By Elina Shatkin, December 8, 2004
For several years, filmmakers and the industry they support have been hyping a new era of moviemaking heralded by the advent of digital video cameras and high-end desktop editing systems. Providing more people with a means of production, however, is not the primary benefit of this technology; according to its advocates, the technology itself will foster a more direct, personal approach to filmmaking. It's a lofty ideal that few movies have attained, but a recent film, Tarnation, may expand the boundaries of both mainstream documentary and narrative forms. Tarnation was shot, posted and delivered on a micro-budget of $218.32.
Directed by Jonathan Caouette, the film explores his life from the age of 11 onward and examines his complex and sometimes contentious relationship with his mentally ill mother. The film begins in 2003, when Caouette learns of his mother's lithium overdose, and traces the roots of their family's often painful history. In so doing, Caouette delivers one of the most meticulous and unvarnished portraits of mental illness ever screened.
Sequences of the film were culled from decades worth of photo albums, home movies, video journals, archived answering machine messages, Hollywood movie clips and pop music samples. Caouette had saved what turned out to be 160 hours of recorded materials spanning more than 20 years. He incorporated a wide range of formats (Super 8, Betamax, Hi-8, VHS and Mini DV) to create a torrent of images that interweave pop culture tidbits with deeply personal moments.
No fancy editing or visual effects technology for Caouette, who cut the film on iMovie, Apple's consumer editing application. Editing was an organic, stream-of-consciousness process for Caouette, who looked randomly through whatever material struck his fancy
. He would then find additional material from the same era as his selected material and edit the imagery into a cohesive segment, output the completed segment to tape, dump the footage from his borrowed Mac and begin work on a new segment. This process continued until Caouette had shaped Tarnation into a two-and-a-half-hour cut that premiered at New York's MIX Film Festival. (Later, with the support of executive producers John Cameron Mitchell and Gus Van Sant and co-editor Brian A. Kates, an 88-minute version of Tarnation screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.)
The effects, which look fairly sophisticated for a low-budget film, were also created with iMovie. The film is a whirlwind pastiche of flash frames, zooms, picture-in-picture effects, colorization and filters that Caouette describes as an "expression of depersonalization disorder," which he was diagnosed with as a teenager. "I conceived the film as a new way of looking at documentary, as though it were imitating my thought process, giving the audience the experience of seeing what it was like to be inside my head."
Caouette acknowledges the editing program's limitations. "You don't want to take a project as ambitious as this and cut it on iMovie," he says. He plans to learn Final Cut Pro for his next project. Though he was mum on the details, he revealed that Tarnation will probably have a sequel, "though it'll really be more of an equal," says Caouette.
Regarding his limited resources, Caouette took a philosophical approach that is often expressed by low-budget filmmakers. "In some weird way it was a blessing in disguise. The limitations make you work harder."
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