Review of Tarnation (2003) by Rod E — 07 Dec 2012

Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette's self-reflexive, autobiographical experimental documentary that uses acoustic and dissonant music, similarly dissonant editing, and a combination of home video, evokes both the impermanence of memory and bliss, and Caouette's desire to overcome adversity as a gay man who grew up in an abusive context.

While the heavy use of music and jarring sound effects may initially be read as overly emotionally manipulative, the combination of this music with the collection of home video, which is spliced together in repetitive, flashback-like fashion, achieves successfully an aesthetic that parallels a stream-of-consciousness mechanism, highlighting the temporality of life and memory.

Caoette's impressive collection of home video, including one of him as child improvising a monologue of woman in an abusive relationship, captures poignantly his adverse childhood experiences as inseparable from his mother's experience with mental and physical abuse, that indeed, his mother and all of her baggage, is seared into Caouette's identity.

While the heavy use of textual narration may be read as an oversimplified method of providing information that uses a voice-of-God type of narrative, it is effective in this film because it mirrors a scrapbook aesthetic.

The narration is not a voice-of-God, rather, it is Jonathan's grown-up voice, attempting to piece together and preserve the kernels that defined his coming-of-age.