Product Description

DVD extras include: Director commentary, optional French subtitles, Photo Gallery. Jonathan Caouette's spellbinding debut film Tarnation re-imagines the whole idea of what a documentary can be. Having filmed his life since he was eleven years old, Caouette has woven together a psychedelic whirlwind of snapshots, super-8 home movies, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, snippets of '80s pop culture and dramatic re-enactments to create an epic portrait of an American family torn apart by dysfunction and reunited through the power of love. arnation begins in 2003 as Caouette learns of his mother's lithium overdose back in his native Texas. Faced with the haunting remnants of his past, including a family history of mental illness, abuse and neglect, Caouette returns home to aid in his mother's recovery. During this time, he rekindles a touching relationship with his mother, another victim of a tumultuous childhood and discovers that family ties are never truly unbound.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75863 in DVD
• Brand: Genius
• Released on: 2005-05-17
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: French
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 88 minutes

Features

• A groundbreaking work in cinematic achievement, Jonathan Caouette s award-winning debut feature is an epic portrait of an American family torn apart by dysfunction and reunited through the power of love. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES Rating: NR Age: 720917545325 UPC: 720917545325 Manufacturer No: FLV5453

Amazon.com
A dark and troubling dream that David Lynch must envy, made all the more unsettling because it's true, Tarnation can only be called at auto-documentary. It's a self-portrait of the family life of Jonathan Caouette, whose mother Renee (a former child model) was forced to undergo electric shock treatment repeatedly in her youth, leading to erratic behavior throughout her life. But though the events of Caouette's life are sad, horrific, or a testament to human resilience, what makes the movie striking is how it was made: Caouette cobbled the movie together from photographs, tape recordings, and home movies that he's shot throughout his life, ranging from footage of himself at 11 years old imitating a battered wife to trashy horror movies he made as an adolescent to the first time he met his father. The unique and fluid result is mesmerizing and eerily intimate, like stepping into someone else's stream of consciousness--though few of our dreams have such a killer indie rock soundtrack. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
"Notes from the Underground" hits the age of the iMac, and it's not a pretty sight. Jonathan Caouette is a young Texan filmmaker who was raised in dismaying, sometimes brutal, circumstances and who has now trawled through them for evidence. The result is part trip, part secret journal, spliced together into a lurid public memorandum. We learn of his mother, Renee, who, by the time she bore Jonathan, in the early nineteen-seventies, had already suffered electric-shock treatment and a violent marriage. Her son was farmed out to foster parents, who maintained the cycle of harm. There is one scene in which, as a boy of eleven, he stages a plaintive drag act, and, watching it, you can barely imagine a more disturbed child; whether such disturbance makes for coherent, let alone tactful, filmmaking is another question. There are moments of graphic beauty here (Gus Van Sant, unsurprisingly, was the executive producer), but also smears of unpleasantness; if the middle-aged, once radiant Renee is now a picture of emotional damage, is it right for a loving son to trap her ravings on camera and put them on show? -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker