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Features
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Caouette's So-Called Life
After 20 years spent recording his life, Houston native Jonathan Caouette turns the raw footage into the dazzling debut documentary Tarnation.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
By Pam Grady
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Sundance's $218.32 man
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When Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation took its bow at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the documentary was relegated to the festivals ‘Frontiers’ section, which is dedicated to more experimental work. It flew so far under the radar that initially the festival didn't even schedule a press screening for it, which only increased the buzz about a filmmaker arriving from seemingly out of nowhere with a movie that reportedly cost only $218.32 to make.
"There are probably other people making great movies at this level, kind of the outsider, but who can't get [it out there]," comments John Cameron Mitchell, one of the film's executive producers, an early champion who helped Caouette realize his dream, the reflection of an early childhood passion for filmmaking.
"It started with being highly interested in films from an extremely young age,” Caouette explains. “Like at age four, going into a movie theater with my grandfather, pre-VCR days, and recording the audio of the movie and having my grandfather buy me like loose-leaf paper, typing paper, a bunch of markers, and I would go home and draw the movie out, scene by scene, frame by frame. That was sort of my playing with GI Joes kind of thing."
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Producer Mitchell
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By the age of 11, Caouette was documenting his own life with a Super 8 camera his grandfather purchased for him at a pawnshop and with a neighbor's borrowed video camera. As a child and young adolescent, he made various attempts at film, without too much initial success. “They were like start-stops of films,” he admits sheepishly. “I would start a project and then I would stop it."
But Caouette persisted, eventually amassing nearly 200 hours of film and video, as well as snapshots, audiotapes and even saved answering machine messages. Though the film is ultimately an optimistic look at Jonathan and his troubled mother transcending their circumstances, the portrait that emerges in Tarnation is also sometimes a harrowing one.
Caouette grew up in a profoundly dysfunctional family, the son of a one-time beauty queen who was diagnosed with acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorders, and who has spent much of her life in and out of mental hospitals, enduring scores of shock treatments. Caouette himself spent part of his early years in hospitals, diagnosed with depersonalization disorder, which leaves him with both a feeling of unreality and the sense that he is disconnected from his own body.
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Arun Nevader/Wireimage.com
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An early Caouette influence
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Raised in Houston by his grandparents, the idea that young Jonathan was destined for a creative life was evident in his precocious playacting for the camera as a child and the drive that spurred him to mount a musical, high school adaptation of David Lynch's Blue Velvet. But it was really during his teenage years that Caouette became serious about his habit of capturing the Caouettes.
"Around the time I was a teenager, I started becoming very cognizant of my immediate family situation and came to the realization that I had a very unique family, which consisted of everybody being diagnosed as clinically mentally ill,” he recalls. “So being aware of this, I found more of an urgency to start filming things around the house; filming my grandparents; filming my mother. What was happening is everything I was doing was pure reaction to what my given circumstances were.”
Eventually, Caouette grew up and moved away, starting over in New York City with a new boyfriend, David, and a job as a Fifth Avenue doorman. But he never stopped recording his life or continuing to try and shape the footage.
"It's been pretty much an inadvertent work in progress, like a real hands-on work-in-progress for the past three years,” he avers. “All the montages that I was putting together were all sort of like what I was doing as a child, previous attempts at trying to piece things together, but that failed."
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MIX Film Festival
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Producer Stephen Winter
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But once Caouette reached that indomitable male milestone of 30 years of age, he realized he needed to commit to being a filmmaker and find a way to make Tarnation. Two years later, thanks in part to Apple’s free iMovie DV editing program, his wish has been fulfilled.
Still, the filmmaker admits the project might have remained a private and, worse yet, ongoing one were it not for the involvement of producers John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) and Stephen Winter (the short film The Mountain King). “It could've been a five-hour movie by next year,” Caouette muses. “It could've been."
Thankfully, fate intervened when Caouette decided to send part of his footage as an audition reel to Mitchell, who was looking for some real faces for his next project, the hardcore Shortbus. Mitchell remembers his reaction when he watched Caouette's reel.
"The film was so well put together,” he says. “There were bits of Tarnation in there and I was blown away and I would show it to all my friends."
Mitchell urged Caouette to finish his film and enter it into the MIX festival, the New York Lesbian and Gay Experiment Film/Video Festival. He also alerted MIX director Stephen Winter to expect Caouette's submission.
The first iteration of Tarnation was three hours long, over twice as long as its eventual 87-minute run time, but Winter recollects his amazement at Caouette's accomplishment. "I've worked on many film festivals and I've sat on many grant panels,” he begins. “I've seen a lot of movies made for no money by interesting people. Never before had I seen something that was put together so brilliantly.”
“It was such a glorious combination of visuals, dazzling style, this incredibly deep, raw emotion,” Winter continues. “I called him before I finished watching it and said, 'Even at three hours, this movie is genius. At 90 minutes, it would be absolutely spectacular. I would really love to come and talk to you about this,' because I had never seen such a thing before."
In fact, Winter was so bowled over by Caouette's achievement that he signed on as a producer, helping the filmmaker in the final push to transform his lifelong collection of footage into a movie. "He had 20 years of footage of his life, but it was all put together brilliantly. And all of his instincts on story structure were all there. His take on narrative structure was wonderful. His take on experimental structure was perfect. He knew it all and he could do it all; he was a dazzling subject."
| Adds Mitchell: "Steven, day to day, worked helping Jonathan find the story, find the film within a lot of material. He brought in other friends, who would help with notes, ideas for this final slog."
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As Mitchell sees it, the most valuable thing he and Winter had to offer was a sense of perspective. "He needed some objectivity. I mean, it's his life. He's in it. Everyone could use some objectivity in their lives.”
Caouette agrees, suggesting the input of Mitchell, Winter and editor Brian Kates all worked to Tarnation’s advantage. "The non-linear aspect was a little over the top and there were a little too many subplots,” he confesses with a laugh. “The movie was there; we just had to take this crazy stuff and put it with this crazy stuff."
| Ironically, even though it was 20 years in the making, Caouette put the final touches on Tarnation a mere three days before its January 18th, 2004 Sundance premiere. The film sold out all of its Park City screenings and went on to play Cannes, Toronto, and other film festivals before opening in limited release October 6th. It also won the Best Documentary Feature Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival this past June.
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Along the way, Caouette and his work have amassed an impressive collection of critical admirers, including Roger Ebert, The New York Times' A.O. Scott, The Village Voice's J. Hoberman, and The Nation's Stuart Klawans. Comments Mitchell, "Quality will win out. If you have that persistence, it's going to get that person who cares and that's going to get to the next person who cares."
| For his part, Caouette hopes Tarnation will lead audiences to gain more empathy for the plight of the mentally ill, a subject he feels has been overlooked by both the mainstream and independent filmmaking communities. “The way it's been represented has been very kind of candy-coated,” he suggests. “I want people to leave the theater reeling with glee and just knowing maybe or having a window in their mind's eye that no matter what's happening in their life, no matter what circumstances are being thrown at them, where they are in the pendulum of this existence, there is always hope and that love can inevitably override." | |
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