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 64
... White's theory of tropes and deep stylistic emplotments offers a methodology for the interpretation of the historical texts that LaCapra defines . By White's definition , " tropics is the process by which all discourse constitutes the ...
... White is defining a new theory of taxonomy based upon style and structure rather than upon subject matter or subdiscipline approach or genre . For White , historical discourse especially should aim toward " the assim- ilation of history ...
... White , attempts " to explain the past by ' finding , ' ' identifying , ' or ' uncovering ' the ' stories ' that lie ... White's definition of the contextualist posi- tion : " the informing presupposition of Contextualism is that events ...
A Social History William J. Palmer. reality . Both Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra stress the duty of history to study " mechanisms of diffusion " whereby " texts and other artifacts are circulated and used in society . " 27 In these ...
... white supremacist violence . He chose , however , not to present that film's message from a black point of view . His was a choice quite similar to that made earlier by Sir Richard Attenborough in Cry Freedom ( 1987 ) , which views the ...
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 |