Almost the first thing anyone hears about Jonathan Caouette's film Tarnation, is that he made it on his Mac with pre-bundled iMovie software for a total cost of $218.32. That factoid alone speaks volumes about the potential future of "filmmaking" in an era of easily accessible, easy-to-use digital technology. As director Gus Van Sant remarked apropo Tarnation, “There are no longer home movies, but movies of the home.”
This future, of course, is only a possible one because perhaps even more than having access to material resources, people need to also have access to conceptual ones. Which means that as important as widely available, inexpensive image-capture and editing software is, it means nothing unless one can think beyond the conventions of bloated budget Hollywood blockbuster entertainment, a paradigm in which digital technology is equated only with SFX.
Tarnation is a kind of documentary. It is also a kind of autobiography, about Caouette's childhood, teenage years, and current life, and a kind of biography---about Caouette's mother Renee, a woman whose fragmented mental condition and shattered life was quite possibly caused by the psychiatric treatment she was given after a bad accident. Caouette's treatment of this standard "nonfiction" material, however, is strikingly original. He combines home movies, photographs, student films, video diaries, recreated scenes, and film and television clips with pop songs, incidental recordings like answering machine messages and title cards. In its use of image and sound collage, multiple image tracks, overlapping and fragmented visuals and sound, Tarnation could be said to have a "music video" aesthetic.
1 comment:
It really is amazing, the level of technology available to the every-day consumer now. I was taught how to use the I-movie programs too, but then learned the much more intricate and more powerful, professional programs Avid and Final Cut Pro. While the differences are eventually very drastic, the essential skills: cutting clips, editing them together, mixing sound, etc, can be handled very expertly with I-movie and with this film as an example, can lead to films hitting the big time without the use of the more intricate programs.
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