Tarnation

The makers of low-budget films are wisely advised to be quiet about their budgets, and focus on their work. That a film didn’t cost much is fascinating to Sundance audiences, but not an advantage in talking to distributors or promoting to audiences. I remember one hapless indie filmmaker who brought his new title to the Chicago film festival and gave a long introductory speech about how little it cost; after seeing it, Gene Siskel told him, “I only wish you had been able to find more money.”

But see how I have started my discussion of Jonathan Caouette’s remarkable “Tarnation” with a discussion of its budget, which became famous at Sundance this year because it was—well, $187. (Of course that does not include post-production and prints, but it presumably represents the real cost of assembling the archival materials, shooting the new scenes, editing the film with iMovie on a Macintosh and burning it onto a DVD.) This film proves, as Richard Linklater’s “Waking Lives” did on a larger but still remarkable budget, that films deserving theatrical release are now within the means of filmmakers with the necessary skill and imagination.
 

So now that we have that out of the way, let me simply add that “Tarnation” has not been invited to the festival because of its cost, but because of its achievement. This is a powerful and heartbreaking film about three generations of a family in crisis, and Caouette shows himself to be a documentarian of rare skill in the way he uses his materials. He begins with old photographs, family movies, answering machine messages, his own first films, and his memories. He adds new video footage of his more recent life. And he organizes this material in a collage that envelops us in his family story.

Some things in his past are certainly true. We follow the early life of his mother, a beautiful young woman who was a model before she suffered a catastrophic accident which led to still more damaging shock treatments—a therapy which apparently contributed to a lifelong mental illness. We sense Caouette’s love and pain for his mother, and his ambivalence toward his grandfather, who is blamed by the mother for many sins, although we cannot be sure that everything is true. We follow the filmmaker’s own personal journey as he discovers he is gay, moves to New York, and then sends for his mother, hoping somehow to reestablish the family that was shattered. And then we follow the consequences of his decision.

Like many family stories, the one in “Tarnation” has more than one version and probably more than one truth, and the bravest thing Caouette does is to acknowledge that. What the audience gets is essentially what he has gathered from his life, his family history, the stories he has heard, the events he has witnessed or guessed about. Narration and subtitles help orient us throughout the story, but they also provide a certain ironic distance: There is a disconnect between a subtitle flatly identifying an event, and the ambiguity of the event itself.

One can imagine this movie as a jumbled scrapbook. Instead, using video editing techniques and special effects, he makes it into more of a poem or a song, into a meditation. At the end we feel we have witnessed what he experienced, and what he survived, and we feel pity for his family but hope for his future.

This kind of intensely personal and subjective autobiographical filmmaking has always been there at the fringes of the cinema (one thinks of Stan Brakhage), but new computer, video and editing tools now bring it toward general audiences. When the Oscar-nominated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” played at Sundance 2003, it was observed by many critics that documentaries of the future would be substantially different because so much home video footage is now available; hours and hours of it, instead of a few fugitive minutes from an old hand-wound 8mm movie camera. “Tarnation” is a moving and technically impressive work by a filmmaker assembling his story through the consideration of a lifetime of memories in many different forms.

Roger Ebert