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Repersonalization By Susan Gerhard Suddenly some little fat girl from Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her little father's camcorder, and for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever – and it will really become an art form. EVERY GENERATION SINCE the onslaught of camcorder technology, and a few generations before, has secured its very own "found" filmmaker. Like Duchamp, choosing his readymades, critics and programmers and high-profile auteurs have selected – seemingly out of the blue – trademarked unknowns to carry an idea, usually awesomely expressed, to the general public. The found filmmaker doesn't arrive through the same old channels, hasn't hit up the usual funders, hasn't been bounced around talent agencies or even gone to film school, but shows up naked on Culture Beach with some treasure, dug up from the bottom of the ocean, that forwards a particular school of thought's prophesies about the future of film. Remember Sadie Benning? She brought us New Queer Youth Cinema from the discomfort of her coming out-coming-of-age bedroom. She reintroduced low-res as high art, encouraged a rush on Pixelvision cameras that were said to sell for the only-in-Toyland price of $100, and was going to inspire a generation of imitators to turn grade school diaries into museum-worthy art. Little attention was paid to the idea that the revolution this wunderkind jump-started had more to do with a new generation's remodeling of feminism than it did with the future of filmmaking – the floodgates were supposedly opened. Until it was clear they were still closed. Benning eluded the straitjacket so many culture-watchers had prepared for her: she continued to grow as an artist, to the point that when she decided she'd said what she needed to in one medium – film – she hopped into another: music. This week we get to watch the unveiling of the next found artist, bringing on the next "future of filmmaking." That previously unknown artist is Jonathan Caouette, who is going to be ushering iMovie Nation into a theater near you, at least according to the New York critics who took the first appreciative swings at Tarnation last week. It may be true that Caouette created the film for $218 – not counting the wages that might have been paid for the many hours it took to edit a lifetime into less than 100 minutes, or the money that has or hasn't been issued for music rights or archival TV and film clips, or the fees that could have been offered to its incredible nonprofessional actors playing themselves in scenes both set up and observed by Caouette's careful camera. But it's also true that, if indeed iMovie Nation is truly at work on its own millions of films, it's most likely that they're nothing like this one. Like Benning before him, Caouette is an original. More culture than most any one person should probably consume and more anguish than any person should have to suffer are concentrated in this singular work of cathartic art. Tarnation is a movie that uses a DIY look and feel to reveal its heart but conceal its skill; its expertly unusual story pacing and Times Square approach to pop culture probably wouldn't work in less sincere hands, engaged in a less life-and-death project. Throughout the film, Caouette is telling the audience he's trying to survive amid suicidal thoughts and foster homes and abuse and bad drug luck that's made him suffer from "depersonalization." The film shows him holding on to the movies, TV, and music that engage him like they're life rafts, which, I believe, gives him permission to brazenly reappropriate them. Caouette repersonalizes himself by latching onto the music video – a form that's only occasionally risen above pure music-industry propaganda since its inception – to mimic the mind's-eye soundtrack that's been narrating his life since the age of four. It's another take on the legal doctrine of "fair use," for times when real estate inside our brains is being purchased by the biggest advertiser. Even if no other filmmaker is ever allowed to binge in the record store quite this way, grabbing up emotional cues, I'm glad Caouette is the one to get the pass. Fandom is saving him, and it's an amazing thing we're getting to watch. The promise, or problem, of Tarnation isn't so much that other people can make movies like this (and I hope they do; I just hope they don't all get released to the general public next year), but that they'll think it's as easy as a couple hundred dollars and a few late nights. Balancing those micromanaged life-summarizing musical montages with vérité-style "real-time" moments and self-created Super 8 horror gems from his personal archives is truly a feat of agile filmmaking, not an iMovie achievement. Still, there's a real democratic, technological revolution that isn't being talked about with this film – and that's the fact that it's getting out at all, not to mention getting out all over. If easy-access technology is creating more filmmakers – known and unknown, working in bedrooms and offices and library terminals on pet personal projects – it's also created exponentially more sophisticated film watchers. Which makes them, I believe, not so much insiders as informed fans who may be more sympathetic to a story like this. Can you imagine, even a decade ago, seeing at a mainstream movie theater, in a city like Orlando, Fla., a story told in screaming graphics and split screens with quick-trigger cuts, a film about the aftershocks of shock treatment, featuring off-kilter interviews of family members who make Maysles-styled marginal figures look like society's stable core? I can't. But I suspect, this time around, the world is ready for the newest readymade. |
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