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
... nuclear war , proposed scenarios for America - Russia detente , laid bare the human realities of the American farm crisis , explored the fanaticism of the terrorist mind , and chronicled the yuppie phenomenon in American life . No film ...
... nuclear arms control negotia- tions with Russia . In 1983 , three films - Places in the Heart , Country , The River - made news in their sharp criticism of the government's abandon- ment of the family farmer and actually helped to lobby ...
... nuclear threat , form another layer of the holograph . The new form of war , terrorism , the new racism , the new feminism , all form a constantly shifting social layer of the holograph . As a by - product of Reagan - era political ...
... nuclear threat and detente , to deal with the new cold war of the eighties . It consistently alluded to the history of the sixties and the seventies , principally the Vietnam War , the civil rights movement , and Watergate , as ...
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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 |