The beginning of Chapter 3 in Crafting Truth (one of the recommended texts on our syllabus) states that "Authority forms part of the complicated ways by which documentaries represent nonfictional reality."
For this week's post, please watch Sarah Polley's critically acclaimed and incredibly complex documentary Stories We Tell on Netflix Instant and let me know what you think, especially in relation to how successfully (or unsuccessfully) the film has been authored. In particular, explain as best you can what the director's approach to her story is, and please let me know if you think her chosen approach makes her story more - and/or less - convincing and why. Do you appreciate what Polley's done aesthetically with the film or not? Is this just another self-absorbed, indulgent personal memoir or something altogether fresh and inspired?
I look forward to reading how you sort this film out - what you liked, what you didn't like, and what it meant to you. Write whatever you'd like, just be sure to address the concept of authority and how it impacted your feelings about this piece of work.
And remember, your in-depth, inspired comments about Stories We Tell need to appear on this blog (and cut and pasted into Moodle) by no later than 9 am on Tuesday morning.
Have fun!
I’m not sure if it’s just me but I still believe that no documentary sets out to lie to their audience. Maybe they want to show something in a subjective light but the filmmakers think they are telling the truth. Sarah Polley is trying to convey the truth about her family because she thinks it’s interesting or important. As an audience, we might not think it’s either of those things but that doesn’t mean Polley didn't succeed.
ReplyDeleteBy showing her family’s (especially her mother’s) story through interviews and home footage you get this sense that you are seeing the whole story. The fact Sarah Polley is still in the documentary and you hear her asking the questions doesn’t bother me like some documentaries of the same style do. It made it seem really authentic and neat.
I feel as though Polley did the film a certain way because she thought that was the best was to show several sides to her multifaceted story. I think she succeeded in making us believe she got the whole story.
The one thing I didn't like was the fact Polley’s dad changed looks several times throughout the film confusing me to who he was. Other than that, I liked it a great deal. It wasn't a life changer and didn't make me want to go out and start a petition, but it wasn't a waste of time.
In “Stories We Tell,” the director Sarah Polley makes a documentary about how her mother’s relationship with her father. The movie begins with the footage of white snow and dead trees from the camera angle of a moving vehicle. Relaxing piano music could be heard. I like the footage of the snow and dead trees because the snow represents appreciation while the dead trees represent memories that family members can only remember. The characters were in their house while speaking on an “interrogation process,” said by Sarah. Michael, the dad was also in the recording studio to voice how he met his beloved wife, Diane. Sarah filmed the family nervous beforehand, which was a great strategy in expressing how they felt in talking about Diane. While the family member spoke, there were old black and white videos as well as colorful videos being shown. Everyone was trying to express their own version of the truth on how they remember Diane, which would lead to different emotional events.
ReplyDeleteIt was said that nobody would care about the documentary. Mark said that his mother was a fun person at parties and would laugh loud. Her joy attracted people, and she was described to be a bad singer, but did not care. Thus, Diane met Michael when they were both acting in a play. They spoke afterwards and formed a relationship. Problems started in the relationship because Diane wanted sex more than Michael. I felt like that information did not needed to be known in the documentary because that could make Diane appear like she only wanted sex. Michael gave up acting, cooked at home, and worked at Manufactures Life, an insurance company. He was a talented singer and writer, but he unfortunately did not pursue his dreams. I think it make Michael a better person by taking care of his children instead of taking serious roles in acting.
Michael enjoyed the solitude and listening to music. Diane was disappointed because he had no friends and was not willing to make any. Diane wanted to become an actor, so they moved to Montreal, which is where she got pregnant. She wanted to have an abortion and Michael upsettingly agreed. I felt like if he did not want Diane to get an abortion, he still has a voice to voice his opinion, because they were married. Her downfall was having down-syndrom, then she died. From the joyful acting scenes shown on the screen, it expresses her characteristics. It eventually got to the scene where Michael did not think that Sarah looked like her because she had red hair. Michael’s family members did not want to tell him who the Sarah could be related to. That scene makes me dislike his family members because they were about secrecy and not voicing their knowledge.
