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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... metaphors and motifs shared by groups of films that together portray , approach , and often even comment upon a specific historical event or sociohistorical trend . In the twentieth century in America ( which epoch coincides with the ...
... metaphor . At times , film even took on a prophetic function . In 1988 , three films appeared - Costa - Gavras's Betrayed , Oliver Stone's Talk Radio , Parker's Mississippi Burning — that warned of an upsurge in white suprem- acist ...
... metaphors for its international and domestic policies in the eighties . In film , this same self - reflexivity took ... metaphor for postmodernist confusion , paranoia , and aliena- tion within both eighties society and film . Perhaps ...
... metaphor for what America was afraid it was going to become in the economic and political 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 ...
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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 |