I just caught up with Tarnation last night - it’s a truly incredible film. The overall story (documentary) packs a punch; the visual style is great; and it was made for peanuts. Definitely an inspiration to amateur filmmakers everywhere.
Tarnation may be the first feature-length film edited entirely on iMovie, and it cost $218.32 in videotape and materials. Despite its low budget, the film has already earned a high profile. Both John Cameron Mitchell, the actor and director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and independent film maverick Gus Van Sant have signed on as executive producers.
Caouette’s autobiographical footage — 160 hours of tape and film — serve as the raw material of Tarnation. The film also includes more than 200 photos culled from Caouette’s huge archive. Unable to afford to scan the photos, Caouette tacked the images to a white wall and filmed them.
After Tarnation screened for the second time in Cannes, Caouette - its director, editor and main character - stood up.
A spotlight was thrown on him and he fought back tears as the cinema crowd gave him a standing ovation. The audience had just watched his life story.
A Texan child whose mother was in shock therapy, Caouette, 31, was abused in foster care and saw his mother’s condition worsen as a result of her “treatment”. He began filming himself and his family aged 11, and created movie fantasies as an escape. For Tarnation, he has spliced his home movie footage together to create a moving and uncomfortable self-portrait.
It is a remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful. It has been constructed from the materials of a lifetime: Old home movies, answering machine tapes, letters and telegrams, photographs, clippings, new video footage, recent interviews and printed titles that summarize and explain Jonathan’s life. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land,” and Caouette does the same thing.
Looking at “Tarnation,” I wonder if the movie represents a new kind of documentary that is coming into being. Although home movies have been used in docs for decades, they were almost always, by definition, brief and inane. The advent of the video camera has meant that lives are recorded in greater length and depth than ever before; a film like “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003), with its harrowing portrait of sexual abuse and its behind-the-scenes footage of a family discussing its legal options, would have been impossible before the introduction of consumer video cameras. Jonathan Caouette not only experienced his life, but recorded his experience, and his footage of himself as a child says what he needs to say more eloquently than any actor could portray it or any writer could describe it.
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