Jonathan Caouette @ FNC: Tarnation filmmaker on the multiverse, staring contests and cinéma poverté
Michael-Oliver Harding
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Back in 2003, a then-unknown 31-year-old indie filmmaker from Houston shook Sundance, Cannes and the entire film world to its core with Tarnation, a deeply poignant autobiographical movie about the filmmaker’s relationship with his schizophrenic mom, Renée. By turns surreal, chaotic, intimate and troubling, Tarnation was an underground tour de force, produced for $218.32, edited on iMovie and compiling a childhood’s worth of both eerie and comedic VHS and DV-shot family videos. The raw honesty and vulnerability with which Caouette pieced together his experimental family diary, delving into his absent dad, his mom’s electroshock treatments and the homophobic environment he grew up in made for one of the finest indie gems in recent memory. Bigwig directors Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell jumped at the chance to endorse this promising talent and ensure we’d all be privy to his work.
I submitted the film to Cannes and Danny Lennon [Ed’s Note: an internationally recognized short film programmer/guru, based out of Montreal] contacted me, and told me all about PHI and long story short, I couldn’t have imagined a better collaboration. I think they’re handling every aspect of the film beautifully…aesthetically, it’s a perfect match. They tend to be attracted to the darker things in life… (laughs) Like my film. I can’t wait to come to Montreal again!
Yes! I’m French Canadian by descent, and I’m trying to connect the dots, because I’m a bit of a mutt, and I’m just now at a place, at the tender age of 38 years old, where I’m trying to figure out where I come from. And I’m definitely going to start from Quebec, and ripple my way out from there.
It’s a combination of mini-factors. One of the most pragmatic was that just after Tarnation, I had gotten into a set of circumstances where I became the sole caretaker for my mother and grandfather for years, and certain things transpired. I had to be the one to hold the fort down. I’m a big advocate of non-institutional places – like I don’t believe in old folks homes or assisted-living facilities, and ironically my mom is living in one now because I could only go as far as I could go with caretaking.
It’s an amalgam of a bunch of different ideas, which is usually the way I always work. I can now say that I come from the idea of doing what I’d call cinema poverté. I didn’t dub that actually, I got that from an NYU journalist, but I’m going to officially adopt that now. She had suggested that was what I did, and right away I was like, “You know what, that IS what I do.” What I mean by that is that I don’t have a very streamlined, linear way of working. I often work in fragments, and conceptually.
Chloë Sevigny in Jonathan Caouette’s All Flowers in Time
The idea was that you would stare at somebody, and if you stared at them long enough in low lighting, their faces would start to morph, which is actually something I would do as a kid. I would stare at something – inanimate objects or people’s faces – and kind of relax my eyes in a certain way, to actually see them change. I know this sounds very acid trip-y, but I think it’s just something you can do in your normal state of mind.
Tarnation, All Tomorrow’s Parties, All Flowers in Time – you have a predilection for altered states of consciousness, and people who skirt a fine line between sanity and madness, dreamland and reality. What fascinates you most about that?
I’m very drawn to the idea that there is more than what we see in front of us. This next movie that I’m working on, which will be about my mother and I, is going to explore the idea of parallel realities and the multiverse…
It’s actually a new scientific theory that’s quickly being proven, thanks to this famous Asian physicist… he’s sort of the new Einstein. It’s the idea that there’s more than just the universe, that there are multiple layers of reality, the way that there would be layers or echoes of sound or light, layers of anything, layers of an onion. They’re starting to allude to the idea that if you were to cut that onion in half, I could be interviewing you right now. It’s a very interesting theory. I’m going to be exploring that thematically in my next film about my mother and I.
Friday, October 15 at 1 p.m., as part of L’Instant Magique shorts program
Ex-Centris | 3536, St-Laurent
ONF Theatre | 1564, St-Denis
Friday, October 22 at 7 p.m.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts | Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium | 1379, Sherbrooke W.
