As low budget as it gets, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation cost a mere $218 but it's a priceless document of a troubled adolescence. A life-long project in the truest sense of the word, Caouette began filming himself on a super-8 camera during his childhood and maintained his video-diary right through his twenties. Caouette's father left his mother, Renee, a former Texas beauty queen, before he was born and the young boy was raised primarily by his grandparents, due to his mother's extreme mental illness. Young Jonathan appeared to grasp that all was not exactly normal in his home life from a very young age and immersing himself in all facets of performance, he used a camera as a diary to document his experiences.
Despite the obscenely limited budgetary constraints, Tarnation is a visually inventive document, with the director using an imaginative array of sources - home footage, photographs, taped interviews - to rely his experiences. This is hardy a simple exercise in stylistics, however, as Caouette's story is a horrifically sorrowful one, with his mother subjected to electroshock therapy from an early age, while his own experiences included abuse in the foster homes that he once lived in. A difficult film to watch due to its overwhelming confessional nature, Caouette occasionally makes things even more uncomfortable for the viewer as he misjudges a couple of interviews, a scene with his grandfather, in particular, seems ill-conceived. Yet as far as brutal, unflinching honesty goes in filmmaking, Tarnation has few peers.
