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
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... problems of the cities ( homelessness , drugs , disease , crime , racism ) seemed to be moving outward and infecting small - town America . The major issues of American social history of both decades were strikingly similar and were ...
... problems of communication that inevitably arise between the demands of the historical text and the criticism function of the film text . The goal is to achieve the paradigm that LaCapra recom- mends , the integration of history and ...
... problems in their own field . " 10 Thus , as does White , LaCapra argues that history can no longer be a single authoritative voice presenting exhaustive documentation as evidence of factuality . Dialogical history , conversely , would ...
... problems of the present into a purely personal past , or a kind of cultural necrophile , that is , one who finds in ... problem what is often taken , deceptively , as a solution : the relationship between texts and their various ...
... problem is , however , that after " a given set of events has been motifically encoded " 24 by the historian , he is satisfied and fails to interpret the meaning or meanings of those events , not to mention their contextual relationship ...
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 |