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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... cold war inactivity , their need for a cold war war . The very existence of the " Firefox , " a supersophisticated Russian warplane that flies at 100,000 feet at Mach V and has a thought - controlled weapons system , becomes an ...
... cold war for visual iconography , but at the end it returns to speech . Incongruously Rocky's final speech , draped in an American flag in a Moscow arena , is an incoherent repudiation of all that cold war rhetoric of the film's first ...
... cold war terrorism . If America and Russia cannot have a shooting war this film says , then their cold war scenarists must be content with making interna- tional snuff movies . Television and Amero - Russian relations go together ...
Contents
The Vietnam War as Film Text | 16 |
The Coming Home Films | 61 |
The Terrorism Film Texts | 114 |
Copyright | |
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