The Films of the Eighties: A Social HistoryIn 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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Preface I is fitting that The Films of the Eighties : A Social History should be a sequel to a book with the identical title about the seventies . Sequels – from Superman to Star Wars to Rocky and Rambo to Indiana Jones and Beverly ...
In fact , one notable trend of both the 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 ...
example , where the Vietnam War was central to the relationship between film and social history in the seventies , it remained so throughout the eighties . Or whereas a prominent chapter in its predecessor defined the major villain of ...
Some of these international issues were carry - over issues from both the fifties and the seventies . They either grew in significance in the eighties as the society tried to resolve them ( such was the case with Vietnam and detente ) ...
Films in the seventies and eighties often portray the events of history as swirling around characters , burying characters in complexities , utterly confusing characters , often leaving characters suspended in a nihilistic void in which ...
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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 |
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Bibliographic information
| Title | The Films of the Eighties: A Social History |
| Author | William J. Palmer |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | SIU Press, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0809320290, 9780809320295 |
| Length | 335 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |