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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... films of the seventies and of the eighties was their nostalgic attraction to fifties and sixties events , issues , and social mores . James Greenberg describes how in the Reaganite - yuppie eighties . " Hollywood went for the Fifties ...
... film as a corporate entity , in this eighties film history the ubiquitous villain is the political terrorist . One of the central polemic concerns of The Films of the Seventies : A Social History was that despite the long - standing and ...
... film representation , participate in an interactive relationship . Histori- cal event generates film representation , which accelerates the progress of the original historical event . What results is proof of both film's aesthetic ...
... film focused less upon the film's subject matter and more upon the trials of bringing that film to the screen . It all began in 1978 when Francis Coppola publicized the making of Apocalypse Now as a war almost equal to the Vietnam War ...
... films such as Michael Mann's Thief ( 1981 ) and Richard Rush's Stunt Man ( 1980 ) never amounted to a trend in film history's participation in social history . The first real formation of sociohistorical " texts " in eighties film ...
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 |