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
Results 6-10 of 98
... Vietnam War and postwar issues , for example , function as a New Historicist interpretation of a sociohistorical text neither interpreted nor understood in the previous decade . In the eighties , film history becomes the mass media ...
A Social History William J. Palmer. 2 The Vietnam War as Film Text N THE LATE seventies , the Vietnam War films , specifi- cally Coming Home , The Deer Hunter , Go Tell the Spartans , and Apocalypse Now , served as barometers that ...
... war because by 1979 an impressive body of literature had been published . Political science and history departments also began creating Vietnam War courses . Na- tional literature conferences regularly ... Vietnam War as Film Text 17.
... Vietnam War . These films served as the publicists of a Vietnam War consciousness that was abroad in the country yet dormant for various reasons ( bitterness , shame , depression , decompression , inarticulateness ) . American society ...
... Vietnam War became a tool , a strategy text , that could be used to teach other , more universal things . Let us call these strategy texts METATEXTS , texts about the creation ... Vietnam War's macroviolence The Vietnam War as Film Text 19.
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 |