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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... meanings we can locate evidence of the ways in which our culture makes sense of itself . " 3 The Films of the Eighties : A Social History , as did its predecessor , unfolds in terms of a constant binary focus . Social history , the ...
... meaning : " it will be lived better if it has no single meaning but many different ones . " 8 Late - twentieth - century historicism needs to define itself as a discourse of critical interpretation as well as antiquarian preservation ...
... meaning or meanings of those events , not to mention their contextual relationship to other events . Thus the historian is intent merely on creating a text without any self - reflexive sense that under interpreta- tion that text may ...
... meaning or has too many meanings to comprehend . Film diffuses the social history of the eighties by defining those " trends " or " threads " -such as Vietnam guilt or yuppie cynicism - that hold the time together and then places ...
... meanings . Film , better than any other medium , is capable of reacting to that need to exist within the confusion of postmodernist life . The confluence of social history and film history in a holographic textuality , then , is a ...
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 |