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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... social history of both decades were strikingly similar and were explored and disseminated to a mass audience through the movies . In fact , one notable trend of both the films of the seventies and of the eighties was their nostalgic ...
A Social History William J. Palmer. example , where the Vietnam War was central to the relationship between film and social history in the seventies , it remained so throughout the eighties . Or whereas a prominent chapter in its ...
A Social History William J. Palmer. more conscious of the power of visual imagery than Ronald Reagan . He was a master at using what Hollywood has always known : that the American people arc most comfortable in believing and ...
A Social History William J. Palmer. consistently overshadowed by the commercial . This materialist emphasis , stimulated after 1980 by the ascendance of Reaganomics , overshadowed older standards of critical taste and social ...
A Social History William J. Palmer. Chariots of Fire , and the promise of existential films such as Michael Mann's Thief ( 1981 ) and Richard Rush's Stunt Man ( 1980 ) never amounted to a trend in film history's participation in social ...
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 |