The Films of the Eighties: A Social HistorySouthern Illinois University Press, 1993 - 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. |
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... Russian . The two most popular novels of the summer of 1989 in America , Martin Cruz Smith's Polar Star and John Le Carre's Russia House , were set in Russia and had Russian heroes and heroines . Due to the effects of the rhetorical ...
... Russian hordes and the genocidal Nazi - like tactics of Russia's Vietnam , the war in Afghanistan . The Russian hordes in Afghanistan in Rambo III ( as in Red Dawn ) are portrayed as sadistic torturers and faceless machines . Rambo's ...
... Russian relations , but it also signals the precise need for greater openness that America and Russia ultimately took in the second half of the eighties decade . In all of these Amero - Russian genre spy films , the one constant is that ...
Contents
The Vietnam War as Film Text | 16 |
The Coming Home Films | 61 |
The Terrorism Film Texts | 114 |
Copyright | |
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