PERFORMERS

Many of the discussions in Part II have been partly about non-fiction’s

longstanding tendency to incorporate (and elicit) aspects of performance, and the implications this holds for documentary realism, narrative, observation, ‘authenticity’ and reconstruction. In Chapter Five, however, the last of our case studies looks at recent films that in methodologically differing ways centralise and depend on traditionally performative strategies;

demonstrate how these are adopted by particular filmmakers and/or their subjects as a practised way of life; or highlight non-fiction’s usually inexorable (yet as often concealed) reliance on enactment: Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (a performance of a filmmaker’s uneasy youth); Michael

Moore’s Sicko (which posits the larger-than-life director as political and presentational ‘star’); Sacha Gervasi’s tale of fraternal crises Anvil: The Story of Anvil (2009); and Nirit Peled’s Say My Name, a rare female take on the usually hyper-masculine ‘rockumentary’, which focuses on not one or two

artists, but many and various struggling rappers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Stylistically assimilating numerous cinematic traditions – which range

fully from the puckish avant-gardisms of Kenneth Anger and Stan

Brakhage to the observational naturalism of fly-on-the-wall direct cinema – Tarnation is a hectically composed chimera: a kaleidoscopic

‘self-inscription’ (literally, a writing of the self ) based on stream-ofconsciousness reconstitution (of old amateur movies, photographs, found footage and answering machine messages; cf. Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans, 2003), overt performance, interviews and an underlying

foundation of highly confessional identity politics. All of which come clashing together, and at times jarringly diverge, to comprise a sympathetically vigorous, semi-linear portrait of Caouette’s exuberant, if dysfunctional, personal life. Made on an extremely low budget, using

Apple’s entry-level iMovie video-editing software, Tarnation, though it feels resolutely home-made, nonetheless represents an extravagant culmination of Caouette’s long-gestating artistic desires, which were bound from an early age to find release via film. As he says of his obsession

for recording and archiving for the purposes of self-documentation: ‘Filming things had a critical life-and-death purpose. It was always a defense mechanism and a way to have a sense of control over my life. Filming was also a way to control and defend myself against my environment and disassociate myself from the horrors around me’ (in Anon.

2005: 3). Tarnation, a film really all about ‘Me’, is thus undeniably selfindulgent, yet it mostly succeeds in making a virtue of unflinching auto-analysis and painful honesty; sharing with Waltz with Bashir and My Winnipeg its therapeutic properties designed to come to terms with

‘horrors’, it asserts its maker’s sense of dislocation (a sense conveyed, ironically, in pursuit of a new kind of belonging) as both defining and personally challenging. It is avowedly authorial in nature, though concerned with a sort of ‘domestic ethnography’ citing the family as ‘the

most fundamental crucible of psychosexual identity’ (Renov 2008: 45; see also Russell 1999: 275-314);1 and it belongs, very loosely, to a sub-group of documentary definable as the ‘first-person diary’ film, a means of usually introspective or relatively parochial expression

favoured by filmmakers such as Judith Helfland (see A Healthy Baby Girl, 1997), Deborah Hoffman (see, especially, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, 1995), Ross McElwee and the prolific Lithuanian film-diarist Jonas

Mekas, who in 2001 released a five-hour film entitled As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, put together from half a

century’s worth of archive material chronicling his life. In addition, Tarnation engages in a semi-underground discourse first emergent in the post-sixties climate of cultural empowerment for minorities of colour, ideology or sexuality: ‘voices proclaiming and celebrating their own

“freakishness”, articulating their most intimate fears and secrets’ (Jon Dovey in Chanan 2007: 248); in this respect, its ancestors are those sexually and politically emotive works by Marlon Riggs in the United States, and Briton Isaac Julien (see Chapter Two), as well as the

numerous instillations by conceptual video artists in the 1970s to deal frankly with the artist’s own body via the new medium’s capability to ‘write through the body, to write as the body’ (Renov 2008: 43).