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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... past into the participatory position of being a layer in the holograph of present history . Dominick LaCapra also lobbies polemically on the necessity and poten- tial for a new approach to history . In History and Criticism , LaCapra ...
... past who sought " to find order in seeming chaos , " 14 have realized that the " dream of a ' total history corroborating the historian's own desire for mastery of a documentary repertoire and furnishing the reader with a vicarious ...
... past as an end in itself must appear to be either an antiquarian , fleeing from the problems of the present into a purely personal past , or a kind of cultural necrophile , that is , one who finds in the dead and dying a value he can ...
... past by ' finding , ' ' identifying , ' or ' uncovering ' the ' stories ' that lie buried in chronicles . " The problem is , however , that after " a given set of events has been motifically encoded " 24 by the historian , he is ...
... past times , the monks had the pens and the paper and were literate and they wrote down , " this is what happened . " This became " history . " In a sense , we as filmmakers are contemporary historians . The system - basically the ...
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 |