Sarah Polley’s use of multimedia, inclusive of interviews, voiceovers, photographs, home videos, and testimonies, in her documentary Stories We Tell creates a narrative that is dynamic and layered. As such, Polley’s documentary fosters an authentic understanding of her family’s narrative, her late mother, and a well-kept secret of Sarah’s biological father.
Through this documentary, Polley has attempted to depict the many different voices, narratives, and interpretations of the individuals involved in her mother’s life, so as to provide a fulsome and multifaceted narrative. In her personal review titled “Stories We Tell: A post by Sarah Polley” published on the National Film Board of Canada’s website the day of the movie’s debut, she explains that she “wanted the story told in the words of everyone [she] could find who could speak about it.”
However, her documentary has left many viewers, including our class peers, critiquing the absence of her perspective and voice. Polley explains her absence as a need to gain a more objective understanding of her mother by learning about her through the perspectives of others. This is evidenced as she explains in the aforementioned personal blog post, “But I found I could lose myself in the words of the people closest to me. I can feel and hear and see their histories, and I wanted to get lost, immerse myself in those words, and be a detective in my own life and family.”
Peter Bradshaw review’s titled “Stories We Tell- review“ on The Guardian asserts that despite Polley’s intent on demonstrating multiple stories about her mother through third-party narrative, Polley’s construction of the film may in fact be her way of erecting control over her mother’s life narrative. Bradshaw contends, “The film, with all its images, fragments and layers, is Polley’s semi-controlled emotional explosion.”
While a verbal perspective on the part of Sarah Polley may have been absent inside the documentary, the way in which she controls the entire documentary as the director, intentional or not, may very well reflect how she views her mother and how she wants her mother to be conveyed and interpreted by the world. Polley has dictated her mother’s life narrative despite not making it explicit in her documentary, by choosing what parts of her mother’s life narrative are conveyed and by whom, and that may signify her perspective, as it discretely conveyed.
Notwithstanding the fact that Sarah Polley exercised ultimate discretion in how her mothers narrative would be directed and produced, she outright acknowledged that embedded in any one life narrative are multiple interpretations, and as such she has attempted to provide us with a dynamic narrative by embedding diverse accounts of her mother’s life. She describes this process in her blogpost as “ […] watching a story take on a life of its own, mutate, and change…. And as the story was told, or perhaps because the story was told – it changed. So I decided to make a film about our need to tell stories, to own our stories, to understand them, and to have them heard.”
Polley’s understanding of our innate need ‘to tell, own, understand and have our stories heard’ resonates not just with her production of Stories We Tell but fits soundly with the theme of this course surrounding autobiography. Our innate need to express has been demonstrated through the facets of this course from our use of social media platforms to convey our life narratives to the role of self-representation in documenting trauma and bearing witness.