Your browser have JavaScript disabled, or you might use the Firefox-plugin NoScript.
Note that Headweb does not work as intended without JavaScript! Click here to read more.

Tarnation

Documentary | 2003 | 91 min |

8 votes

Add to Watchlist

Tell a friend

Caouette has been documenting his life since he was eleven years old. With TARNATION, he weaves a psychedelic whirlwind of snapshots, Super-8 home movies, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, snippets of 80s pop culture and dramatic reenactments to create an epic portrait of an American family torn apart by dysfunction and reunited through the power of love.

TARNATION begins in 2003 as Caouette learns of his mother’s lithium overdose in his native Texas. Faced with the haunting remnants of his past, including a family legacy of mental illness, abuse, and neglect, Caouette returns home to aid in his mother¹s recovery. Slipping back into the archives of his youth, we watch Caouette grow up on camera, seeking escape from family trauma through musical theater, grade-B horror flicks and the forging of his identity through popular culture.

Having relocated to New York in his twenties and subsequently attaining peace in the form of a supportive mate, Caouette discovers that family ties are never truly unbound. He rekindles a touching relationship with another victim of a tumultuous childhood - his own mother Renee.

TARNATION is a raw and sensual display of self-destruction and rebirh that announces the arrival of an exceptional new cinematic visionary.

In the press (10)

Comments

Write a comment:

There are no comments posted yet.

Ron Stringer, LA Weekly

”Once in a blue moon, a picture shows up at a festival that busts our ways of looking at cinema wide open. That this should happen this year at Sundance, and – get this – by way of a young somebody’s first feature - is something of a miracle.”

Tim Appelo, Seattle Weekly

”A flat-out masterpiece.”

Screen Daily

”Extraordinary piece of Cannes-bound autobiography will resonate with audiences everywhere. Tarnation is a uniquely moving testament to the hardships and damage inflicted by life, wheteher mental illness or abuse, and the means to endure them - artistic expression and love, both romantic and familial.”

David Ansen, Newsweek

”A whirlwind journey through filmmaker Jonathan Caouette’s Southern Gothis life. Painfully self-revealing but never self-indulgent. Tarnation ultimately coheres into a remarkable affirmation of a son’s enduring love for his broken mother.”

Gavin Smith, Film Comment

”Always compelling. A swirling digital vortex to chronicle its maker’s passage from childhood turmoil and teenage acting out to eventual psychic survival. The video has a directness and a wrenching emotional force. You know the filmmaker means every frame.”

Jan Stuart, Newsday

”An electrifying first film. Tarnation is a mesmerizing rock-and-read memoir.”

Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

”I feel transcendence in reality, watching Tarnation”

Manohla Dargis, LA Times

”An exuberantly personal work smeared with lipstick traces from the likes of David Lynch and avant-garde legend Jack Smith that recounts the filmmaker's life with and without his disturbed mother.”

Los Angeles Film Festival 2004

”The jury was impressed by Jonathan Caouette's audacious demonstration of craft. 'Tarnation' is a film that achieves the nearly impossible; it's raw and personal, aesthetically distinct, and operatic in scale.”

Toronto International Film Festival 2004

”Daringly, brilliantly, and with superb sensitivity and taste. Riveting and deeply affecting, Tarnation sets a new standard for autobiographical filmmaking.”