***1/2 (out of ****)
A documentary directed, edited, and produced by Jonathan Caouette
2003 (limited US release 2004)
105 min NR (should be R or NC17)
A friend of mine has been keeping a weblog that describes, among other things, the deterioration of his marriage. Am I a bad human being because I daydream about novelizing it? I think to myself, all it needs are a few joining scenes, a bit of exposition, a touch of rewriting, and voila, we have an instant memoir.
Houston-born documentary filmmaker Jonathan Caouette has, with his film “Tarnation,” done essentially that. Like many people who get a kick out of English class, he has been keeping a journal that is part history, part story, and part speculation. His journal is not on paper or the internet, but on VHS tapes that he has been making since he was 11. From a whopping 160 hours of raw footage, he has edited together a ninety-minute impressionist montage, from ages 11 to 25-ish, while he was raised by his grandparents and his mother slowly sank into schizophrenia. It is a collection of incidents and moods, not a narrative film. Few of us have the temerity to pull out a circa-1984 Camcorder during moments of household crisis. If some big-budget films are like paintings come to life, then “Tarnation” is a pouch of smudged snapshots that start to talk.
The result reminds me of something Kafka once said—I wish I could find the exact quote—about how terrified he was of ripping off the fronts of houses and finding pigs living inside. A family is a strange entity, fulls of secrets made in dark-stained kitchens. We can’t completely shake the feeling that there is something wrong when the same people share the same small space for years and years. Siblings have to keep on living with each other, night after night, despite things that would cause normal friends to split up. The great gift of horror purveyors like M. Night Shymalan and Stephen King is that they illustrate just how creepy lived-in family spaces can be, as if people and intimacy are a disease.
Contrasted to his mother’s descent into schizophrenia and Caouette’s dread of history repeating itself (“I don’t want to turn out like my mom!” he pleads, alone, to the camera) is his autobiography. If he were any gayer he would need a dress or a leather hat, and “Tarnation” recounts his youthful trips to nightclubs and the friends he made there. In one of the film’s many uneasy laughs, we see him disguised as a woman to get into 18-and-over clubs. He is active in theater programs in and out of school and uses his camera not just to document his own family but to make short, no-budget films. Most revealing are the scenarios he acts out on his own, as if rehearsing a part for a play that will never exist. As a precocious pre-teen he puts on make-up and talks to the camera as if he were an abused housewife who has just murdered her husband. The scenario has no direct relation to Caouette’s life, yet the pain does; there is some fact in any fiction. We see footage of a teenage Caouette in a dark room, lit with a flashlight, and singing along with a stereo. What better expression is there of the artist’s desire to record something he is doing or something he has made so that he may stare at it later and ask, who am I? Mixed in are snippets of the films and television shows that got Caouette through his troubled youth, including “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Electric Company.” “Tarnation” illustrates how we live our lives simultaneously in the present, in our memories, in our hopes and plans, and on TV.
“Tarnation” became a sensation at film festivals such as Cannes not so much because of its power but because of its startlingly low price tag. The movie was edited entirely on a Macintosh, using the consumer-priced software iMovie, for around $200. Transferring it to 30mm, of course, cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and getting Lucasfilm to remaster the sound was equally expensive, but “Tarnation” essentially became a hit for next-to-nothing. The images Caouette creates are stunning, regardless of the price, and the blurriness, focus problems, color issues, etc. only add to its immediacy. The image that will stick longest with me is of a teenage Caouette singing: only a quarter of his face is used, but that same quarter is replicated and flip-flopped in order to make a strange, alien head, with four mouths that join as one on the high notes. It is an unsettling illustration of his mental unrest at the time.
Caouette himself was present at the screening I attended, and he was cheerful, even exuberant. No question put him by the audience about his personal issues seemed to bring him down. I was tempted to ask him if he had finally learned to hold a camera steady. He described “Tarnation’s” various incarnations, including a three-hour rough cut that includes subplots about his siblings and fantasy sequences created expressly for the film. Since its inception, video is best used as an alternative to film, and not as a replacement. In the same way that Guy Maddin celebrates celluloid’s history through grainy, scratched-up negatives, the most interesting video movies are the ones that exploit video’s imperfections instead of masking them. Think of the warmth and strange lights that glow on old reel-to-reel 8mm home movies, think of how dreamy and foggy they are, and compare that to the unreal orange-skinned, washed-out colors of movies shot on digital video, like “Collateral” and “The Fast Runner.”
One could take the cynic’s view and call “Tarnation” a glorified home movie, done in slow-mo and set to creepy music, or an unscrupulous exploitation of a family’s trust, or a 90-minute commercial for iMovie. Even then, as an editing trick, the movie has an undeniable “whump” to it. “Tarnation” is not an entertaining or pleasant experience, in the traditional meaning of those words, but it is not easily forgotten.
Finished October 22nd, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night