For this week’s scrutiny, I would like to use Bill Nichols’ writing in Engaging Cinema as a lens through which to dig deeper into a moment from Stories We Tell. This same moment was discussed on page 60 of Amelie Hastie’s The Vulnerable Spectator piece, centering around the clip from 1:26:56 to 1:28:11. As Hastie describes, this sequence uses a voice-over technique in which we hear Sarah read an e-mail to Harry about her vision for the film and what its core messages would be about: namely, the “discrepancies of stories,” “the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral,” and that stories usually “end up with shifts and fictions in them, mostly unintended” (Hastie 60). As this voice-over plays, the viewer is finally given a transparent look at the fictional visual elements of the documentary that were previously implied to be truths or at least much more subtly incorporated into the film’s narrative. We see the younger Polley family eating at the dinner table through the lens of a “home video,” followed immediately by an outside view of adult Sarah directing the camerawoman where to move and how to shoot. We see young actors prepping for their scenes and, poignantly, Sarah in the same room as the actor playing her deceased mother, speaking with her directly and revealing the depths of the fabrication.
Some may feel deceived by this decision, the rug pulled out from under them in the last third of the film as many of the “home videos” they believed in and connected with emotionally are revealed to be fake. While watching the documentary, I had doubts early in the film that any family did so much filming around the home, especially when video cameras were heavy and unwieldy, let alone that they captured such beautifully composed and Normal Rockwell-esque moments so consistently, yet I still felt a strange sense of betrayal when the true mechanisms of the fabricated “home video” moments were revealed. In a way, I think this is a fair reaction. Most people go into a documentary about actual events expecting to be told the truth, facts and objective perspectives. Having it shown so plainly near the end of the film that this is not strictly true can be upsetting, not because we aren’t aware of the tricks of the trade behind even “factual” films, but because we want to believe in the illusion created by the filmmaker, even if we are aware of our own willful naivety.
However, this is by no means a condemnation of using purposefully-crafted, fictional elements such as fake “home videos” in order to better convey a story or message. This is where I would like to bring in Nichols’ piece in order to better examine why exactly this technique not only works, but is a valid form of “documentation” that is, at times, more “truthful” than objective fact.
As the very core of the documentary itself seems to point out, the “truth” can become a bit tricky when the very human element of memories comes in. No one person will remember the exact same things about an event, person, or time after all. For example, nearly every account of Diane’s reaction to her pregnancy with Sarah contradicts each other, with some claiming she was ecstatic while others claim she was distraught. However, this doesn’t mean that any account was necessarily right or wrong. Maybe some people misunderstood Diane’s emotions but believe entirely that they correctly interpreted her reaction. Maybe Diane herself fluctuated between excitement and dread, warring between having a child with someone she loved and having a child with a man who wasn’t her husband. Maybe some people are simply misremembering after many years of separation from the moment. Maybe Diane allowed different facets of herself to be revealed at different times, to different people. The point is that as the documentary says, each individual has a unique perspective on any event, has their own truth, and in combining all of these truths into one overarching narrative you will inevitably get something that is both entirely truthful and entirely false. In a way, this is exactly the same balance taking place in the visuals of the documentary, including the use of directed, scripted videos in place of actual home movies.
It makes sense for a documentary about the conflicting personal truths and falsehoods of an event to embrace the same thought for its visuals. It does utilize actual photos and videos of Diane and Sarah’s family throughout, keeping that core element of factual, objective truth. However, what the fake home movies add to the documentary is a visual enforcement of the words spoken throughout, a fantasy of what the stories told actually look like in the mind of Sarah. In imagining the scene of a memory told by another person, we are left with a video that is both “truth” at its heart—in both the memory and in Sarah’s emotional vision of it—as well as a lie completely fabricated and inherently different from that memory, since it could never be perfectly replicated, let alone by someone who was either very young at the time or not yet born at all. However, I suppose my argument regarding all this is if that actually matters to the impact of the film?
