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. |
From inside the book
The striking similarity of the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations and their attendant personality cults notwithstanding , those two decades bear the burdens of quite similar social histories as well . Both had the previous decade's ...
Eighties America , Reagan's America , appeared , superficially , to be a safe place , especially in terms of economic stability . Like America in the fifties , eighties America was a " sure - thing society .
Thus it is also most fitting that the central figure of eighties social history , Ronald Reagan , was a former film actor who repeatedly employed film images and references to advance his historical goals . In his farewell speech to the ...
more conscious of the power of visual imagery than Ronald Reagan . He was a master at using what Hollywood has always known : that the American people arc most comfortable in believing and understanding events that they can see .
While thousands of real families were fighting to save real family farms , films like Places in the Heart , Country , and The River dramatized their struggle and lobbied Congress and the Reagan government for farm aid in the public way ...
What people are saying - Write a review
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 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Bibliographic information
| Title | The Films of the Eighties: A Social History |
| Author | William J. Palmer |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | SIU Press, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0809320290, 9780809320295 |
| Length | 335 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |