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 91
... movie The Day After . The impact of that single " media event " so catalyzed public opinion that it influenced the Reagan government to pursue more serious nuclear arms control negotia- tions with Russia . In 1983 , three films - Places ...
... movie screen . The films of the eighties seem to be consistently offering images of screens within screens . Often ... movies . The eighties is the flowering of the age of high - tech gadgetry and computer proliferation , thus the films ...
... movie industry ( with the ludicrous exception of John Wayne's Green Berets ) had refused to portray the war in films while the war was going on . The American academic establishment had not yet gotten around to teaching it . Thus some ...
... escalated to the point where the buddy - chase genre movie is no more than a text within a bigger text , a small war caught in the context of a larger war , a microcosm of the Vietnam War's macroviolence The Vietnam War as Film Text 19.
... movie Platoon does . Both are alive and real in their action sequences , yet both are artificial and pretentious in their subjective , metaphoric , intellectual discussions of the war . The Vietnam War is a text that just happens , like ...
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 |