Sure, we may be left feeling betrayed and suspicious of the documentary’s factual merit once we realize that a large chunk of the visuals given as truth were actually fake, but until that point the fake clips do their job within the film. This is a story about stories, and a very personal narrative within a family, not a documentary claiming to have all the facts about an objective issue that can be followed with statistics and news reports like an opioid crisis or the devastation caused by a hurricane. It is inherently based in emotion and personal testimony, and the goal of the film seems to me to be an emotional, reflective one. As Sarah herself states, it’s a film made to bring her mother back to life, to learn about her and the decisions she made that so deeply affected their entire family and those around her. For viewers outside of that bubble, I would suggest that it is a film meant to impact emotionally, to prompt reflection on one’s own story, the stories of the people around them, and how the interplay of lies and truths are present in everything, particularly interpersonal relationships. In order to connect with the audience enough to achieve this goal, in order to prompt a genuine emotional response, scenes were fabricated to better illustrate the situations and persons involved, as well as their relationships. These scenes, fictional as they are, better humanize and endear the audience to the “players” in the story through rhetorical devices.
This is where Nichols’ own words really become relevant to this analysis of Stories We Tell. As he states in Engaging Cinema on page 99, “Like the classic art of oratory, rhetorical film discourse serves to move or affect, persuade or convince the audience. Persuasiveness is not necessarily identical to persuasion: a documentary may move viewers or arouse feelings more than persuade them of the soundness of a specific argument.” We as the audience are persuaded to feel a certain way about Diane, Sarah, and their family’s stories rather than to examine the factual “truths” of what happened. Nichols continues this train of thought on page 100, saying that these types of films “do not make literal arguments. They draw us into a particular perspective on the world and invite us to experience the world in a distinct way.” He continues later on the page to say that “often there is no clear-cut solution to a real-life problem, and logic alone cannot persuade. In this case, the premises or assumptions that lead individuals to take up different positions may derive from values and beliefs. Here, rhetoric takes priority over pure logic.” In this way, the “logic” or “facts” of this documentary are instead the values and beliefs of the family, the emotions conveyed, and the fabricated home movies are just another device in communicating these persuasive elements.
Nichols himself explains how this technique is so effective on page 101, when he states that “for rhetorical purposes the appearance of logic may do the job as well as actual logic.” He continues this thought on page 102 by saying that “the anecdotes, impressions, or proofs may, in fact, be true, but most important for rhetorical discourse is that they convey the impression of truthfulness.” This is exactly the phenomenon that the scripted “home videos” accomplish. Even after realizing that the videos are essentially fake, we still see the impression of truthfulness that they were created with and that they leave behind on the audience. We are being told a story. If the objective truth of the stories cannot be shown through actual home videos, a close approximation or visualized personal truth still makes a deeply emotional impact—in some ways, possibly even more so than actual videos of the moments would! The fabrications are purposefully directed, with intentional compositions and emotive actors all working towards a specific tone and message, and it could be argued that such an approach conveys the intended emotions of the memories better than hypothetical, actual home videos would have. After all, there’s a reason life lessons are often taught through fictional stories rather than retellings of actual events—sometimes the truth is more clearly found in fiction.
Questions:
- At what moment did you realize that fake “home movies” were being shown in the documentary? How did you feel when you realized this? Do you think this is an effective technique and is it “credible” in a documentary-style film?
- In what ways does Stories We Tell follow the three principles of good rhetorical discourse (credible, convincing, compelling)? In which ways does it intentionally break or challenge these principles?
- What six modes of organization from Nichols’ reading do you see most clearly in Stories We Tell? What about in Cameraperson? Do you think these chosen modes were the best choices for these particular narratives?
Sources:
Hastie, Amelie. “The Vulnerable Spectator: Vagaries of Memory, Verities of Form.” Film Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.59. Accessed 1 November 2020.
Nichols, Bill. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.
Stories We Tell. Dir. Sarah Polley. Mongrel Media, 2012. OSU Secured Media Library. Web. 1 November 2020.