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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... issues of sexual ( in the aftermath of the World War II " Rosie the Riveter " women's liberation ) and racial ( in the dawnings of the civil rights movement ) equality , while in the eighties feminism reached its maturity and the first ...
... issues of American social history of both decades were strikingly similar and were explored and disseminated to a mass audience through the movies . In fact , one notable trend of both the films of the seventies and of the eighties was ...
... issues of social history . It examines how , as one layer in a complex multidimensional holograph of history , film history enters into the major debates and issues . Further , it defines the forms , the texts , that the discourse of ...
... issue at hand is an international or a domestic one , upon the film representations of those issues as they participated in American culture . Film in the eighties not only bore witness to cultural change but in many instances ( such as ...
... issues accumulated referential bodies of films that formed coherent " texts . " Other issues— such as the farm crisis or the attempt to understand what happened to a soldier in - country Vietnam - drew pockets of concentrated focus at ...
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 |