QCA Film: Tarnation

The film, Tarnation both ends and starts with a Max Ehrmann poem entitled, Desiderata. Read it. It’s chock full of good advice.
Tarnation, is an autobiographical documentary created by Jonathan Caouette that focuses on his adolescent and young adult relationship with his beautiful, but mentally-damaged mother, Renee LeBlanc. The most extraordinary thing 88-minute long film is that it’s composed of over 20 years from hundreds of hours of old Super 8 footage, VHS videotape, photographs and answering machine messages. From a very early age, Caouette until today, the actor/director basically set to recording himself and everyone around him at all times. And the movie incorporates a great deal of that footage in a rapid-edit breakneck speed that is both overwhelming, amazing, and illustrative of the constant onslaught of trauma and mental breakdown facing Caouette’s family throughout his life.
The film was initially made for a total budget of $218.32, using free iMovie software on a Macintosh computer. As an early supporter, film critic Roger Ebert notes, $400,000 more was eventually spent by the distributor on sound, print, score and music/clip clearances to bring the film to theaters. The film went on to win awards including Best Documentary from the National Society of Film Critics, the Independent Spirits, the Gotham Awards, and the LA and London International Film Festivals.
Read more about Caouette and see a brief clip of the film, after the jump!

This monologue appears in the film comes after the actor/director reveals that he witnessed his mother being raped at a young age and subsequently spent time being physically and sexually abused in a foster home. Though ultimately loving and affirming of family, the film really is quite heartbreaking and often times difficult to watch. Yet, any gay artist can perhaps identify with some of the fear, rage, reckoning that come through in this short piece of acting.
Caouette came out as gay at a young age and moved to New York City at age 25, eventually finding a boyfriend named David Sanin Paz. They both live in New York City today. As documented in the film, his mother has lived with them at times and they’ve formed an unusual family. A scene early in the movie has an 11-or-so-year old Caouette improvising a monologue as a woman in an abusive relationship. Caouette later sent in this tape as an audition for John Cameron Mitchell‘s film Shortbus. The tape later found its way to Gus Van Sant (director of Milk, about the openly gay political figure, Harvey Milk). Both Van Sant and Mitchell ended up signing onto the film as executive producers.
Today, Caouette is working on a documentary about All Tomorrow’s Parties, an “alternative” music festival.