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 90
... films ' social history not only exposed but probed those " deeper , disquieting elements " of the main issues of the ... film history of the eighties decade . It begins with a New Historicist model for the participation of film in the ...
... film . The " historical imagination , " for White , attempts " to explain the past by ' finding , ' ' identifying ... film as sociohistorical document fits this model of contextualized history in that films frequently carry on social and ...
... films ) to the point that new levels of the text become holographically overlaid atop the original text . LaCapra sees the focus upon these " mechanisms of diffu- sion " as central to a definition of late - twentieth - century ...
... film historian has his finger more firmly on the pulse of the film industry than James Monaco , and when he compares the social consciousness of the films of the eighties with those of the sixties the present shakes out pretty well : I ...
... film's ideological / historical project is as blatantly revisionist as this , " Gavin Smith protests , " but it's [ Mississippi Burning ] a classic case of a film not being what it should be ... Hollywood modes of discourse infiltrate ...
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 |