I felt like the director, Sarah did an excellent job at capturing the story about her parent’s relationship, but I was not interested in this documentary. I like the various camera angles and home videos used, but the words that the family members were saying made me dislike them. How Diane did not know who the father of her baby was made me not want to finish watching the documentary. Diane’s first marriage was difficult. She left Michael in the middle of a fight, through a wedding ring in the snow, then returned the next day. I felt like selling the wedding ring for money or giving it to someone else is a better choice than acting out on current emotions. Diane then missed personal time with her children and was capable of focusing on her life. Before their marriage, they were in a discreet relationship, which makes me dislike the parents more. Diane was also known to be a flirt, but it was said that she really wanted Michael.
I immediately did not like the feeling that I got from this documentary, even though the story was interesting. It felt very staged, too staged, and it took away from the authenticity that I need to feel to truly enjoy a documentary. It's not that I doubt the truth in the story, but it makes it feel more like a fiction film than a documentary. The filmed narration and the father’s interview sometimes blended together and appeared confusing. The way at the beginning of the film that they show setting up for the interviews made it feel very fake to me. It seem scripted and made me uncomfortable and started off the doc in poor taste to me. It seemed to ease into a more natural feel as it moved on, but the introduction to the interviews made me upset from the beginning. I was able to get more into the story as it went on. I enjoyed the old family movies that they showed because it paired up well with the narration. They'd be talking about the mother’s laugh and show real footage of her laughing. This was one of the things I really liked that they did in the doc. It felt natural and real.
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ReplyDeleteStories We Tell is one of those movies where I feel more inquisitive after watching. Not just about the movie itself, although I do think I’ll have to watch it again to pick up things I missed, but also about life in general. I think this was a brilliant way to capture the different details and perspectives many people can have on a given situation. I appreciate that this was not by any means a “normal” family dynamic. I think all of Dianne’s family was very open, honest, loving and accepting.
ReplyDeleteSarah Polley chose to withhold the information about her doubts regarding her father until we get to know the family a little bit, which I really thought was great. By her asking her siblings, father, and mother’s lovers and friends to start off with the story of Dianne we get this whole image of her as a person. Sarah isn’t just interested in her mom as her mom but also her as person: wife, mother, friend, actress, lover… This genuine curiosity is what I think gives the film its authenticity.
Do I like the way it was shot? Absolutely. In the beginning we see them setting up and can observe them getting comfortable with the camera and that captured me because it was real. I love that the father was interviewed and then later recorded the narration as an outside observer. I think they were lucky to have all the old footage to carry the story back to those days, it made a complete picture of the family, and ultimately Dianne’s life.
Sarah Polley has created a story about her mother. It is a great narrative in its own right, but I also admire her for seeking out her own truth in such a selfless way. It could have easily been a Sarah Polley documentary, which might have been “another self-absorbed, indulgent personal memoir” but instead she stays mostly out of the camera and lets her family tell it for her. I loved it, I think she is very brave.
The Stories We Tell
ReplyDeleteIt has been said that there are three sides to a story, one person’s point of view, another person’s point of view, and then the truth. Unfortunately, with this particular story, there are so many points of view that it is almost impossible to know the entire truth as the main person that the story is about is no longer alive.
I commend Sarah Polley for attempting to determine the truth about the past when her mother is no longer around to tell her part of the story. What I felt immediately in this story was that some of the “footage” didn’t seem like it was authentic, like it had been recreated, and sure enough, by the end of the film, we find out that it much of it had been recreated by the filmmaker for the purpose of this film. I’m not sure if I appreciated that approach, as it appeared that much of the “footage” that she used for the purpose of creating the backstory was recreated, and it made me lose some faith in her storytelling. However, in putting the title of the piece together with the sides of the story that everyone was sharing, it was fine, I just don’t know how much credit I would give it as an “authentic” documentary. But, that has been the common thread that we have been dealing with in our class so far, what makes a documentary an official documentary. For me, it made me feel like I was watching more of a narrative piece with the guise of a documentary.
