The chronic memoirist

DURING Jonathan Caouette’s first appearance at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 1, the 31-year-old filmmaker found himself cast in the new role of celebrity as he hit the red carpet -- actually beige, and not a carpet -- outside Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall at 8:30 p.m. He went past the stringer from Star (who was passing out his number, the stringer said, to anyone who might have occasion to see Ben Affleck intoxicated) and didn’t break his stride as he headed toward the photo pit, where he submitted to the cameras just ahead of Ethan Hawke.

In the strident lightning round of flashes, Caouette pretended to faint. He rolled his eyes back and did a funny exhausted sea horse-like seizure-wriggle, arms going out as if preparing for a backward dive, his roomy, publicist-provided Marc Jacobs suit flapping. It was a performance, all right, but the message was: If you insist on focusing on me, you’re missing the point.

For a guy who trained a camera on himself starting at the age of 11, then turned that footage into “Tarnation,” a movie that has been ecstatically received on the festival circuit and praised by critics for its originality and emotional power, Caouette seemed resistant to the spotlight. “I already feel like I’ve been hit by a truck,” he said, as he thought about the days of the festival ahead of him, leading up to Tuesday’s premiere of “Tarnation.” “This wakes me up in the middle of the night with butterflies.”

Asked if it’s inevitable that he’ll become part of the celebrity culture machine, Caouette said, “If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen, but I’ll try to avoid it as much as possible.” Then he paced the lobby in the manner of a man having an anxiety attack, his freshly cut hair going from faux-mussed to actually mussed.

On Tuesday night at 8:45, at Alice Tully Hall this time, a nearly full house sat waiting for “Tarnation” to begin. In the green room, Caouette sat smoking, wearing the same Marc Jacobs suit he’d worn a few nights before, surrounded by friends. Stephen Winter, the film’s producer, read aloud from a review of “Tarnation” in Film Comment magazine. “I have seen the future of documentary filmmaking,” he began. “Good ... God!”

Caouette seemed frozen for a second, then smiled and looked down. Then he walked over to the bar.

“Tarnation,” which Caouette put together on his Macintosh using home video camera footage, famously cost less to make than a liquored-up producer-starlet lunch at the Ivy. Now its maker has quit his day jobs and his night jobs. Indie film darlings Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell have lent their names and assistance as executive producers. “Tarnation” was bought after last year’s Sundance Festival by Wellspring -- even despite the heavily soundtracked film’s outrageous music clearance issues (Caouette couldn’t get rights to use “a majority,” he said, of the music he wanted to include). At Cannes, Wellspring sold international rights in 20 territories. For the rest of this year, Caouette will be flown around the world to screenings and festivals.

“Tarnation” is an unusual family memoir that, with its overloaded visual style and its storytelling techniques borrowed from fiction, seems to do for documentaries what the New Journalism did for nonfiction. The bare bones of the story are disturbing: In 1964 or 1965, Caouette’s mother, Renee LeBlanc, first received what would become a long series of electroshock therapies; as a result of that, the film claims, and of a lithium overdose a few years ago, she now exists in a sometimes manageable, sometimes extremely unusual state. Caouette, whose father left early on, was largely raised in Texas by LeBlanc’s parents, Adolph and Rosemary Davis.

Using 20 years of home footage intercut with subtitles on a black screen that give stark factual details, Caouette documented a tragic family story in hellish but also somehow loving detail.

Particularly terrifying: lonely dramatic monologues performed and recorded by Jonathan Caouette when he was 11. Like the work of a tween Cindy Sherman minus the irony, these scenes are a dissertation on disassociation and trauma and chaos- induced gender instability.

A home in Queens

Jonathan CAOUETTE’S Astoria apartment is the home of a boy who grew up believing in movies, and film posters of a specific sort are everywhere: “Midnight Cowboy,” “Eraserhead,” “Christiane F.,” “Santa Sangre.” The house is on an adorable and hilly little street. The Queens neighborhood looks a bit like Venice but with East Coast trees and New York-slim lots and three-story buildings. In the living room there are crates of LPs: the Shining, Donny Osmond, the Stone Poneys, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nina Hagen. Keane reproductions, Catholic kitsch, clean white curtains on the windows, water stains on the ceilings, red light bulbs and lampshades. It is comfortably dark. His cats are an array of fat and tiny and black and white, and his big scary white dog’s name is Shiny.

Upstairs, Caouette’s editing suite was clearly once a closet. It is smaller than the average prison cell. His wee desk is in front of the one window, which looks directly across the street to a small brick church and a message, spelled out in white prefab letters: “Put your FAITH in GOD.” The room has glass doors, which render it fittingly transparent to the bedroom he shares with his boyfriend of seven years, David Sanin Paz.

And down the hall from his office there is an empty room, which was, until a few days ago, his mother’s bedroom.

At the end of “Tarnation,” Caouette and his mother and boyfriend are happily living together in Astoria. Only recently he came to the decision that his mother needed to return to Houston. “She had been here for about a year and a half,” Caouette said on the morning of the film festival’s opening night. “It was becoming a task just having her around. I guess a couple weeks ago I was basically holding her down on the street over here and calling an ambulance. She was in Elmhurst Hospital for about 2 1/2 weeks. I thought she was going to be OK, but she wasn’t.

“I got a rental car and drove my mother back because I didn’t want to take her on an airplane because of how questionable her behavior might be,” he said. While he talked, he smoked and drank coffee constantly. He had largely quit smoking for four years but took it back up at the same time the film received distribution -- perhaps a consequence of suddenly exposing a very private project to the world.

