Tarnation

It comes as little surprise that Jonathan Caouette has a promising film career based on a debut film that was made by any means necessary. He’s been doing this kind of thing since he was a kid, growing up in Houston.
Caouette’s film Tarnation was originally made with a budget of $218.32. “The total is derived from all the video tapes and various footage I pulled and imported into iMovie, and then exported to a Hi-8 master,” Caouette tells Free Press Houston in an exclusive interview. (All told, when Tarnation is released later this month the total negative amount spent on the film including sound re-mixes, blow-ups to 35mm and song clearances by distributor Wellspring will be approximately $400,000.)
Caouette just looks like a film star, a part he has played throughout his life, as illustrated in Tarnation. His features remind one of Ewan McGregor. He has that presence which can be found in the androgynous character of the rock star in Velvet Goldmine. (Okay that part was played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, but McGregor was in the film and cut from the same bolt of cloth.) It’s the same look Albert Finney had from the early 60s until he stopped being a romantic lead in the 70s.
One day Caouette, transplanted to New York and working as a doorman (“Very good benefits,” Caouette nods.) auditions for a role in a movie for Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell. The film (a project still in production called Shortbus) becomes a moot point as Caouette gets needed encouragement to enter his working version of Tarnation into a film festival. Mitchell comes on board as producer. Soon Gus Van Sant is an Executive Producer and Tarnation has secured respective berths at the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. The rest as they say is film history as an iMovie becomes a feature release. And Caouette looks like he belongs in the midst of this maelstrom.
The word tarnation is an epithet, a euphemistic form of damnation. For Jonathan Caouette the title of his debut movie reflects the steep road he has taken, from years of obscurity shooting home-style videotape to becoming a filmmaker with the hot film du jour.
Tarnation redefines the unique movie experience. Completely made using Macintosh’s built-in film editing software iMovie, and comprised of video footage, phone messages, and Super 8 clips that basically cover his entire life, Tarnation mixes this documentary style footage with the arsenal of Mac editing effects to spin Caouette’s tale with the dizziness of a kaleidoscope.
“The first time I ever picked up a camera I had asked my grandfather to buy me a direct sound video camera. It was about $60 at a pawn shop,” recalls Caouette. Earlier in the week, Caouette had come to Houston to preview Tarnation to a full house of friends at local Microcinema, the Aurora Picture Show.
“I have always had an esthetic for video. In the 80s video was so widely available,” notes Caouette, seated at a corner table of the Lancaster Hotel restaurant. “I could go to Target to the photo section and get $10 cartridges of Super 8 film.
“I was making experimental horror films. Then I discovered underground films and repertory art films by way of the few friends I had met in the gay underground scene in Houston,” says Caouette.
Tarnation treads on Caouette’s past, a view both brash and delicate. After portraying a history of family dysfunction Caouette asks Adolph, his grandfather, point blank whether he was responsible through negligance for the abused suffered by Jonathan’s mom, Renee. Moments like this are interspaced with shots of Caouette as a teen rehearsing in an ad hoc high school production of Blue Velvet. More poignantly, one scene shows Caouette crying in front of his Mac as he searches the Internet for information on lithium. His mother has just overdosed on that medicine, used for bipolar disorders.
Caouette admits that some of Tarnation was recreated while he was putting it together; for instance, the part with him breaking down while searching on the Internet. “I was too far emotionally gone the first time,” Caouette notes. Also one sequence with a baby Jonathan lying with his grandmother is actually Jonathan's own nine year old son as a baby.
The website for Tarnation claims Caouette’s birth date as 1972, but he states: “I was born November 26 at Jefferson Davis Hospital in Houston, in 1974.” Caouette was involved with Houston’s Big Brothers & Big Sisters Association of America. There his sponsor was Jeff Millar, then the film critic for the Houston Chronicle. “That was my film school, going to see a lot of movies. The calendar for [Houston art house] the River Oaks Theater was as important as anything at school.”
Caouette reveals, if only obliquely, that for his next project: “I am going to take three films from the 1970s, huge studio films that were successful in their day.”
“They were produced between 1974 and 1977 and they all utilized the same actress. Basically she looks and breathes and feels like the same person in each film, right down to her accent, her hair length. I want to take all three of those films and re-mix them, re-augment those films into a completely different two hour film,” Caouette hints without actually naming the films. Can’t let the cat quite out of the bag, don’t want to jinx the idea. Ideally, Caouette suggests, he wants to give this project the iMovie treatment. Tarnation itself was originally three hours before he cut it down to its present length, about a half-reel short of two hours. Perhaps there’s a Tarnation 2.0 in the future.
Somewhere in the middle of the interview Caouette’s cell phone rings. As he answers you can see his face brighten, his eyebrows arch. The voice on the other end informs him that he has won the Best Documentary award at the Los Angeles Film Festival. There will be no sleep tonight as the rest of the evening will consist of preparing for a dawn flight to L.A. to receive his honors. How cool is that?
Caouette orders an espresso. “Coffee and cigarettes are my vices. I quit smoking for four years, too.
“Anyway,” he says lighting up a smoke, “I’m going to quit again.”