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
... critical taste and social consciousness . As Steve Randall , senior vice - president of Tri - Star Pictures , makes abundantly clear : " The 12 - to - 24 audience sells two - thirds of the movie tickets . It's a fact of life , and if we ...
... critical reading of texts ( including items usually referred to as documents ) in a manner that may itself affect both the conception of former ' reality ' and activity in the present . " 7 Essential to any study of these " texts ...
... critical theories generated in literary and philosophical studies , theories that emphasize the multiplicity of levels of interpretation of texts and the hidden emplotments ( language patterns ) of both style and 1 The Holograph of History.
... critical interpretation as well as antiquarian preservation , as a discourse of relativist contextualizing as well as mononarrative backgrounding , as a discourse of culture - generated stylistic and thematic subtexts as well as factual ...
... critical act of reinterpreting and even reshaping past history . These films examined the self - reflexive need to reexamine our political consciousness toward the issue of nuclear war ( The Terminator ) , our ecological conscious- ness ...
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 |