Tarnation

Wow. Jonathan Caouette's $218.32 miracle, edited on an iMac with iMovie software and utilizing - in its 88 minute run time - 160 hours of footage shot over 20 years, Tarnation is simply one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. No exaggeration. It's sometimes hard to watch, but it's one of the most personal statements ever committed to film, and it's a miracle it was ever made. It's an overwhelming triumph of self-expression, and the idea of independent film in general. It's almost impossible to explain the overwhelming emotion that one feels when viewing this film. Watching it is an amazing, hypnotic experience. An incredibly affecting, experimental film that bombards the audience with images: sometimes moving, sometimes strange, sometimes confusing... but always interesting and intriguing. The entire first half hour or so is comprised almost entirely of old pictures, and on-screen text detailing the sad truths of Jonathan's family. I remember thinking, during the film, how amazing it was that something as little as text on a screen could make me as emotional as it did. But the one thing that I will probably always remember from the film, and the thing that sticks with me most now, is a five or six minute unbroken take near the end of the film, where Jonathan is filming his mother, after she's just had a lithium overdose and has become brain-damaged, and there she is, and we're watching her as she looks at her son through the camera, and she's laughing uncontrollably at nothing, something she thinks is something but is really nothing at all, and the take is quite brilliant, as it goes farther and farther past the place where a filmmaker would normally cut, and now it's all just become absurd, and everything's absurd, and we see just for a moment how her life and the life of those around her must be just that much more insane now, and how our experience with this woman can not come close to being the experience that others share with her every day, namely her family, and we can finally see, in some way, how after everything, her son can still call her his "beautiful mother."