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 56
... seventies in that earlier study encompassed approximately seventeen years , the eighties really do begin in 1980 with the ascendance of the Reagan administration and continue of a piece throughout that decade . The victory of the Reagan ...
... seventies , principally the Vietnam War , the civil rights movement , and Watergate , as cautionary metaphors for ... seventies , for example , the subgenre of the disaster film found a short - lived popularity . Like the microcosmic ...
... seventies were trying to put out fires that their leaders had started . The seventies was characterized by America's struggle to escape and survive Vietnam exacerbated by the international embarrassment of Watergate . Thus the ...
... seventies " nothing was ever what it seemed to be , " 40 in the films of the eighties everything is simply out of control , and the world is struggling to stave off chaos . If in the seventies , political thrillers were most worried ...
... seventies , the Vietnam War films , specifi- cally Coming Home , The Deer Hunter , Go Tell the Spartans , and Apocalypse Now , served as barometers that measured the submerged public opinion toward that war and the soldiers who fought ...
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 |