The New Outre Auteur

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The New York Sun

Jonathan Caouette was busy helping his new roommate move into their home in Astoria when I called him. “There’s a lot going on,” he told me good-naturedly – an understatement, considering the wildly enthusiastic response just about everyone who’s seen it have had to his new film “Tarnation.” A documentary that unspools as an eye-popping, outre, obsessive-compulsive autobiographical fever dream, “Tarnation” is a found-footage collage of Mr. Caouette’s harrowing childhood and adolescence.


Born in Houston in 1972, Mr. Caouette began his extraordinary self-chronicle at the age of 11. His beloved mother, Renee, suffered from schizoaffective disorder, and at this time she was in and out of mental hospitals. Mr. Caouette, who had endured abuse and neglect as a foster child, moved in with his maternal grandparents in 1979. To make sense of the chaos, he picked up a camera. “Tarnation” is composed of his own Super 8 home movies, snapshots, video confessions, telephone calls, and Hollywood esoterica.


“Documenting everything in regards to my immediate family was always a way of validating things,” he told me. “It was a way of saying, ‘Pinch me, this is actually happening.’ It was so frightening that I could never articulate the magnitude of what it was that I was experiencing. The camera was used as a weapon, just to make sense of it.”


As we watch this young man with a movie camera, we see him performing an uncanny drag act, in which he plays an abject single mother, and staging other delirious fantasias, such as a musical version of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” at his high school. “Tarnation” also traces Mr. Caouette’s development as a cinephile with rarefied taste.


“I fell in love with underground movies when I was 11; prior to that I was obsessed with horror films. The early footage you see, of me zooming in on my grandmother scratching her head, is an absolute, swear-on-my-life direct inspiration from watching things like [Paul Morrissey’s] ‘Heat’ and ‘Trash’ and ‘Bad’ and [Andy Warhol’s] ‘Bufferin.’ And the whole notion of Andy Warhol was definitely an inspiration to get out of Texas.”


That Mr. Caouette’s film was edited entirely using Apple’s iMovie software and cost $218 to produce has already become the stuff of do-it-yourself legend. Now running at 88 minutes, “Tarnation” first screened as a two-hour-long film at the MIX Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival last November. The festival’s director, Stephen Winter, signed on as producer; “Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s” John Cameron Mitchell and Gus Van Sant became executive producers. Sundance and Cannes, where the film received a 10-minute standing ovation, followed.


When I asked him if he could conceive of something like “Tarnation” as an ongoing, life-chronicle project, Mr. Caouette demurs. “At least in this period of my life I’ve definitely capped it; it’s time for me to move on to other things. There are other stories I’d like to tell, other narratives I’d like to explore.” One idea he has is another cinephilic fancy: “I’m going to be taking three films, major motion pictures that span the years 1974 to 1977 that all starred this one actress – I can’t say who yet. My fantasy is to get all three films free of underscore music with just the split-track dialogue and basically reaugment them and remix them into a new two-hour film that’s going to tell a different story.”


But even though Mr. Caouette is back to work, crafting other, non-autobiographical narratives, he simply can’t imagine putting an end to documenting his life. “Never. It’s really a compulsion. I’ll always have a camera in my hand. But for the time being I haven’t even had time to blow my nose, much less hold a camera.”


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