Every review, positive or negative, I've read of "Tarnation" has started with the same information: that it was made for a total cost to its maker (Jonathan Caouette) of $218. That's how much it cost for his tapes; the cameras (which vary over the course of the movie) were gifts, and he used his boyfriend's iMac to edit it, using the iMovie software. I generally prefer movies to be shot on film than digital cameras, but, on the other hand, "Tarnation" is proof that if people have a good movie in them, they can now easily get it made (distribution is trickier).
"Tarnation" is a documentary about the life of its maker, Caouette. When he was a child his mother was (wrongly, we learn) diagnosed with mental illness and taken away from him, and he had to live with his grandparents. As a teenager, he experimented with drugs and sex, then, grown up, he left his grandparents to go and live in New York, reuniting with his mother. Since he was a child, he has documented himself and his life on VHS, Betamax and digital.
Over the last few years, he gathered together all his footage, uploaded it onto the computer and, with encouragement from John Cameron Mitchell and Gus van Sant (both of whom get Executive Producer credits), edited it together (from over 160 hours of footage) into an effective and at times disturbing documentary, reminiscent of 2003's successful "Capturing the Friedmans." It was picked up for Sundance 2004, and has since been talked about endlessly among filmgoers, the talk usually being about the fact that it was made for $218 ('dollars, not pounds!' someone exclaimed to me).
Yes, it was made for $218. A lot of movies are made for that amount, and less, but (thankfully, in most cases), you and I will never see them. I went into "Tarnation" because I was interested in its technique, and I was surprised at its unusual power. It is not a movie that, afterwards, you leave to return to normality; it stays with you, and leaves you questioning what 'normality' is.
Consider Jonathan's monologues to the camera. As a boy, he dresses up in his mother's clothes and talks in a Southern drawl, which seems amusing at first until we listen to what he is saying (later, when the drugs have taken their toll on his mother, she has a long, wild speech into the camera and we realise, chillingly, that she sounds exactly like Jonathan in these early scenes). He locks himself in rooms, and films himself taking drugs. Some of this is not easy to watch (at least half a dozen people left the cinema at the screening I was at).
Inevitably, there are imperfections. There are too many montages (I'm beginning to think any montages in a movie is too many), and too much information is given to the audience through titles on the screen. The latter mistake seems like laziness, and the former seems to be picked up from other American movies that make the same mistake.
Quibble, quibble. It's my job to point out where movies go wrong, so there you go. I still think "Tarnation" is an excellent documentary, better than many I've seen that cost hundreds of times as much. I don't want to tell you too much about what happens in the movie because I didn't know, and it has some very powerful moments.
And Caouette, somehow, remains a mystery; for all his autobiographical detail, we can't quite get to the bottom of his personality. I suppose the best clue is not in the movie; it's the movie itself. I think that anyone using a camera to film so much of his life must have wanted somehow to distance himself from it.
"Tarnation" is a documentary about the life of its maker, Caouette. When he was a child his mother was (wrongly, we learn) diagnosed with mental illness and taken away from him, and he had to live with his grandparents. As a teenager, he experimented with drugs and sex, then, grown up, he left his grandparents to go and live in New York, reuniting with his mother. Since he was a child, he has documented himself and his life on VHS, Betamax and digital.
Over the last few years, he gathered together all his footage, uploaded it onto the computer and, with encouragement from John Cameron Mitchell and Gus van Sant (both of whom get Executive Producer credits), edited it together (from over 160 hours of footage) into an effective and at times disturbing documentary, reminiscent of 2003's successful "Capturing the Friedmans." It was picked up for Sundance 2004, and has since been talked about endlessly among filmgoers, the talk usually being about the fact that it was made for $218 ('dollars, not pounds!' someone exclaimed to me).
Yes, it was made for $218. A lot of movies are made for that amount, and less, but (thankfully, in most cases), you and I will never see them. I went into "Tarnation" because I was interested in its technique, and I was surprised at its unusual power. It is not a movie that, afterwards, you leave to return to normality; it stays with you, and leaves you questioning what 'normality' is.
Consider Jonathan's monologues to the camera. As a boy, he dresses up in his mother's clothes and talks in a Southern drawl, which seems amusing at first until we listen to what he is saying (later, when the drugs have taken their toll on his mother, she has a long, wild speech into the camera and we realise, chillingly, that she sounds exactly like Jonathan in these early scenes). He locks himself in rooms, and films himself taking drugs. Some of this is not easy to watch (at least half a dozen people left the cinema at the screening I was at).
Inevitably, there are imperfections. There are too many montages (I'm beginning to think any montages in a movie is too many), and too much information is given to the audience through titles on the screen. The latter mistake seems like laziness, and the former seems to be picked up from other American movies that make the same mistake.
Quibble, quibble. It's my job to point out where movies go wrong, so there you go. I still think "Tarnation" is an excellent documentary, better than many I've seen that cost hundreds of times as much. I don't want to tell you too much about what happens in the movie because I didn't know, and it has some very powerful moments.
And Caouette, somehow, remains a mystery; for all his autobiographical detail, we can't quite get to the bottom of his personality. I suppose the best clue is not in the movie; it's the movie itself. I think that anyone using a camera to film so much of his life must have wanted somehow to distance himself from it.