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Mania is hell. And to watch Jonathan Caouette’s agonizing documentation of his and his mother’s mental illness is to live through it with them. Combining Super 8 footage that Caouette started shooting at 11 with family photos, clips from cult movies and ’80s TV, and a soundtrack that’s mellow and melancholy, this nightmarish portrait of abuse and insanity makes you feel as if you were flipping through a scrapbook on acid. The delirium of images and effects tells the story of Caouette’s mother, Renee, a child model subjected to numerous rounds of shock therapy who spends her life in and out of Texas institutions. It’s an affectionate, affecting ode. But the story belongs more to Caouette himself. He created the film using Apple’s iMovie — emphasis on the "i." Tarnation is not so much documentary as it is cinematic memoir, an account, for the most part resisting self-indulgence, of Caouette’s seemingly unbearable life as he witnesses the rape of his mother, spends time in abusive foster homes, grows up gay in a backward Texas town, gets diagnosed with depersonalization disorder, and lives as though he were in a dream. He turns the camera on himself perhaps to make his life more real, perhaps to make sense of all the chaos. (88 minutes)
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
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