Tarnation

Aroview: Famously stitched-together documentary of one Jonathan Caouette’s troubled life, where 19 years of home movie footage was edited for pennies on an Apple iMac, and released under the auspices of Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell.

Deeply, at times excruciatingly personal, Caouette’s scrapbook confessional (complete with frantic on-screen narration) floods the viewer with a lifetime of intimate and distressing footnotes: growing up gay, surviving fatal drug use, wrestling with identity, and learning to live with a checkered family past. With demons like these, the film carries a weight of self-absorbance that’s insufferable at the best of times, but courageous all the same as form of therapy, if not necessary exorcism.

NZ International Film Festival 2005