Amerarkana as recommended by Film General Board on IMDb
Over a few threads (and years!) on the Film General message board on IMDb I asked for examples of "Amerarkana". Now latterly this has been resurrected on the ICM Forum after IMDb deleted their own forums.
What is a film from the body of Amerarkana? It is an arcane American movie, it is the type of movie I grew up watching, catching haphazardly on late night tv, as a 90s British teen (many Americans had the same on their late night cable).
Below are some typical characteristics of the type of movie in question, it should include many/most of these with the more non-negotiable ones nearer the top:
Important note: some of these films will have been described as "film soleil", in DK Holm's book of the same name, though by no means all. Amerarkana is intended to include most of those films but be a wider definition. Not all Film Soleil as per Holm would qualify, as Holm includes films not located in the US, such as René Clément's "Plein Soleil".
Thank you to the individual posters who made recommendations, these guys are recognised in the comments by each film in the list. Thanks to the unofficial historian of IMDb's dearly departed Film General board, Perception_de_Ambiguity, for keeping the details of many of the historical threads.
What is a film from the body of Amerarkana? It is an arcane American movie, it is the type of movie I grew up watching, catching haphazardly on late night tv, as a 90s British teen (many Americans had the same on their late night cable).
Below are some typical characteristics of the type of movie in question, it should include many/most of these with the more non-negotiable ones nearer the top:
- released into cinemas (or indeed on TV or straight to video) between 1981 - 2007 (this period is bookended by the discovery of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the last new release on VHS in America, the theory is that the prevalent sex being dangerous element coincided with the former issue, and the releases of this type of film died with its main commercial medium for distribution)
- set entirely in the USA (or partially in Mexico where Mexico is a metaphor, e.g. substitutes for the American unconscious or id)
- not recognisably set in the big coastal cities of America (although New Orleans gets a special permission and the big cities are often a starting point, before the leap into the unknown/primal, "Something Wild" and "The Last Seduction" being examples). This is the most broken rule. Generally if you think the movie has elements of civic purpose, civic pride, civic progress, civic responsibility or even civic destiny, then you're on the wrong track, this is out-of-kilter individualist cinema.
- related to the above, elements of "unplacedness", particularly the feeling of having no idea where the movie was set in recollection. Double points if a forensic examination of the movie finds no references to real places on a map.
- atmospheric (ingredients such as darkness, resignation, hopelessness, delinquency)
- sleazy female characters, schizophrenic leads, drifters (physically or metaphysically). Lives lived on the margins
- containing an element of crime
- magical real atmosphere (parallel to the oneirism of the classical 40s and 50s noir cycle)
- B-movie. If created by a recognised auteur, generally ignored by critics when talking about their body of work (for example "Fear X" by Nicolas Winding Refn, "In the Cut" by Jane Campion and "Palmetto" by Volker Schlöndorff)
- elements of fatalism
- could be futuristic dystopian, if elements of polemic absent
- (with the above exception) set contemporaneously, that is, not made in 1990 with a story from the 1920s
- perhaps an affluent, discreet, individualist world, elements of traditional power structures absent
- the stereotypical VHS box cover may show at least two of these objects: woman (preferably scantily clad), gun, cigarette, highway, car (sports, red), cactus and/or tumbleweeds, neon sign
Important note: some of these films will have been described as "film soleil", in DK Holm's book of the same name, though by no means all. Amerarkana is intended to include most of those films but be a wider definition. Not all Film Soleil as per Holm would qualify, as Holm includes films not located in the US, such as René Clément's "Plein Soleil".
Thank you to the individual posters who made recommendations, these guys are recognised in the comments by each film in the list. Thanks to the unofficial historian of IMDb's dearly departed Film General board, Perception_de_Ambiguity, for keeping the details of many of the historical threads.
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