Replacement and reparation in Sarah Polley’s Stories we tell

Abstract

The question of the ethics of a documentary film has been debated for decades, with the work of Emmanuel Levinas gaining a particular currency lately. My own contribution to this debate focused on the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject of her film – a process that under certain circumstances could evoke a deep bond between the filmmaker and her subjects, and which I claim is similar to a mechanism which clinical psychoanalysis calls ‘transference’. This chapter looks at Stories We Tell (Polley 2012) and examines it as a site of reparation. I also investigate the notion of obsolete technology and fake archive as pivotal in Polley’s project, which I see as a way of a reclaiming the lost agency of the filmmaker’s mother vis-à-vis the patriarchal systems that she inhabited.