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
... attempt to understand what happened to a soldier in - country Vietnam - drew pockets of concentrated focus at cir- cumscribed points in the decade . The eighties in film history actually began with a British invasion . Epic ...
... attempts to vitalize dry - as - dust history via the inclusion of new methodologies of interpretation borrowed principally from literary criticism , philosophy , and linguistics as " McHistory , " all " special sauce , lettuce , cheese ...
... attempts at surrealistic , expressionistic , or existentialist historiography in this century ( except by novelists and poets themselves ) . " 6 White's argument implies that because of the conservatism of the historical establishment ...
... attempts " to explain the 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 ...
... attempts definition and interpreta- tion of the multiple texts that accrue in layers , and finally attempts self- reflexive analysis of those different texts as a means of arriving at a metatext or metahistory . This metahistory places ...
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 |