(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
In Which Brakhage Meets a Factory Installed Apple Video Editing Software Program.
I am a bit late coming to this one. It finally hit the UK this fall and for its entire run I was determined not to see it. There was just something about it that bugged me. It was hard to miss the buzz about it, and it did sound like something that brought together all of my favorite hobby-horses (DV, non professional, expressionist, etc…). But behind all the hype seemed to be a film born out of an unsettling sort of self-focus. To be fair, it smacked of the same sort of bombastic self-focus that has given birth to some great works of art in the past, like This Side of Paradise or Warhol’s self-portraits. To pull off this sort of narcissism though, one has to be both very interesting and a genius.
Jonathan Caouette certainly is interesting. Anybody that has managed to capture most of their life on personal home video is interesting even if they haven’t really done anything. The mere tenacity of that sort at least merits a short film. Tarnation is the ordered summary of 160 hours of film Caouette took of himself and his family over the course of his 30 year life. Though often referred to as an “autobiographical documentary”, it seems to be as much about his mother as it is about himself. Perhaps in this sense the film is a storyline of self-discovery rather than just self-description, as if as an adult Caouette could only really understand himself if he could understand her. Submitted to shock therapy for literally no reason when she was very young, the film traces her struggle with mental illness as it maps out the stages in Caouette’s distinct coming-of-age.
His grandparents, shown by the film to be just as loving as misguided, are straight out of a Flannery O’Connor novel and touched by the irony that fiction can seldom achieve. Or maybe out of an early Ian Banks novel, but that is beside the point. Virtually allowed to raise himself in their care, Caouette turns the camera on them and himself as he chronicles his adolescence in the absence of his mother. What emerges from this haunting visual essay is a perfectly poised stream of home videos punctuated by notable moments of personal shock and self-discovery. His mother’s rape, his abuse in a number of foster homes, a drug overdose, his grandmother’s death, his mother’s fateful Lithium overdose, and other such moments are cast in textures of bold expression. At times they are bold to the point of awful. The young Jonathan himself takes us through the discovery of his own talents, the discovery of his own sexuality. And as he grows, so does the film, becoming more aware of itself as a history, but more importantly, as a collection of emotional milestones carved from mountains of imagery.
As a narrative, the film pulses with something usually foreign to strict storytelling. Caouette often comes close to the edge beyond which something ceases to become a film. We usually refer to such things as “experimental” or “avant garde,” often hiding them in art galleries like the creepy uncle of watchable and accessible film. Cauoette doesn’t simply edit together the frames of these odd old videos, he colors them, bends them, slides them, reduplicates panels of them, scratches them, and spills them across the film with a frantic pathos. Somehow he manages to convey the dislocation and rage that defined these stages of his life, eventually closing on the staged third person footage of him peacefully asleep next to his rescued mother, a reverse Pieta. The film is steeped in an emotional vocabulary that renders its presentation necessary. “The medium is the message,” and in the film Jonathan seems to ascribe this dictum to his discovery of an alternative lifestyle in the gay, punk, and gothic scenes of early 90’s Texas.
In the Looking Glass.
As a child he enjoyed filming himself, often in close-ups of his face, as he acted out different roles and tried on varying emotional masks. He has taken some of this footage and manipulated it into a charged frenzy; visual studies in rage and dislocation these images would work well as silk-screened paintings. Easy comparison could be made to the self-portraiture of Francis Bacon, both in tenor and motivation. In one notable sequence the 11 year-old Jonathan delivers a monologue posing as a drug-addicted and abused white trash mother. Somehow he nails the part. He was 11. Eventually all of these theatrics begin to raise an interesting question. This acting came so naturally for him that he seems to be slowly creating or adopting a script for himself as his own story. This script riffs off of the one involving his mother and his unusual adolescent struggles, but it is a construct that helped himself distance himself from reality. Even if he would disagree, consider the film itself. He is posing, defining, and eventually describing himself to us as the finished product. Tarnation itself is this product, and the film serves as an equivalent sort of construct, a shorthand to his self-identity.
This is meant to be a very restrained criticism, as we do this every day. We identify with this character in this film or that book and borrow their script for a while. Like Jean Paul Belmondo inBreathless standing with a cigarette next to the Humphrey Bogart poster, we pose our way through the day on the back of other people’s storylines. This isn’t always a bad thing; some scripts are great ones to claim as our own. And Caouette seems to be aware of this.
A Study in Sympathy?
It is just that the character he adopts isn’t that interesting until the end, when he rescues his mother from the fate of Adult Protective Services. As a figure that overcomes such adversity he is interesting. But an example of the potential banality inherent to self-focused projects like Tarnation uncovers itself in the last few scenes. These staged, filmed, and emotionalized moments are clumsy, lacking the heartfelt ingenuity of the rest of the film. They are not very interesting even though they are meant to function quite dramatically. Likewise, his love of all things camp, including Dolly Parton, isn’t that interesting. Camp is the new black (everyone knows that). His incredible giftedness isn’t that interesting, there are lots of talented people out there. He, like his mother in her youth, is a strikingly beautiful person, which of course isn’t that interesting. It isn’t even very interesting that the film was made for only $218. The version on DVD was certainly a few hundred thousand dollars more than that after song rights and the like were purchased (his frequent use of Low was a great addition). And while his visual approach is very engaging, technically acrobatic, and even innovative, the film is too narrative for us to take it simply on a formal basis. Visually the film is arresting, but this at times is threatened by the potential banality of his self-characterization. All in all, there are a lot of things not very interesting about the film.
But I think the film is more than the sum of its parts. He becomes interesting at the end, even in the midst of these underwhelmingly staged scenes. He sits next to his mother sleeping on the couch and falls asleep, having provided the home for his mother that she was never able to provide for him. This profoundly ethical act rescues the film from narcissism. It is this act that makes him extremely interesting, and his method of filmmaking enables us to participate in this process with him. In the end what makes the film absolutely worthwhile is that he tells this story to its conclusion. In Tarnation Caouette expresses emotions heretofore unexpressed because of their apparent inexpressibility, and for this I am grateful. Mr. Caouette, I am sorry I skipped your movie, it would have been ripping on the big screen.