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Where is Jafar Panahi's "The White Ballo ...No "Tarnation" Effect: Why Did Jonathan Caouette's Watershed Film Not Create a Cinematic Revolution?
I think it's instructive that YouTube, launched a year later than "Tarnation," would engender millions of far less talented Caouettes, who would similarly use their computers to document and distribute the stories of their lives, irrevocably changing the media world. But why didn't "Tarnation" itself break out in a bigger way and become a more influential phenomenon. While the movie earned more than a million dollars in box office receipts worldwide—a not-too-shabby figure for a weird personal doc—"Tarnation" still seems to be regarded today as a kind of outsider-art oddball.
One of my contentions is that Caouette's films, both "Tarnation" and "Walk Away Renee" are in many ways difficult to watch, showing rather unpleasant sides of the director and his mother. "Indeed, the films can be off-putting," I suggest, "which may be one of the reasons why few filmmakers have followed in Caouette's brash footsteps. For all of its digital razzle-dazzle, the work is ultimately about mental combustion and collapse, which in turn drives his unique aesthetic choices. How many filmmakers can claim to be so closely in tune with mental illness to cinematically reproduce it?"
1 Comment
hasbert | June 29, 2012 1:17 PM
There's another reason Tarnation-like narratives didn't take-off: the techniques of Tarnation actually precede the development of those of fictional metaphoric narrative, but they emerged -- thanks to the time it took to make filmmaking technology available to the masses -- only well after metaphoric narrative was well-established.
So the methods of Tarnation were an anachronism even before they emerged.