Stories We Tell
| November 20, 2013 | Posted by mchaveza under Uncategorized |
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Families create their own narratives. Stories are passed on from generation to generation, and in this way the past continues to live, but it can also be obscured or distorted. In the film “Stories We Tell” looks at the relationship between Polley’s parents, Michael and Diane Polley, including the revelation that the filmmaker was the product of an affair with Harry Gulkin. What’s interesting about the autobiographical mode is that it incorporates interviews with Polley’s siblings from her mother’s two marriages, interviews with other relatives and family friends. All coming together to a narrative a true story about a family who have experience the death of a love one.
During the entire film I got the feeling that the filmmaker was keeping me guessing about the relationship between the mother, her lover and family. It appeared that there was a hidden surprise waiting to happen. For example we have Diane Polley comes to us in fragments, and we are forced to re-adjust our interpretation of her throughout the film as new details are revealed to the audience. From the very begging we see the filmmaker encouraging her family to “tell the story from the beginning until now,” at first with some hesitation but as the story starts to flow I saw how every individual adds more information to the story that is either relevant or irrelevant.
“Stories We Tell” begins with Sarah setting up her father in a recording booth, to do the narration for the film, which (we find out later) he wrote. It is fascinate that from the very beginning there is the element about the type of mode the film is about. “Interrogation process”, if I’m not mistaken is what the producer or in this case the Sarah tell each one of her family members. It makes sense that there a relationship with how the filmmaker approaches the autobiographical mode and her technics to do it.
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