tarnation
-
All in the Family: Jonathan Caouette on Walk Away Renee
I’ve been struggling to find a metaphor for the very special, not to mention most unusual, connection between director Jonathan Caouette and Renee Leblanc, his mentally ill and frequently institutionalized mother and the subject of his most recent film, Walk Away Renee. The closest I could come is really a parallel, and it lies within Caouette’s body of work. In his 2010 surreal short All Flowers in Time, a beautiful young woman, played by Chloe Sevigny, has an indefinable relationship with an adolescent boy. In a bizarre world where young people’s eyes can turn glowing red, the two seem to […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 27, 2012 -
FILM COMMENT’S 50 BEST — RELEASED AND UNRELEASED
Film Comment editor Gavin Smith is always kind enough to send me the ballot for the magazine’s annual “50 Best” rundown (actually, two rundowns — the “50 Best Released” and “Unreleased” Films of the Year), but as a reader of the magazine I’m always a bit intimidated by how much I don’t manage to see in a given year — especially this one, in which I spent about six months out of town, five of them in a arthouse-deprived place where Anchorman was my top viewing experience. So, I sit on the ballot rather than skew the results due to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2004 -
PRODIGY
A debut feature 19 years in the making, Jonathan Caouette’s “brutal and spellbinding musical-docudrama” Tarnation premiered as a rough cut at Mix 2003 and screens in the Frontier section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. (Tarnation was substantially reedited following its debut at Mix, and is tipped for the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes following its screening in Park City.) As per the Mix Festival’s write-up: “Tarnation weaves a psychotronic whirlwind of snapshots, Super-8 home movies, old answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, snippets of ’80s camp pop culture and dramatic reenactments drawn from Caouette’s entire life.” “It’s kind […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 20, 2004
