Tarnation

I used to have hair like that

It seems my morning ritual of 30 minute sitting meditation has been supplanted by 30 minute documentary watching with breakfast. This morning, I put in Tarnation and I was almost late for work. Incredible. I suppose the reason I netflicked this particular movie was not necessarily for the subject matter, but really because I read somewhere that it was made completely with iMovie and with a budget of like $218 or something. Utterly inspiring and unbelievably potent. (Though I would say that the typographer in me was squirming with the unrefined lettering and I'm sure I could rationalize it as "fauvist" or "vernacular" or something, but I still would have loved to refine it, pull it back a little...*sigh*).

Anyways, it seems a new breed of documentary film is sprouting wings. Capturing the Friedmans and now Tarnation, both have at their core one person, a character who embraced the videocamera at an early stage. It's called access. It takes a particular kind of person to record the mundane and the minutiae and the difficult personal moments of his life and the people around him. The result: these two films speak so powerfully about editing and memory with a primary-ness that we couldn't achieve before.