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MillimeterHome Movies, Big Screen
Oct 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Kristinha M. Anding
Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, an 88-minute autobiographical documentary detailing the filmmaker's experiences growing up in a troubled American family, has been garnering buzz during the past year, touring Sundance and Cannes and earning praise from critics such as Roger Ebert, as well as the executive producer support of Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell.
Jonathan Caouette with his mother, Renee LeBlanc.
Caouette's predistribution budget for the film? $218. It's a meager figure that belies the effort Caouette has put into the film; he's been creating it for the greater part of his life.
Caouette began recording himself and his family in Houston when he was 11 years old, using Super 8, VHS, and Betamax cameras that were borrowed or given to him as gifts. He captured hundreds of hours of poignant footage, images of himself gaining subjectivity in the shadow of his mother's harrowing and heartbreaking mental illness.
A couple years ago, Caouette discovered Apple's iMovie while working on a short film called The Hospital in New York. He began uploading his home-movie footage onto his iMac to serve as flashback for the film's main character. Impressed by the ease of use of the software and driven by a need to tell his own story, he began compiling and editing more material from his extensive archive. Tarnation began to take shape.
“It was like Fisher-Price,” says Caouette of iMovie's simplicity. “You're able to render and get instant gratification with movie software that's on your computer.”
Caouette says the process of building the documentary was completely organic and mostly low-tech. He projected his Super 8 footage on his wall and then videotaped it with his Sony MiniDV Handycam, a gift from his grandfather in 2000. He transferred VHS and Betamax footage from his VCRs to Hi8 and then to his Handycam via FireWire. He eschewed even a scanner, opting instead to tape photographs to his wall and take digital stills of them. He uploaded everything into iMovie, added a soundtrack from his CD collection, and began cutting rhythmically to the music.
Caouette recorded himself and his family with Super 8, VHS, Betamax and still cameras as a child and later compiled the footage using Apple's iMovie.
“The movie has sort of written itself. Nothing was really premeditated about what I did,” says Caouette, who belted out the first edit of the film in just three weeks for the MIX Film/Video Festival in New York. “I did everything very organically and quickly.”
The predistribution budget of $218 accounts mostly for the Hi8 tapes that acted as makeshift external hard-drive space for his iMac. (The production, picked up for distribution by Wellspring, has since spent much more on expenses, including clearances for the music and television clips incorporated into the film.)
“When I first started doing this, I didn't have an external hard drive,” he recalls. “I would just work in 15-minute intervals and then dump everything to a Hi8 tape — those were sufficing as my masters.” Caouette says once his iMac couldn't handle the movie anymore, Van Sant called Apple, which generously donated a G5.
Blowing up the documentary to 35mm at PostWorks in New York continued the organic process of the film's creation by lending an unintentional “dreamy” quality to the piece, according to Caouette.
“With a lot of the one-frame editing I did, we had a lot of dropouts,” he says. “But it also lends this additional esoteric, dreamy layer over the entire film in a way that looks really cool.”
Technicolor, New York, completed the color correction and interpositive, and the little film that could got another big boost when Skywalker Sound offered to do the audio mix.
“They just called us one day and said, ‘We loved your film,’” Caouette says, laughing. “Now the movie sounds like Star Wars.”
Tarnation evolved into a confessional, poetic amalgam of intimate memoirs illuminating the filmmaker's tumultuous past as well as his unconditional love for his mother. Caouette says he hopes his do-it-yourself documentary, crafted entirely from existing footage, will show others that they too can construct personal narratives that can make it onto the big screen.
“I really hope this movie can be an inspiration for would-be filmmakers who are maybe intimidated by how much money it takes,” he says. “You really just need a camera from Best Buy, a FireWire, and a Mac. There should be no more excuses.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.