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
... human realities of the American farm crisis , explored the fanaticism of the terrorist mind , and chronicled the yuppie phenomenon in American life . No film historian has his finger more firmly on the pulse of the film industry than ...
... human action . Also , on a primary text level , history may embody an idea that gives a general definition to the vision of the film and points in a general way toward the other levels of textuality of the film - its subtexts and / or ...
... human and political puzzles of the future written in the 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 ...
... human villains of the past . More friendly , childlike machines like R2D2 and C3PO of the Star Wars series ( 1977 , 1980 , 1983 ) , Number 5 of the Short Circuit series ( 1986 , 1988 ) , and even Steven Spielberg's E. T. ( 1982 ) and ...
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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 |