That morning, he was wearing low-top Converses, funny jeans with thigh pockets, a gray T-shirt with the number 12 on it. He is good-looking, with bright blue eyes, his hair unkempt to his shoulders (later, before he arrived at Lincoln Center, he would have it chopped clumpy and glam-rock). He is also: very likable, very friendly, both peaceful and quirky. He does not like: flying, having his picture taken by people other than himself or in other ways being at the mercy of or subject to other people’s control.

“West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. Got to Texas about six days ago. Must have gotten there ... when did I get there? I just came back last night,” said Caouette, who untrained himself from a Texas accent years ago. He had taken two Ambiens to endure the flight the night before -- they had not, by his report, entirely worn off. “I left the next day? Which was Friday? And I arrived on Sunday? Wait, I actually left Thursday. Got in Saturday night?”

This blur is not entirely medication-related: Since the film’s appearance at Sundance in January, Caouette’s life has been what every first-time filmmaker would dream of, an exhausting dream to have come true.

Caouette had spent a difficult week in Texas, meeting with social workers and doctors who recommended hospitalization, which he opposed, and, in the end, he rented an apartment for his mother. In the evenings, he set aside three or four hours a night to conduct interviews by phone. “It’s a double life I’m having to do with this movie,” said Caouette. “Multitudes of phoners while trying to stabilize a mentally ill woman.

“I’ve inevitably become a caretaker for many different kinds of people. It must be really a karmatic payback or something I haven’t taken care of. My mother, my grandfather, my son ...” he trailed off. “Inadvertently, it is what it is.”

Packing a camera

Agnes JAOUI’S “Look at Me,” the opening-night selection of the New York Film Festival, was generally well received, but through the glass walls of Avery Fisher Hall, one could see silhouettes of moviegoers departing throughout the screening. Caouette was among them, not that he disliked the movie: It was his nerves, maybe, and when a reel blacked out for a minute or two, he and Paz sneaked out. At 10:40 p.m., they were sitting on the illuminated ledge of the Lincoln Center fountain. The Colombian-born Paz, a tall little prince, was wearing a trim black suit and a silver tie, his dyed-blond hair pushed back. They were reading the new issue of HX, the local gay nightclub paper. Caouette was on the cover. “I never dreamed when I moved here seven years ago I’d be on the cover of this rag,” he said.

Caouette, chronic documentarian, brought his camera to the opening night of the New York Film Festival, although he would hardly ever take it out of his bag. (“I’m surprised I haven’t left the camera on myself with all the experiences that have been going on,” he said that morning. “Maybe enough is enough with this movie.”)

Caouette had never been to Central Park’s Tavern on the Green, that unhip New York staple of high-society entertainment, where the festival’s after-party was held. “It’s very ‘Stepford Wives’!” he exclaimed. The hanging lanterns, the immense trees, the outdoor space of the restaurant is like a Terry Gilliam set for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the waiters in mint-colored double-breasted jackets. A man who looked like a pirate caressed the leg of a gorgeous girl the color of Rosie Perez. The cool fall evening smelled unexpectedly of cheese.

Caouette’s Ambien haze soon wore off -- he’d gotten used to his haircut, he’d had a few white wines, he’d left the trip to Texas behind. The pair hit the buffet -- Caouette slathered his beef with Tabasco. The protective and sweet Paz was happy. The bag with his camera, the diarist’s burden, was safely far away with the coat-check girls.

Caouette spent the beginning of the party in isolation with Paz, but as the evening progressed, he was introduced to admirers, who said things like, “So you’re the guy!” But the party itself was not as packed as it had been in previous years, people said.

Inside, under the outrageous ceramic ceilings, actress Sylvia Miles was wearing an astonishing, glowing white gown, beaded white gloves, white barrettes in her thick white-gray hair. Like the Ghost of Artistic Integrity Past, she swept through the crowd to Caouette.

Caouette and Miles were all big hand gestures and love. “I watch ‘Midnight Cowboy’ every week!” he said. He is a serious fan. They both said, “I’m so happy to have met you!” Miles was daringly drinking red wine. She pulled a tuxedoed older man -- cufflinks, rich -- over and said, “His film is the best in the festival!” She encouraged Caouette to call her. Paz went to the bar for another round. Caouette was elated. He stepped alone outside under the magical lanterns, into the mix of producers and promoters, and said, “It smells like honeysuckle now,” and it did.

The party ended at 2:45 a.m. Caouette and Paz, among the very last to leave, walked past the line of taxis and out of Central Park, holding hands. They were not going to what someone referred to as “the after after after.”

Art in the edit

Earlier in the day, Caouette said something misleading about his film. “I believe in cinema verite like nobody’s business. I believe in leaving the camera on and seeing what happens.” That is misleading because his art is in the edit, the assemblage, not in what any old camera can see for itself.

But he will be acknowledging his skills -- if he can prevent himself from making a “Tarnation 2” from the hundreds of hours of footage that remain in his office -- with his next project. If he can get hold of film clean of underscore, he’s going to take three movies, each made between 1974 to 1977 and each starring the same actress, and refashion them into one single new film -- a fittingly obsessive project. He’ll also attend the Sundance director’s workshop, whose motto should be “Where autodidacts come to resist being ruined.”

Caouette will also enter another new phase of his life next year, when his 9-year-old son (whom he decided not to put in the film) comes to live with him and Paz, along with his son’s mother, who is an old friend.

And he’ll be going back home as well.

“I’m about to become bicoastal,” said Caouette. “Not in the L.A. sense, in the Gulf Coast way.” Despite, or because of, the cathartic exercise of his film, he’s able and eager to return to the family home so devastatingly documented in “Tarnation.” “I’m going to build an editing bay in my old bedroom in my grandfather’s house. There’s a huge attic that was converted into another room. I’m just going to take my G5 and get the footage from these movies that I’m going to work on.

“While I’m taking care of my grandfather and mother,” said the director, “I’m going to be working from home.”