"All art,” believed Fellini, “is autobiographical.” Arguable, but often true of early efforts, that apprenticeship through which the artist must pass to find his métier. In the case of cinema, the difficulty for a “documentary self-portrait” is where to find a handle of objectivity, an outside reference from which to consider and organize, some vantage that will allow of significance beyond individual, romantic ego.

Billed as suggesting “a new era for . . . cinematic collective unconscious . . . [and] fever dream,” embraced at Sundance’s Frontier program and the Illinois EbertFest and included in the current New York Film Festival, Tarnation is a début feature from its writer-director-editor. Now thirty-one and with a number of shorts behind him, Jonathan Caouette borrowed a video camera two decades ago and began recording his own and his family’s Houston-suburb life--grandparents Adolph and Rosemary and Liz-Taylor-eyes beauty-queen mother Renee, whose emotional problems were either brought about or worsened by two years’ shock therapy.

The eighty-eight 35 mm minutes that emerge via Apple’s iMovie program from an original hundred-sixty hours of unlabeled varied-format material -- Super 8, Betamax, VHS, Hi-8, Mini-DV and taped phone messages -- plus a hodgepodge of commercial movie, music and television clips, developing tricks, film strips and split screens, are undeniably a disturbing portrait of disturbed individuals. Parallels with a similar home-movie Capturing the Friedmans will surface, but, though Caouette and co-executive producer Gus Van Sant would tout this as a new direction, the vote here is that, all said and done, it is not cinema.

What exactly it is, is hard to define. Within a frame of the director’s receiving notification in New York of Renee’s unsuccessful lithium-overdose suicide and resultant further personality deterioration, the melange assembles a visual memory bank of abuse, disappeared father, dysfunction and a real-slash-fancy world of cross-dressing, hysteria, blood, dismemberment, unnerving noise and banal pop culture. Children of war and other unsettling backgrounds often draw themselves as distorted, missing body parts or having extra ones, and characters in this film are imaged imperfect, broken, multiplied or mutilated.

The opening phone-call frame is repeated, in a train Jonathan rushes by emotionless landscape on a return to Texas after five years, and Renee then comes to Greenpoint in Brooklyn to live with him and his boyfriend David. The journey of his whole life, the uncovering of past accountability -- Adolph angers and shuts off, unknowing father Steve from New Hampshire is located and appears -- and images of gay and adult street and club culture (Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is mentioned), family memories and mugging for the camera, all contribute to an effect. Unfortunately, everything is narcissistic, a reveling in fragmented individual egos with nothing tied together by the excessive explanatory subtitles.

The director-participant repeatedly brings up his depersonalization disorder, manifested in drug-like feelings of detachment from the person’s own body and mind. Claiming moviemaking as a form of escape, he would use the affliction as structuring “organic stream-of-consciousness” principle, a means to indicate the untrustworthiness of the world outside the self-as-recorder. In effect, however, this exhibitionistic airing of dirty underwear simply embarrasses, but does not engage, the spectator. For example, a scene in which haunting, brain-damaged Renee croons and giggles around a small pumpkin while unfocused Grandpa reads in the background, is brutal to her but means as little to us as Jonathan’s inarticulate 5 a.m. attempt to speak into the lens. In contrast, and better, because quiet and tender, is his touching the “angel spot” on his sleeping mother’s upper lip.

As with media and modern textbooks, busy bytes are flashy but so short and empty that there is no concentration of attention. One is uncomfortable but, with no point from which to approach, no more than that. A more successful consideration of disoriented America, its parents and particularly the lost children, is Standing by Yourself. In that cash-strapped Utica, New York, basic home movie, the camera is not on director-writer-producer Josh Koury but, rather, on his real-life brother and friends; the director’s detachment is scolded by their mother, but the distance is necessary if a film would reach the forest beyond its isolated trees. 

(Released by Wellspring; not rated by MPAA.)