Jonathan Caouette’s debut film Tarnation, an intimate study of his relationship with his dysfunctional family, made Caouette the toast of Cannes in 2004.
The film was marked out by its brave visual approach, its emotional rawness, its low-budget achievement – famously costing $213 to produce. Its box office success demonstrates the contemporary audience’s thirst for films which are visually challenging and seek to find new forms of narrative.
As we emerge from what we might call the first American century, the Pure Product film programmes offer work by a range of artists and filmmakers which not only meditate on the dominance of American culture – its effect on modern western culture, on modern western private experience – but also finds new ways to express its complexity. Loosely themed around ideas of family and culture, the two programmes offer innovative ripostes to the bizarre kitsch world constructed from daytime TV, the fading glitz of Hollywood, the freaky shine of materialism. Like Caouette’s film, the artists here search for the authentic, the human, the lost landscape of the real, buried deep in the craziness of modern culture.
Reviews
Straddling the divide between the art gallery and the cinema, these films offer fascinating proof that digital filmmakers are only restricted by the limits of their imagination.
Jamie Russell, www.channel4.com
…do check out Pure Product (touring programme), a touring programme of rarely-seen American independent short films that comprises two packages: No Place Like Home and Karaoke Culture. Kicking off at the Watershed cinema in Bristol on 30 April, it features work by alt-visionaries such as George Kuchar, Lewis Klahr and Vicki Bennett. Common themes include the mass media’s role in flooding our lives with falsely cheerful images and the darkness that resides in domestic spaces. Many, like Caouette, adopt scrawly, image-doctoring strategies as a way of signalling their resistance to the glossiness of so much mainstream visual culture.
Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph