Tarnation

I chose to watch Tarnation after reading a very brief description of its content, expecting something charming, eccentric, and a little sad. What I experienced was beautiful, heart-wrenching, and completely different than what I anticipated. Caouette's auto-documentary fluidly combines home movies, photographs, and super 8 film, as well as other filming media, to create something incredibly personal. Caouette (who I feel like I should call "Jon" after watching this) has a deep understanding of the way people think and relate to each other; and this capacity for empathy translates into his film-making allowed me to feel I was truly experiencing someone else's life. Tarnation is a truly effective example of the formalist style, using a wide variety of artistic and stylistic devices to impart it's messages. Tarnation is first and foremost of and for Caouette. It is part diary, part expose, part coping mechanism, and an escape from an alien world which in itself is a beautifully raw commentary on the fragility and complexities of the human mind, the dynamics and inner workings of family, and the resilience of the human spirit.

Tarnation is a combination of home movies, VHS tapes, super 8 footage, answering machine messages, and phone calls recorded on video. Upon some follow-up research, I found out that Caouette's budget for the film was a mere $218.32 which accounts mainly for the cameras he used throughout his life to shoot. The filming methods used are modest and achieve a very raw, very real effect.

Caouette combines video from his various cameras with light/wash effects added with standard Imovie software to create a product that is psychedelic and dream-like in effect while retaining a shocking realism.  The mix of delusion and reality is one of the most important themes in Tarnation as this complex relationship applies to schizophrenia as well as Depersonalization disorder. We see images in Caouette's life as he interprets them, making connections that aren't always linear but are realistic in terms of how the mind processes things. What this accomplishes is that overall, the film mocks the idea that anything is truly "real," suggesting there is no actual line between what is real and what isn't.

The written narrative is simple and evocative. It is reminiscent of the style of a children's book and it serves as the most linear and straightforward device in the entire film. It is clear that Caouette chose his words very carefully, for even the short, simple and factual phrases he uses to impart important information to his story carry incredible poignancy. For instance, when introducing Renee and her parents, the phrase "everything was good,"  dropped a pit of anticipatory anxiety into my stomach. At first, the narrative uses white text against a black background, asserting the seriousness of the film. Throughout, the font stays the same yet the color and texture of the background changes , seeming to become more hectic and saturated as the film progresses. Because the text is the only real narrative in Tarnation we are forced to place much more emphasis on the more subtle sentiment attached to scenes which accompany it. This is effective because it allows us to draw our own conclusions rather than just absorbing what the film-maker has to say.

After viewing Tarnation there is one thing that is incredibly clear: Caouette must have a deep and personal understanding of amor fati if only for the fact that he manages to stay resilient and retain a strong sense of self despite the "government experiment" quality of his family's life. In the end there is no attempt to reconcile the dualities in his life, but Caouette's acceptance of them as inevitabilities allows him appreciate his life for what it is. His story is raw, tragic, painfully real, and hauntingly tragic. It is not a story of redemption, of rebirth, of courage. It is a portrait of human life, with all of its joys, pains, and complexities, existing and changing just as all our lives do.