Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley has managed to create a diverse and riveting place within the film industry in the past 20 years. Although her claim to fame has been through narrative television and film, her latest directorial venture The Stories We Tell brings audiences into her personal life.
The Stories We Tell is an extremely interesting documentary to look at in depth, due to the fact that it weaves many different documentary modes together to create a story with complex objectives. The documentary delves into the sordid affair which resulted in her birth. By using second-hand accounts of those who were affected; her father, brothers and sisters, her mother’s friends and family, they weave together a narrative structure that discusses how her mother, long passed from Cancer, may have had an affair whilst in away from the family. While the film does focus on the story of how Sarah discovered that her father was not, in fact her biological father, the scope of the documentary is much broader. Through the use of her personal story, Polley explores the bigger idea of the inconsistency of memory. She does this by implementing various techniques from many different modes of documentary film making.
Bits of Essay films, participatory films, and reflexive films litter The Stories We Tell in order to create this “Cacophony of voices” (Polley) that show a wide range of interpretations of this story. For example, Many people in the film are interviewed and some even read their manifestos of the happenings (Ie: her father and her biological father), combining both the interviewee process of the participatory film and the cause and effect story arc of the essay. Polley herself also can be found in the film, filming or interviewing others, or reading emails, etc. Adding to the participatory aspect of the film.
Throughout the film, there are what we assume to be home movies which account the day to day life and the Polley house. Many of which contain footage of her mother Diane. What we come to find out, however, is that this footage is not super 8 footage from Polleys childhood, as is assumed, but instead it is footage that was staged and filmed for the purposes of the documentary. By recreating moments that may or may not have happened it adds a sense of reflexive mode to the entirety of the film. This changes the viewing process as it is revealed and the audiences in allowed to finally grasp the overall objective.
(Left: Diane Polley. Right: Rebecca Jenkins, who played Diane in The Stories We Tell)
The Stories We Tell uses these combinations of modes create a sense of subjectivity and remind the audience that memory is not an objective storyteller, nor is a documentary film due to the fact that you can never be sure that what someone is saying is absolute honesty. This is an interesting way of mixing the modes of documentary film making in order to convey an overall theme. Which can still be interesting despite an abstract theme like memory.