The Films of the Eighties: A Social History

by William J. Palmer

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809320290
• ISBN13: 9780809320295
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

More Fun than One Might Guess

Dr. Palmer's scribblings on film are NOT so uselessly DRY as the mysterious quoting review implies, though the guy can ( & does) stoop to SOME jargonic postmodern deconstruction, plus at least one hilariously terrible actual diagram. I swear! Fortunately, the empty academic professionalism is nicely balanced by passages of plain readable screed, tips on good commercial flops, etc. The professor seems to be some sorta quasi-Dickensian crypto-feminist at heart, best as I can guess from this filmcrit & a very sketchy bio. He is overkind to Oliver Stone, who does not NEED (or even want) kindness, but otherwise fair. Or almost fair. If one elects to concoct a sub-heading called "Ensemble Weepies" for categorizing bathetic chick flicks, what about "Baseball Hokum" for the inverse, or obverse, or obtuse? Doctor?

Scholarly analysis.

"...on a primary text level, history may embody an idea that gives a general definition to the vision of the film and points in a general way toward the other levels of textuality of the film - its subtexts and/or metatexts (self-reflexive discourses). If history is a holograph, then so is film because film is also composed of different layers of textuality. The surface texts of most films are constructed out of a limited number of conventional mass modes of discourse (plots), whereas the subtexts of films consist of a variety of sociohistorical discourse contests (themes) such as politics, social consciousness, revisionist history, moral messaging and existentialist themes. " (The "score" rating is an unfortunately ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)