"Notes from the Underground" hits the age of the iMac, and it's not a pretty sight. Jonathan Caouette is a young Texan filmmaker who was raised in dismaying, sometimes brutal, circumstances and who has now trawled through them for evidence. The result is part trip, part secret journal, spliced together into a lurid public memorandum. We learn of his mother, Renee, who, by the time she bore Jonathan, in the early nineteen-seventies, had already suffered electric-shock treatment and a violent marriage. Her son was farmed out to foster parents, who maintained the cycle of harm. There is one scene in which, as a boy of eleven, he stages a plaintive drag act, and, watching it, you can barely imagine a more disturbed child; whether such disturbance makes for coherent, let alone tactful, filmmaking is another question. There are moments of graphic beauty here (Gus Van Sant, unsurprisingly, was the executive producer), but also smears of unpleasantness; if the middle-aged, once radiant Renee is now a picture of emotional damage, is it right for a loving son to trap her ravings on camera and put them on show?
[
http://www.newyorker.com/online/filmfil ... A600767A6A ]
Jonathan can only talk about himself in the third person, and watches his own life unfold in front of him as if it were someone else's. But then, between his unsteady self and this terrifying sense of loss, of lack of control, something happened ? the presence of a camera. Through a small miracle, as young as eight, Jonathan had access to a super-8 camera, and started obsessively filming himself, then directing spin-off low-budget horror movies with alluring titles like The Ankle Slasher or Spit and Blood Boys. Not surprisingly, he was always playing somebody else. For his first screen appearance, he put make-up on and mimicked the coy and sad gestures of a battered housewife ? inspired in part by his own mother, and in part by his favourite sitcom. To gain access to a gay New Wave film club (where he discovered punk rock and underground cinema), being underage, he dressed up as a ?petite Goth girl?. And so on. Real life, said Rimbaud, to whom Caouette resembles a little bit, is elsewhere ? and Tarnation (?Frontier? section), the astonishing result of his film-and-video experiments, is his ?Bateau Ivre?.
The child of our era of easy access to cheap technology, Caouette goes overboard and plays with all the tricks and special effects offered by his home computer software, but strangely enough, instead of being downright irritating, this excess strengthens the unmistakable sincerity of the project. The diffracted mirror image he creates by recycling, editing, splitting, solarising or redoubling hours of footage from his personal archives/library is a complex, engaging portrait. In Here and Elsewhere (1974), Godard demonstrated that, in a world dominated by media, we use the images of others to compose the signifying chains of our own discourse ? and it's even better if these others are already dead. Caouette uses images of himself as if he were another ? One shouldn't say ?I speak? but ?I am spoken?. I is another, said, again, Rimbaud ? staging his own death in the process. Not only because of the numerous suicide attempts of his destructive teenage years, but because he had to die as ?I? to become the subject of the cinematic fiction in which he appears as ?he? ? because he had to die as ?Jonathan? to be inhabited by the mother who, as he acknowledges in a particularly moving moment toward the end of the film, ?lives inside [him], in [his] hair, behind [his] eyes, under [his] skin?.
In this hollowing process, Jonathan-the-zombie re-emerges as the filmmaker who exists through the images he shot and collected. Tarnation is an important work because it is the ultimate found-footage film. Beyond the harrowing story of a stolen childhood, it encapsulates our postmodern condition: the conflicted awareness we have of being split from our own discourse, of being ?constructed? by a permanent flow of images, some ?real?, some manufactured. Our experience of the world, and some of our most intimate emotions, come from these images handed to us from elsewhere.
[
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ ... _2004.html ]
Probably after the 5,000th arty home-movie montage purporting to tell the story of someone's lousy childhood, I'll rue the day I called Tarnation a masterpiece.
But a masterpiece it is, of a mind-bending modern sort: This story of a 31-year-old man and his mentally-ill mother is right on the border between what shrinks call immature "acting out" and mature artistic sublimation. Caouette, the filmmaker and protagonist, weaves psychodrama shot in the middle of the madness together with revelatory stills, surreal montages of the Texas landscape, found footage, clips from such disparate but fetishistic entertainments as Rosemary's Baby and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, fantasy monologues, and stark interviews that inexorably lapse back into psychodrama.
This isn't a journalistic work?a Peeping Tom brief?like last year's squirmy Capturing the Friedmans. The home movies are heavily filtered, transformed into art objects, their subjects encouraged to turn themselves into characters in the great drama of the hero's life. But that doesn't distance them. Tarnation is a collage of pain that breaks over you like a wave. Every second you can feel the cost to Caouette of what he's showing: The sounds and the images are like a pipeline from his unconscious to the screen.
[
http://slate.msn.com/id/2107903 ]
Just as unusual are the circumstances of Tarnation's creation and its circulation since first surfacing at New York's MIX festival in 2003. Caouette edited the first version in three weeks, using only the iMovie program on his Mac and an official budget of US$218.32. Besides endorsements from Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell (who signed on as exec-producers), Tarnation immediately began to attract festival invites and proclamations that it represented a revolutionary new model for personal filmmaking. As Van Sant told Filmmaker magazine last January, "I knew something like this would appear and I am glad that it finally has."
[
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_01.2 ... ation.html ]
When his family members most need his protection, he rips the scabs off their wounds and calls that honesty, though he makes no room to even mention the existence of two half-brothers or his own nine-year-old son. For all his professions of love for his mother, how can he justify the unconscionably long display of the delusional woman babbling in her brain-damaged state (especially as she has repeatedly tried to avoid his camera)? Immediately after so wantonly exposing her, Caouette films himself tenderly covering her sleeping figure, then milking sympathy ? he?s afraid for his own mental health ? while enjoying one final radiant closeup, bathing Tarnation?s undoubted star in golden light.
If this film has genius, it lies in the publicity hook that rivals The Blair Witch Project: the three-figure budget, the indie glamour of sponsorship by Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell, the out-and-proud posterboy for P-Flag (though little evidence here suggests that he ever set foot in the closet). Still, viewers besotted with his a-star-is-torn family narrative will have to defend themselves against the skeptics. As one audience member succinctly put it, ?He?d fuck himself if he could,? though Tarnation stands as the next best alternative.
[
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/46/tarnation.htm ]
Making this movie, which was in some ways the work of Mr. Caouette's life up to now, was obviously therapeutic, but it seems, remarkably, to have been undertaken in a spirit of generosity, rather than solipsism. There is an inclusive, almost utopian spirit lurking amid the murk and sorrow of ''Tarnation,'' a celebration of the idea that while nobody has ever made a movie like it, anybody could.
[
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.h ... A9629C8B63 ]