About the story itself, I did find it intriguing as personally my family history is convoluted much the same and have thought about how to tell the many “stories” that the members of my family have been telling to the world. What do we all tell ourselves to keep ourselves sane or to save face about a particular situation? This film was intriguing in that respect, that I think it can make people think about the family lies that affect many other people, not just the ones in our own family but the people that are linked to us, and how it can ripple through people’s lives many years later. For that, I thought her approach was interesting. However, as a documentary, I thought it was dangerously close to being more of a narrative and an overuse of fake “footage”. I think that as a filmmaker it is important to watch the credits of a film. There you can learn a lot about a film, especially about this one, where there were other actors portraying the people.
From the start of documentary I had a feeling that I would never receive a solid truth. I initially felt fooled by the use of recreated footage. When we watched The Imposter there were scenes of recreated footage but they were done so well and it fit the mood of the film. However in this film the scenes just felt too staged and too stylized. It just seemed like they tried too hard to recreate what life must have been like for Diane. Also I felt there were just so many people being interviewed that it at first it was a bit hard to keep up with their relationships to Diane, and some of those people seemed like they weren’t really contributors to the film. They were just inserts to fill time. And After being introduced to so many people and conflicting stories, I just felt like I couldn’t trust what anyone had to say, and for a majority of the film it caused me to be a bit uninterested. I kept asking myself “why finish watching this if there is no clear truth”. As I neared the end of the film I realized that the director probably felt that exact same way growing up trying to figure out the mystery of who her father was. The only part of the film that actually felt a bit authentic the father narrating the film through the letter he sent to Sarah. But even then I was still taken out of the moment whenever Sarah would interrupt and have him rerun lines. In the end I wasn’t really a fan of this doc, and I wonder if this film is the result of having direct relationship to the subject.
ReplyDeleteJust as beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, so is the truth. We choose what truth to trust, what story to believe, and if we aren’t happy with the answers presented to us, we construct our our own. Whether we seek to prove our truth is irrelevant because as long as we believe our truth is true, it will remain so. This documentary did an excellent job at manifesting that idea. This was a story told by many different tongues, which story is the truth? Well, who’s to say that there can only be one? All the stories are true because they are true to the people telling them. Which story we choose as our favorite is what makes it the “truth”; the truth to us. I think to approach this story in this way, authored by many, only made it all the more credible. I thought was particularly convincing was that we are not let in, until the very end of the film, that all this old-family-footage is not actually old-family-footage, but rather staged actors. I say this is helpful to forming the truth because it’s another representation of what the director thought her mother to be. It was her truth about her mother, a truth that we believed blindly because we assumed it was real footage.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was particularly interesting what Michael said about stories. That while our own lives may seem mediocre and lackluster, we all have one. One that is unique, riveting and detailed. Why is it we crave to be told stories from the outside world, but never consider our own worth telling? Another concept I found thought-inspiring, was the idea that Harry presented. Saying that this story was only two people’s to tell, himself, and Diane. However, was it really even Harry’s? Would it really not be just Diane’s? But seeing as she is no longer around to tell “her” story, we get the versions of her loved ones and friends. The stories that we can criticize and critique, because why should we trust them?
At the end of this film, Sarah, the director is asked by her brother, why is she making this documentary, and what is it really about. Sarah responds, “I don’t know, memory, the way we tell stories.” I would go a step further and say this film is about perspective, and how every perspective is the truth, not just the one, because every perspective is true to that person experiencing it. This film makes me wonder what stories I tell, and moreover, how mine will be told. Because, as Michael hints at with the birth of his new grandchild, we are all just stories to be told, that’s our true legacy, and that legacy will be glorified or condemned by the people who tell it, despite who you were or what you did in terms of your “truth”.
I think it takes a lot to think your family is interesting enough to produce a documentary about them. Someone said in the beginning, “every family has a story…”. That is true and most of those stories could be told in a compelling fashion but I feel a sense of pride without arrogance around this story. The youngest daughter seems convinced that her family story is one that needs to be told but it doesn’t seem like she’s trying to peddle a story that isn’t there.
ReplyDeleteThe use of old film is amazing. It really helps tell the story. Also, when they use grain on the more informal clips for the interviews that contain boom mics in frame is a nice intentional touch.
