# A lonely star from Texas



## Revelation_old (Aug 9, 2004)

*A lonely star from Texas*
Demetrios Matheou
17 April 2005

When writing about Dogme, last week, I referred to the widely-held fear that the advent of digital technology would not only encourage thousands of new filmmakers, it would also open the floodgates to an awful lot of rubbish: that having the means is one thing, being able to make a film is another.

Tarnation, for a time at least, could well be the exception that proves the rule. Created on Apple?s iMovie software for just over $200, Jonathan Caouette?s remarkable debut is much more than a budget miracle. It is a film that reconfigures the documentary form and makes a mockery of reality TV, that joins Capturing The Friedmans as a devastating document of the dysfunctional American family unit and, last but not least, reminds us of the wondrous narrative potential that cinema carries, but so rarely exercises.

Caouette, who has an innate talent both sides of the camera, had been documenting his often sad and confused life ? son of a woman with serious psychiatric problems, raised by grandparents who did much to cause those problems, struggling with his own mental disorder ? since he was 11 years old. He was 31 when he decided to edit the plethora of material, including Super-8 movies, answering machine messages, excerpts from his favourite films and even his own short films, to create a deeply expressionistic account of that experience.

At the heart of Tarnation is Caouette?s relationship with his mother. Renee was a beauty queen with a promising life ahead of her, when a freak accident led her parents to misguidedly submit her for electric shock therapy ? which duly led to a lifetime of mental illness. In between the endless hospitalisations she gave birth to her son, who became hugely traumatised by Renee?s intermittent presence in his childhood, while in the care of Adolph and Rosemary, who Renee always accused of physical abuse and who appear before Caouette?s camera as decaying Gothic monsters.

Nor did it help that Jonathan was a gay boy in a state like Texas, with a depersonalisation disorder that left him in almost permanent existential crisis. His earliest video footage includes a remarkable ?performance? as a southern belle, a sort of underage Blanche DuBois, making a clandestine confessional. The teen Caouette had a sort of electric haired post-punk look (not unlike Robert Smith of The Cure), which the film?s jumble of images ? fleeting, sped up, bled into each other ? heightens to suggest a man whose psyche is splitting apart at the seams.

It?s no surprise that at high school he chose to produce a musical version of David Lynch?s Blue Velvet, a film with more than its fair share of torch song despair and psychosis.

If this is documentary, it is in a form that is as much about movie-making as it is personal revelation. Like the Friedmans, Caouette was obsessed with putting his life on film; unlike their rather embarrassing sub-Python efforts, even his earliest diaries show a deeply cinematic sensibility.

One watches Tarnation and thinks of Lynch, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, Guy Maddin ? idiosyncratic talents who share a dynamic approach to the medium. And, with his use of split screen, optical effects and, especially, montage, he has elicited more out of iMovie than most experienced editors do from their top-end technology.

While the content is unquestionably heavy going, two things prevent the film from being a total downer ? the intense bond between Renee and Jonathan, which remains defiantly optimistic to the end, and this way in which Caouette the director creates from the wreckage of his early life something poetic, visually dazzling and extremely moving.

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