After watching documentaries or reading non-fiction novels or biographies or autographies, I think it is always interesting to consider the levels of mediation that exist in any attempt to still time and to document a particular moment in the expanse of our lives. In director Sarah Polley’s documentary film, Stories We Tell, she takes viewers through the unravelling of a personal family secret. Through a series of interviews, footages from family home videos, and the reconstruction of certain memories, she, in a sense, recreates history. However, the documentary format, with individual holding cameras and the b-roll footages constantly establish both a distance and serve as a reminder that the video itself is being mediated by the documenter.
Interestingly enough, with the availability of social media and the Internet, I often read reviews of a movie before spending close to two hours watching the movie itself. What I end up doing with a documentary film is read a review on a person’s review of their own life. The complexity is stated in that sentence itself. In a review by Nicole Sperling in the LA Times, she references explanations by Polley regarding the choices that she made as a documentarian. Polley reveals that she was making a movie about storytelling and part of the premise of the movie was to “not pretend that this was some factual thing, that this was as close to the truth as we could possibly get with a million different versions — and one of those versions [was] this film” (Link to statement here). Despite the fact that she tried to get everyone’s perspective into the film, giving each of their voices equal weight, she cannot escape the fact that each voice was mediated in some way. This is represented in the framing of the scenes in which there is always the sense that there is a camera. Oftentimes, the viewer sees the video of a video being filmed. Reviews of these sorts also contribute to the uncovering of the ‘truth.’ John Buchan, Sarah’s Polley older brother is a casting director himself who worked collaboratively with Polley to cast people who would recreate the scenes narrated by Michael Polley, their father. In that same article, Buchan talks about how when he was casting himself at age 18, he made sure that he got something “who was way better-looking…because [he] like[s] the idea of rewriting history.” Related to this, Buchan references how the scenes recreated and the actual home videos melded together in a way that a couple of times, even Buchan could not tell the difference himself between which was the ‘real,’ and ‘authentic’ footage as opposed to one that was recreated. In the end, Polley is apt to call this work a story and her father and all others involved “storytellers” as stated in the closing credits. They recognize the fact that this is an act of reconstruction and inherently flawed in that sense but the alternative seems to be to not to document or to document only one voice.
In also thinking about WHY to document, Polley says in an interview with Studio Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqBe1DSY1Vc
that some journalist had found out about this family secret before most of her immediate did and was planning on posting it. In a sense, I think she wanted to preserve the right to tell her story just as Harry Gulkin felt adamantly in the film that he was the only one who had the right to tell the story. All in all, documentaries raise ethical questions of how to document and who has the right to document.
Hey Vivian!
I thought this was a really interesting post! Especially cool that you looked into some of the people’s thoughts within the making of the film. In some sense I guess we are always editing and mediating how we want the outside world to perceive us, down to what we wear and what we say and how we present ourselves. That stuff is just brought to a WHOLE other level when it becomes recorded down in film or text, or we might even want to think about Facebook and other social media platforms where we all (those who choose to be on those platforms anyways) become our own documentarians. We get to chose how we want our narrative to look, including our relations with other people. I like that Polley, and the others in the film, are seemingly aware of this act of mediation, and how often documentaries and film – just in their immediate power – sometimes makes us forget this. As someone who has personally played around with documentary and editing, it’s funny to look at a finished film and think of the disjointed and disconnected timeline of the production vs. the final product, the final product giving us the impression of linearity when the production and construction of the film was probably not that way at all. It’s almost as if we are talking about two different levels of linearity: time and subject, or time and story. Sorry this is so long and rambly! Just some thoughts that your post brought up for me 🙂
We’ve encountered this idea of the ethics of ‘narrative ownership’ before – who owns and gets to tell the story – and I’ve seen it at the dinner table quite a few times as friends will compete to tell a story in their own way. I get a sense that Polley intends to preserve the subjectivity she describes through her film; I would argue that all have the right to document or tell a story. I would also posit that objective documentation is possible where objective intent is maintained. If I set out to photograph a dog I do make choices that may affect perception of that photograph but reality remains unchanged – the object is not altered and the medium is the medium. If my intent is to deliver an objective narrative I will (barring incompetence and ineptitude) most likely do so regardless of whether objectivity in itself is definitive or relative – rendering the distinction functionally useless. My photograph is not completely representative of the concept of dog; it is a real photograph of a real dog.