Using the father to tell the story is the right person I believe. It is really hard to listen to him say some of the things he is as this hybrid first person/third person. His sense of family construct being told in the third person is a bit eerie to me. He seems to be so accepting to say seemingly awful things about himself in the third person.
I believe her story is to detach herself, even though she is a character and producer of this story. I think she wants to give accurate accounts of her families’ lives. Immediately you want to know whom these people are and then the story keeps getting deeper. On surface level, I don’t seem to care about these people but the more they’re on screen the more you seem to care and the more the story draws you in further.
Stories We Tell was a reminder that nothing in life is linear. As human, things are always moving in many directions, and we are always feeling. Diane was brought back to life and took a dynamic form on screen. Sarah achieved this through interviews from the many different roles people played in Diane’s life. This was key in telling her story because I think the story took shape while she filmed. As she interviewed and uncovered information it snaked her journey along to uncover even more details. I think as her mom came back to life, her project shifted and became maybe a little more than what she had originally set out to do. This documentary seemed to be a form of art that was “more for the artist than anyone else”. I like that because I think there is a lot of honesty and beauty behind that in a way where everyone is a bit vulnerable. We see that clearly through the lens that Sarah is trying to tell. But I don’t think she was trying to “tell”, but rather explore and learn for herself which I think is what a good documentary does.
ReplyDeleteOverall I appreciated what she did. I felt like I actually had taken away a sense of acceptance after watching this film. I grew attached to Michael, and felt an appreciation for him and his view of life, and love for Diane. I like that Sarah was able to make me feel this way about him, because I think she feels just that for him too. The only thing I didn’t really like was her real father. I was so emotionally involved that I can’t tell if I actually really felt this way, or if I was more so projecting Sarah’s discomfort about him. It was clear she wasn’t open armed accepting of him. Maybe she bit off a little more than she could chew with the truth behind all this.
I liked the home footage. There was a lot more variety than you would expect from typical home footage, but I attribute this to the fact that Diane was an actress. Sometimes the home footage seemed a bit forced, or maybe that it lingered a little to long on screen during a voice over. I guess thinking about all this now there was a lot of little things aesthetically here and there that I didn’t like. For instance the whole beginning was too staged for me. I felt like this was something someone in film school could throw together. But maybe that was the beauty of her kind of not knowing what shape all of this would take? It wasn’t meant to be beautiful, but rather raw? All in all I liked the message, and if something can make me feel than I approve.
I'm just going to be honest. I didn't care for this documentary much at all, to the point where I turned it off about an hour in. It felt a little like a waste of my time. This doesn't mean that I don't respect Sarah and her passion behind telling this story, it just wasn't for me.
ReplyDeleteI will critique what I did see though. I thought that the style was interesting. I honestly couldn't tell if the footage was real or staged to look real. Most of the home videos seemed to match the story too closely. There was so much of it - almost as if it was a documentary within a documentary, and it distracted me. I also had trouble keeping up with who the interviewees were. This was partly due to my poor attention span, but also because there were just so many.
Other than that, it seemed like a project that Sarah made for her own sake. I don't necessarily feel like the story needs to be "heard by all", but at the same time, it can be relatable in many ways. In a way it is like a scrapbook. Lightly informative and pretty to look at, but mainly only meaningful to those involved with it's creation.
