screened Los Angeles Film Festival
In his first feature, self-taught filmmaker Jonathan Caouette has crafted 19 years' worth of home movies, video diaries and answering machine messages into a bracing autobiographical fever dream. Layering soundtrack and visuals in an intricate collage of rich emotional texture, he displays an exhilarating talent. Tarnation, which was a hit at Sundance and Cannes and recently won the Los Angeles Film Festival's top docu prize, should connect with adventurous filmgoers when Wellspring releases it in October.
Made entirely on iMovie, Apple's consumer-grade editing software, Tarnation boasts the remarkable production budget of $218.32 -- the cost of videotapes and a pair of angel wings. Far more remarkable, though, is the film's poignancy and visceral impact. The category-defying film explores Caouette's tumultuous childhood in a Houston suburb, where his grandparents raised him while his mother, Renee, shuttled in and out of hospitals for (misdiagnosed) schizophrenia.
Last year, Caouette began editing footage he'd been shooting since he was 11, combining it with pop-culture fragments and a few scenes in which the director and his boyfriend, David Sanin Paz, re-enact more recent events. Caouette makes ample use of iMovie f/x to manipulate photographs and his Super 8 and video material, creating a rough-hewn, psychedelic aesthetic that is at once postmodern and operatic. The chemical reaction between the visuals and the gorgeous soundtrack selections, including cuts by Nick Drake and Glen Campbell, generates a powerful and tender surge of feeling. (About 80% of the songs are expected to be cleared for the film's theatrical release.)
For all its flourishes, Caouette's storytelling is unblinking. There are plenty of difficult moments, some unfolding before the camera and others relayed through onscreen text that spells out a story filled with horrors of the mental-health and child-welfare systems. Still, Tarnation is a triumphant coming-of-age tale. It traces the forging of an identity through resilience, self-awareness and, not least, art.
At the gay clubs he frequented in his teens, Caouette found inspiration in punk and underground films like Liquid Sky, whose influence is apparent in his film's multiple levels of performance. Besides the home movies, there are the horror shorts he made as a kid, the musical staging of Blue Velvet he and his high school boyfriend directed and, most extraordinary, adolescent Caouette's portrayal of abused women in improvised monologues. In those speeches, he is channeling his and Renee's painful experiences; art gives Caouette the necessary distance to face demons.
And the demons don't shame him. Instead, he finds hallucinatory beauty in life's unanswerable questions. Above all, Tarnation expresses immense compassion, gratitude and unwavering love. When Renee reads passages from the famous prose piece Desiderata, Caouette presents it not with an ironic wink at poster kitsch but as an openhearted prayer.
TARNATION
Wellspring Releasing
Nightlight Films
Credits:
Director/writer/director of photography/editor: Jonathan Caouette
Producer: Stephen Winter
Executive producers:, Gus Van Sant, John Cameron Mitchell
Co-editor: Brian A. Kates
With: Renee Leblanc, Jonathan Caouette, Adolph Davis, Rosemary Davis, David Sanin Paz
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 88 minutes...
In his first feature, self-taught filmmaker Jonathan Caouette has crafted 19 years' worth of home movies, video diaries and answering machine messages into a bracing autobiographical fever dream. Layering soundtrack and visuals in an intricate collage of rich emotional texture, he displays an exhilarating talent. Tarnation, which was a hit at Sundance and Cannes and recently won the Los Angeles Film Festival's top docu prize, should connect with adventurous filmgoers when Wellspring releases it in October.
Made entirely on iMovie, Apple's consumer-grade editing software, Tarnation boasts the remarkable production budget of $218.32 -- the cost of videotapes and a pair of angel wings. Far more remarkable, though, is the film's poignancy and visceral impact. The category-defying film explores Caouette's tumultuous childhood in a Houston suburb, where his grandparents raised him while his mother, Renee, shuttled in and out of hospitals for (misdiagnosed) schizophrenia.
Last year, Caouette began editing footage he'd been shooting since he was 11, combining it with pop-culture fragments and a few scenes in which the director and his boyfriend, David Sanin Paz, re-enact more recent events. Caouette makes ample use of iMovie f/x to manipulate photographs and his Super 8 and video material, creating a rough-hewn, psychedelic aesthetic that is at once postmodern and operatic. The chemical reaction between the visuals and the gorgeous soundtrack selections, including cuts by Nick Drake and Glen Campbell, generates a powerful and tender surge of feeling. (About 80% of the songs are expected to be cleared for the film's theatrical release.)
For all its flourishes, Caouette's storytelling is unblinking. There are plenty of difficult moments, some unfolding before the camera and others relayed through onscreen text that spells out a story filled with horrors of the mental-health and child-welfare systems. Still, Tarnation is a triumphant coming-of-age tale. It traces the forging of an identity through resilience, self-awareness and, not least, art.
At the gay clubs he frequented in his teens, Caouette found inspiration in punk and underground films like Liquid Sky, whose influence is apparent in his film's multiple levels of performance. Besides the home movies, there are the horror shorts he made as a kid, the musical staging of Blue Velvet he and his high school boyfriend directed and, most extraordinary, adolescent Caouette's portrayal of abused women in improvised monologues. In those speeches, he is channeling his and Renee's painful experiences; art gives Caouette the necessary distance to face demons.
And the demons don't shame him. Instead, he finds hallucinatory beauty in life's unanswerable questions. Above all, Tarnation expresses immense compassion, gratitude and unwavering love. When Renee reads passages from the famous prose piece Desiderata, Caouette presents it not with an ironic wink at poster kitsch but as an openhearted prayer.
TARNATION
Wellspring Releasing
Nightlight Films
Credits:
Director/writer/director of photography/editor: Jonathan Caouette
Producer: Stephen Winter
Executive producers:, Gus Van Sant, John Cameron Mitchell
Co-editor: Brian A. Kates
With: Renee Leblanc, Jonathan Caouette, Adolph Davis, Rosemary Davis, David Sanin Paz
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 88 minutes...
- 7/15/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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