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
... deals with more serious issues - terrorism , detente , nuclear holocaust , racism , yuppieness - than baseball , but at its core is that same point : that Hollywood creates a discourse in clearly defined texts that not only comment ...
... deal with their historical texts , The Films of the Eighties : A Social History works to discover and thus minimize the problems of communication that inevitably arise between the demands of the historical text and the criticism ...
... deal with social history are still around and as vocal as they have been in every decade of film history . Director Richard Lester charges that " the films of the ' 70s and ' 80s seem to have come from one studio . Ostrich Films Ltd ...
... deal with social history . Davies remembers seeing the Hollywood musical Singin ' in the Rain ( 1952 ) when he was a child : " When you grew up in a Liverpool slum and you saw these films , that's what you thought America was like ...
... deal with the new cold war of the eighties . It consistently alluded to the history of the sixties and the seventies , principally the Vietnam War , the civil rights movement , and Watergate , as cautionary metaphors for its ...
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 |