About fifteen minutes into the film, I started to dislike the style of storytelling that the director chose to utilize in telling her story of discovering her biological father as well as what seemed like some sort of memorial for her late mother. It wasn't the fact that the director decided to include the stories of everyone who was affected by these experiences, including their own interpretations of what occurred. Instead it felt like most of the sequences just were not necessary in telling the story, nor did they add any aesthetics in terms of cinematography. The main examples that come to mind are the reenactment sequences that are made to look like home videos. This I thought gave off a really weird vibe and made this seemingly serious documentary seem more like a biographical television show. Although I didn't enjoy the film very much I thought it was unique in the way of how the director conducted each interview allowing each person’s truth, or simply what they believed to be the truth to fully come out. The audience is forced to take this sometimes contradictory evidence and sort it out themselves to seek the truth. In the case of this documentary everything was pretty much resolved in the end and nothing kept me guessing or quite honestly, interested by the time I was halfway through the film. I don’t believe the film should have been as long as it was and, in my opinion would have worked much better if it was only half the time. However, the overall pace of the documentary was very quick and did not leave much room for the audience to take a moment to sort of contemplate the evidence that has been presented. Instead there were no gaps of silence, rather there was always someone constantly talking and this sort of reminds me of what its like listening to someone give a lecture, and I can only stay attentive for so long before my mind begins to wander. Thats mainly why I think that the way images are composed in a documentary is essential in grabbing and keeping the audiences attention as well as effect of evoking certain emotions and conveying underlying themes that are presented in the film.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was done ver interestingly. I feel as if it was a ay for her to say all the things she waned to say in without her really having to say them. I liked this documentary if was very interesting however I didn't like how it was a little confusing. Her mom dies, then she talks about the divorce and her mom's affair. I feel the editing there was a little off which kind of makes it a bit confusing. She definitely hit the nail on the hammer though with mixed feelings of her mom. In the beginning I felt like she was a fun exciting mom, and then was kind of like wtf I thought things were great and then had no sympathy. There were definitely some curve balls in there like with the dad's letter how he told her mom when she went out there she could find a lover and stuff like that, which caught me off guard. All and all I found it very interesting and I liked how it was shot it was something different.
ReplyDeleteStories We Tell was beautiful.
ReplyDeleteThe film starts right off with the filmmaker's overall intent in the guise of a quote from Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace: “When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.” Sarah Polley started this project, not knowing what was going to become of it. In order to discover her origins, she first had to lay all the evidence in front of her. This is her aspect of reality, her journey into finding herself, and us, the audience, along for the ride.
No one in her family knew either. "Who fucking cares about our family?" her older sister Joanna asked. Michael, her father, also stated to Sarah as he readied himself to start the narration. "I hope that you'll explain to me some time what all this is that you're trying to do." This ambiguity during the beginning of the film made me ponder; what was the filmmaker's purpose? (Now looking back, I feel that she included them in the beginning on purpose, to make the viewer wonder along with her.) So, while watching the film, I took notes on what her purpose could be. Of course, the first and most obvious one was to learn more about her mother. Because Diane passed away when Sarah was very young, Sarah longed for the connection that all her interviewees had with her mother. Through this, Sarah gains perspective as to what her mother did and why, and also goes on to discovering things about herself as she pieces her mother together. Her desire to have everyone tell their accounts, their individual truths to make her own truth about her mother was very striking. We as audiences have the same clean slate, that system of processing information provided to us and spitting back out opinions; but Sarah had to do that with a person that should be familiar to her, her own mother. Another purpose for this documentary was also to serve as therapy for her family. This "project" got every single one of her family members verbalizing their pent-up feelings about Diane and the affair. Maybe they even found closure, especially if they are able to accept everything as a part of life and be willing in the end to share this story.
The style was entirely appropriate for the film. To me the interviews did not seem rehearsed at all, but very candid and intimate, authentic and imperfect and perfect. There were times in the interviews that focused less on what the person said, and more on the nonverbal emotions, the reactions that Sarah was able to capture. For example, when Sarah asks, “What do you remember about the day mom died?” and “What did you say to her?” Michael pauses, tears up, answers Sarah, then takes a long drag from his cigarette. Sarah also made it a point to include her own voice asking questions in the clips, unlike some of the other documentaries that we've seen so far, which disconnected us from the filmmaker. She blatantly edited interviews together to show contradictions in their accounts, to show the unreliability of memory and feelings of frustration when the truth is unclear. Same with the seemingly omniscient, but unreliable narrator, her father Michael. She adds his second role to guide the documentary along while continuously asking him to “take the line back again,” which does ruin the authenticity of Michael’s readings, but it also underlines certain things to either herself, himself, or the audience. In addition to the narration and interviews, Sarah also added “home footage,” both real and reenacted, filmed with a Super 8 to add to the style of nostalgia. What I found refreshing and unique was that Sarah didn’t TRY to sell her reenactments as believable; in fact, she did the total opposite. Even though she doesn’t come out and say that a footage was real or not, she does add behind-the-scenes footage of her directing the actors. She didn’t add the reenactment footage for anyone else but herself, to help visualize the witnesses’ accounts and to create her own “evidence” of how her mother was like. Sarah reminds the audience that we are in her truth, her world.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed watching this film. It definitely helped shed my initial thoughts of what a documentary was. It doesn’t always have to be about cold hard facts. And as for this documentary being a self-absorbent memoir, I don’t think that’s true. Yes it was about discovering herself and about her loving, dysfunctional family, but it was also about the human condition and the exploration of truth, the meaning of art we ourselves try to define throughout life. Harry Gulkin says it best while trying to defend his trying to tell the story: “I think anyone that writes anything, anyone who does anything, wants to bring it out to a public. If there’s a story to be told and if the story has some validity and some resonance, then you don’t keep it to yourself.”
