On the run up to the festival our resident guest blogger Lloyd Griffiths will be giving us his thoughts on this year’s programme. For his first blog he’s taken a look at the career of American Indie filmmaker Jonathan Caouette who will having his first UK retrospective at Ffresh 2012.
Ffresh festival will be an exciting time for many film lovers to discover some of the brightest new talent at its most raw. A chance to splenetically indulge in as much new film as possible, the festival is about unearthing new talent, gaining new perspectives. Scattered amongst the animation, Welsh language films and documentaries will be a chance to digest the work of Jonathon Caouette, perhaps with the extra consideration it demands.
That he is called an exciting new voice in American cinema is both vital and behind the times. He’s been making films since childhood and had already made two shorts – The Ankle Slasher and Pig Nymph by the age of eight. It then seems rather terse to say so, doubly so when you consider his breakthrough film, Tarnation, was made of twenty years worth of super 8 home footage. It looks set to be a powerful and historical experience. I don’t mean it’s going to start a war, but it’s difficult to describe Caouette’s first feature, which he realised could make a part-documentary, part narrative-fiction after the events themselves – one which attest to the reasons for him picking up the camera in the first place.
The story, if one can call it that without sounding trite, begins when Jonathan finds out his mother, Renee, overdosed on lithium medication, and from there, one is taken on heady trip through the past of a tragic family past – of psychosis, drug addiction, rape, and abandonment, all of which is coloured by his love for Renee. While many film retrospectives seem somewhat arbitrary – whether it be Southbank luvvies circularly eulogizing the masters of cinema (Hitchcock was good? what!) or films shoehorned to fit the Zeitgeist, it’s clear that offering oneself to Caouette’s body of work will be animating and engaging. The fact he has said film making was at the time a way of creating a kind of a distance between himself and the tragic events offers the intriguing promise that this retrospective will be truly vital – contextualising and historicizing rather than cheapening his work.
As such, it’s far from a chore that Ffresh is screening all of Caouette’s work- including the recent Walk Away Renee and the heady DIY aesthetic of cult-festival Documentary All Tomorrow’s Parties. The latter is the kind of film that you could easily get drunk to, not only does it have some of the best fans-eye footage of some of the brilliant bands from the festival (sobriety and watching Nick Cave seem ill-at-ease ideas), it also embodies the pulsating aesthetic of the festival, but never giving way to rock star myth. As such it’s a unique rock-doc, for the fact the fans are the pole around which the festival moves and Caouette presents that with genuine warmth, like something I read about ATP once- “the greatest party in the world and nobody is headlining”.
It will be a unique look at the work of a film maker still in his prime, and Jonathon will be introducing all of his screenings as well as holding an Film making masterclass, so the chance to talk personally with someone for whom film appears to be a primary instinct is one as imperative as the films themselves.
The Jonathan Caouette retrospective begins on Tuesday 7th February with the screening of both Tarnation and All Flowers in Time.
