A transformative decade that witnessed the U.S. film industry's restructuring under the pressures of neoliberal globalization, the 1980s swept away the last remnants of Old and New Hollywood alike while preparing the ground for today's High Concept wasteland - thus goes an all too familiar tale of decline. The texts assembled in this volume tell a different, altogether more fitful and complex story about Reagan-era Hollywood, attuned to the struggles that went on behind and in front of the camera: interrupted careers, defiant last stands, paths not taken.

The book places particular emphasis on modes of realism from within the mainstream of U.S. popular cinema that resisted the tide of the times. The lexicon format, allowing for many perspectives and constellations while imposing none, encourages the reader to make their own connections, drawing out parallel histories that restore a sense of possibility to the canonical course of film history. From forgotten masters to minor works of the greats, from the defining actors of the decade to its definitive genres, from resistant independents to the resistible rise of the multinational corporation: the Real Eighties await rediscovery.
About the Author: Lukas Foerster is a film critic and curator based in Zurich. He is a regular contributor to dailies and magazines such as taz, WOZ, Cargo, and perlentaucher. Since 2006, he has been organizing film programs in Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich.

Nikolaus Perneczky is a writer, researcher, and cofounder of the curatorial collective The Canine Condition. He is coeditor of a volume on Third Cinema (2014) and coauthor of a monograph on contemporary U.S. comedy (2016). Recent publications include essays on the Nigerian filmmaker Ola Balogun (2016) and on the Nigerian animation pioneer Moustapha Alassane (2017). He is currently working on a Ph.D. project at Goldsmiths, University of London, concerned with the making, sharing, and showing of moving images in post-independence West Africa.

Contributors include: Andrey Arnold, Alejandro Bachmann, Johannes Binotto, Adam Cook, Filipe Furtado, Thomas Groh, Christoph Huber, Michael Kienzl, Ekkehard Knörer, John Lehtonen, Hans Christian Leitich, Sulgi Lie, Maximilian Linz, Elena Meilicke, Olaf Möller, Bert Rebhandl, Drehli Robnik, Simon Rothöhler, Joachim Schätz, Alexandra Seibel, Leonie Seibold, Silvia Szymanski, Fabian Tietke, and others.