I have to admit, Stories We Tell made me cry. I sympathize with Sarah Polley about wanting to know the truth about a parent. After she was able to connect with Harry at the coffee shop and tells him, “Now I’ll watch the documentary about you. What a handy tool in a situation like this, to have an educational DVD on your previously unknown biological father. Hilarious,” It made me wish that there was a documentary about my father.
ReplyDeleteThe question of authorship in “Stories We Tell” was really broken down when the “storytellers,” and specifically Harry, began discussing who had the right to contribute to Sarah's telling of the story. Harry states that the objective of art is to convey (or seek to convey) the truth, which he believes can only be done through the accounts of people immediately involved with the story. Yet, Sarah is not attempting to expose the absolute truth of her mother's life and her own paternal relationships. Rather, she is weaving together the voices of those affected by these things in a way that clearly incorporates her own intent – to allow her subjects to voice their stories in order to piece together a portrait of her parents through their memories of them. Because, ultimately, what else do we have of a person's life beyond memory and basic physical contribution?
I appreciated Sarah's approach to authorship, especially in terms of finding a balance between creative control and cinematic transparency. Her use of reenactments is poignant because the idea of seeing characters experience moments that are recalled punctuates the stories with (assumed) validation and provides richer visual references than b-roll or talking heads. Her reveal of the footage's creation (as well as her inclusion of characters' remarks about her interview style and editing techniques) only serves to validate her own pursuit of sincerity. Her style is heavily influenced by the ethics surrounding the recording of close family, and I admire her ability to incorporate that into the art of the piece, rather than allowing it to disable the telling of a not-always-peachy tale.
Honestly I didn’t feel the impact I usually feel after watching a documentary. I couldn’t feel invested in the story. However I think as far as documenting this story for themselves this was interesting. I feel like it is more of a personal memoir. There is nothing wrong with creating work that is self indulgent like this but I think it’s harder for an audience to get into being unconnected to the family.
ReplyDeleteI was a little put off by how much this film is trying to portray the truth about this family yet it feels contrived and forced. The home videos try to make you feel that the story is so authentic. At first I didn’t mind the home videos. However I don’t like that they are portrayed as authentic and then we find out that they are recreated. It makes you feel fooled and I don’t really like that. I want to know that I’m watching a recreation if I’m watching one.
I also thought that the father reading the script felt a little forced as well. I think it points the story in a specific direction but also makes it feel to constructed. Again this decision makes me question the authenticity.
I did like the interviews because they feel more conversational and much less pointed and scripted. But I thought there were so many people we have to slowly figure out who they are in the story. Just tell me off the bat who the sibling are and the order of age. Otherwise what I found myself doing is trying to figure out who these people are rather than listening to what they are saying.
Although I didn’t have a deep appreciation for this documentary, I did find it interesting and not a waste of time. I respect her decision to put out such personal stories about her family.
