Tarnation

Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette, 2004

“They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
Whether the director/producer/writer/protagonist Jonathan Caouette has read this classic Larkin couplet seems somewhat improbable but the layered meaning here could easily serve as the point of departure for this gut-wrenchingly autobiographical debut, created entirely using iMovies software.


The dialectic contruct of fear and love underpins exactly the reaction encountered by the viewer which is a mix of repellence and fascination. Caouette in his unflinching portrayal of his own definitively dysfunctional family, uses reels of footage (apparently shot from the age of 11 onwards), answer phone messages, recorded phone conversations and a bank of still images spliced together to create, in effect, a map of his own psychogeography.. The images, sounds, snippets and songs cut together to reflect the subliminal meanderings and bridges of the human mind and the image-scapes it perpetually crosses. With these meanderings ordered in a linear fashion of ever increasing age, by the end what we have is a unprecedentedly intimate portrait of this artist as a young man.


“ She is behind my eyes” he says of his tortured-soul of a mother, mentally poisoned and fractured beyond repair so cruelly after undergoing electric shock therapy so early on in her life, administered to her by her own parents under horrifically poor advice. Or so they say anyway. Unschooled and unformerly trained, the filmmaking is knife-wound raw, and all the more head-spinningly effective for it. Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell have come on board as executive producers, presumably to insure that the film reaches the wide audience it deserves. As with everything else, Caouette’s cinematic influences are too laid bare – Lynch, Van Sant himself, punk-rock film and music and Italo-horror are just some of the seeds planted firmly in his field of vision.


Ultimately though, this is an emotional whirlpool of a film, clouting you in the face, stabbing you in the heart and electrocuting your brain in reminding you of the power of cinema and its redemptive, cathartic qualities.