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 1-5 of 74
... whole book consistently focuses , whether the issue at hand is an international or a domestic one , upon the film representations of those issues as they participated in American culture . Film in the eighties not only bore witness to ...
... whole cluster of time - travel movies embody Hayden White's concepts of a " metahistory " that can go back and by means of critical reinterpretation change the meaning of history . Themes like this concept of self - reflexivity form ...
... whole series of texts . The textuality issue as a starting point in turn involves two other essential issues : ( 1 ) what and where that text is ; ( 2 ) how to interpret that text . It is extremely difficult , however , to either ...
... whole context of violence in the film . " In a war , " as Samuel Popkin has stated , " the first and foremost issue is the containment of violence . " 5 Dirty Harry operating in San Francisco is trying to contain violence . Harry has a ...
... whole body of Vietnam War films have accumulated into a rather full subgenre . The history of the Vietnam War film is a clear one and the first phase of it has been defined before by a number of commentators , myself included in The ...
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 |