I have to say, I actually quite liked the filmmaker’s choice in inviting her audience in on the preparation process with her various staging tactics. In fact, it gave the film a certain essence of authenticity in its own right. Normally, I would have been quite reluctant to these methods had I found out about them after the fact, but from the very start of the film, Polley is very candid and open with her audience about her strategies in telling her family’s story. She doesn’t feel the need to mask them behind a false sense of authority and forceful manipulation, which she could have easily done because let’s face it; documentary filmmakers manipulate their subject’s circumstances all the time to attain their own idea of “Truth”, do they not? The fact that she doesn’t hide this practice from her audience, not only gives the film an all-inclusive Polley family touch, but it makes me, as the viewer, trust her artistic choices and invest in this particular family’s story all the more. Does the film, itself, ever attain a sense of Truth in a general sense? No, not really. But what I appreciate about Polley’s choices as a filmmaker is that her intent was quite the opposite. This was not simply a story about a single family’s complex relationship with their deceased mother. This was more of a collective effort to piece together the skewed and fragmented bits of memory this family had in order for Polley to conceive her own account of who she believed her mother was, and make sense of the world around her. Do people not do this every day in their own lives? Yes, the bulk of her subjects aren’t as credible as one would naturally assume. They are kind of all over the place, in fact. And yes, the story, itself, gets a bit heavy handed at some points. But in retrospect I don’t mind any of it because it all serves to further Polley’s objective in demonstrating that even in one’s own family, there is no universal essence of Truth about a single person or experience. Rather, life is comprised of much smaller personal truths that carry much more significance in the eyes of those that experience them. What does the rest matter?
ReplyDeleteThis documentary is unlike anything I've seen in this genre. I liked how Sarah Polley showed her version of the truth by acknowledging to the audience that the crew was (obviously) present during the filming process, but sometimes it's easy to forget that there are people influencing what you're watching, merely by existing in the situation. No matter what you film as a documentarian you have to remember that it's not going to be true in it's "purest" form because you, and probably others will be there. Which kind of hurts my heart a little but because I pride myself on showing what the story looks like without my presence. But this documentary is an example of how to stay true to the reality of it all. I also liked how Sarah would leave in the audio of her telling them what to say like "Okay tell me the story of everything that happened as if I don't know what already happened." So you as an audience member know the structure of the question and how that can influence the answer. She also made it very clear that she was a part of this story too, she wasn't an outsider looking in, she lived the story so she made her influence apparent, which I enjoyed.
ReplyDeleteThis documentary was interesting to me because I thought it was more about how everyone told the story rather than the content of the actual story. Polley chose to reveal some facts that seemed vital to the story later in the documentary, for example Dianes first marriage resulted in two kids, I assumed from the beginning that all of her kids were from her marriage, however that was not the case. I think Sarah did this to show the audience that, that was the way the story was told. She revealed layers to the story in the order that one would tell it in. All in all this was an enjoyable documentary with a great story, and it taught me a lot in how I want to go about showing my version of the truth when I make documentaries.
The Stories We Tell resonates within me completely on the realms of perception. I think Sarah completely accomplished what she sat out to......illustrate how a person's perspective can dull down or highlight certain aspects of the same situation.
ReplyDeleteI personally think the use of so many different characters was a brilliant choice on her part. I've skimmed some of the others' blogs, and this choice seemed to be a common nuance to many responders. I'd like to challenge those irritated by this choice to weigh things in a different light however. I took a second to analyze her choice of what I would agree to be a confusing amount of characters and my personal analysis forced me to finagle my interpretation.
I feel this was done purposely. We humans are almost always guilty of attaching how we are to perceive, or how we respond emotionally based upon other attachment to said subjects. For example, if a man were too murder his own family member or friend, we are automatically geared to invest our emotions with a reaction along the lines of......Oh my....how could he do such a thing to his own family/friend. But if a man were to murder some stranger at random....our emotions would still be elated, and we would still wonder how a human could do such a thing to another human, but our knowledge of no personal attachments between the victim and suspect would certainly alter the approach of our emotional investments. Since we all know murder is just wrong period....that should be how are thoughts/responses are centralized....leaving all other information, pertinent or non-pertinent, off of the dockett.
