This film cost 218 dollars and therefore enters the history of the cinema as the probably cheapest independent-hit of all time. Its director never had anything to do professionally with film and only knows one single topic: himself and his family history. This however is so intense that “Tarnation” advanced to a festival success in the USA and got the young Jonathan Caouette the attention of indie-icons Gus Van Sant (Elephant) and Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), who became his supporters.

Jonathan Caouette’s biography seems like a daily-horror-soap. His mother Renee is treated with brutal electroshocks because of a temporary paralysis in her youth and develops a lifelong schizophrenic disturbance. As a fatherless toddler Jonathan witnesses his mother being raped. At the age of 11 he directs himself for the first time in front of a Super-8 camera and imitates a hysterically sobbing, hunted woman. Later he films ultra-cheap underground-trash about blood-spitting grandmothers, even later the boy who is diagnosed with a pathological self-perception moves to New York and merges the own trauma and the efforts for his sick mother into a kind of video diary – as radically self-reflective as it is unsparingly embarrassing and aesthetically innovative. “Tarnation” is mounted together from innumerable personal documentations and artefacts on a home computer, it uses video clips, family photos and answering machine messages and goes under the skin of the viewer with an absolute will of self-exposure.

USA 2003, 88 mins. Director, Screenplay and Camera: Jonathan Caouette. Editing: Jonathan Caouette and Brian A. Kates. Starring: Renee Leblanc, Jonathan Caouette, Adolph Davis, Rosemary Davis, Davis Sanin Paz and others.