A lot of attention has been garnered as of late by Jonathan Caouette’s 120-something dollar magnum opus, Tarnation (2003), which he cut together from a miasma of his own home movies using Apple’s consumer-level iMovie program. I’ve not seen Caouette’s film as yet, and so am not really in the place to talk about it (although these comments have less to do with the film’s supposedly remarkable content than they do with its “revolutionary” production methods anyway), but I can’t help but feel slightly jaded to think that Caouette’s been
garnering so much attention when, for years now (at least since 1997 and most definitely since 1999), another filmmaker has been doing almost exactly the same thing in terms of a consumer-level low/no-budget methodology from his studio in Los Angeles. If Caouette has made a masterpiece using little more than his computer’s iMovie software, then the poet laureate of “cyber-cinema”, Evan Mather, has truly delivered the “magnificent œuvre” suggested by Brenez and made possible by the DIY-moviemaking boom and the internet.