente spawned another cluster of films of sociohistoric signification . Of the domestic issues of the decade , eighties film history developed an ongoing fascination for the intricacies and ironies of the ...
... cold war of the eighties . It consistently alluded to the history of the sixties and the seventies , principally the Vietnam War , the civil rights movement , and Watergate , as cautionary metaphors for its international and domestic ...
... cold war intrigue and espionage , international blackmail , and fanatical revolu- tion . Of all the genres , the political thriller has historically been the most attentive to the issues of social history because political thrillers ...
... cold war with Russia and Japan , a loser . Vietnam became a warning , a symbol of defeat and loss , but most of all , it became a text.2 It became an extremely complex text that was constantly being interpreted , reinterpreted , and ...
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 |