I like how she had her siblings, friends/associates/colleagues from her mom's "hayday," and even members related to the man she'd had a proven affair on.......and no matter their relation to Diane, they all pretty much said the same things....in different ways. So in the midst of all the confusion...not knowing who was speaking, being mixed around in trying to keep track of exactly who said what, and eventually not knowing/remembering whose point of view we are following. .....simply forces us to just listen to stories without true bias.
I'll admit that the early stages of the story's unfolding, I was thinking she was wrong and lowdown for having a child outside of her marriage. But as the many different views of "the story" were presented, I found myself feeling neutral as if she proceedeed as best she could with the hand that was dealt to her. It also helped that everyone had a lifetime of fun, positive memories of her and the man who had been cheated on says not to dare blame Diane and in a sense took on some of the accountability of Diane's actions by listing out the ways in which he "sucked" as a husband.
The juiciness of the plot details can kind of make viewers feel deceived since there was no conclusive answers to the things we were wondering, but I think that was Sarah's angle. It seems as though her message is to tell us we are there to soak up what's being output and we don't really have the rights to wonder as we may think we do. One of Sarah's last lines about her reasonings for this creation was like...memories...I don't know.....how stories are told. This tells me that she can't have answers for others if she doesn't really have them for herself and that being open to what another wants to share, leads us no insight into other details and give us no true rights to question. After all, how would we have the right to want to know everything after 2 hrs of exposure, when all of those giving us that exposure will have to go on not knowing exact details forever due to a huge missing link in the chain.
About Stories We Tell...
ReplyDeleteDid I like the doc? Eh. Was it interesting? Eh. Did I connect with the characters? Eh. Did I like the way Sarah chose to shoot? Eh. As a whole, this documentary was just "eh" to me. In the beginning I liked how it started out with the subjects preparing to be recorded because the audience got to see how they were really feeling about having to talk about Diane. At first I was thinking (because of the beginning) that she is some wacky person who did some wacky thing that was interesting enough to make documentary about. Turns out, the documentary just wasn't that interesting to me. I mean sure infidelity and having a baby that isn't your husband's makes for interesting gossip and I thought probably an interesting documentary, but I just couldn't get into it. I even fell asleep watching it. There were also waaaaay too many subjects to keep up with. I had to keep reminding myself who everyone was. I liked how there were different inputs and versions of the "Diane" story, but I feel some weren't needed as much as others. I also liked how the director didn't put herself right in the documentary right away. She allowed others to set up their story and then proceed to go on with her version. I liked the home footage that was used because they were used at the perfect time. I liked the setting in which the documentary took place because it wasn't do distracting and it gave a homey feel to a perusal story.
As for this documentary being something "fresh and inspired", the answer is no. The story is kinda been there done that and although it was something important to her, it wasn't as important to me. In a way, from the way the subjects were describing her in the beginning and when Michael was talking about how she was in love with his character and not him as an actual person, it was kinda foreshadowing some drama or strain on their relationship.
Overall I wasn't a huge fan of this documentary, but I did appreciate in what the director was trying to accomplish, although I don't feel that having all those subjects helped her cause.
In “Stories We Tell”, we are revealed fairly late into the film that authenticity is a major factor in this documentary. When the revelation comes and we finally see that actors are being shot in this film, not just authentic home footage, we start to question everything, just as Sarah Polley must have questioned her life growing up. This movie forces you to ask the question: “Is what I’m seeing true?” Throughout this movie, I was so into guessing how this film was going to unfold that I didn’t really pay attention to the fact that almost half of this footage was not authentic; it wasn’t really videos of her family and mother from back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. So when I finally saw the revelation of Sarah standing with her “mother”, it was a “oh my god” moment. I absolutely loved this film. At first, I didn’t see the whole picture and why it was so praised, but once the credits started rolling, I could not get over the fact of how well Sarah Polley pulled off this film. When the audience goes through a paralleled experience as that of Sarah, that’s when the fascination sets in. As far as authenticity is concerned, I believe it played an important roll in the film. The director played with the idea of being “authentic” or “real” because, growing up, Sarah questioned these ideas and sought to find the truth; “who really is my father?” I believe this film was very aesthetically well done.
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