Hearing Corporeal Memories in Cameraperson and Stories We Tell

Home , Sarah Polley, Silent film, Stories We Tell

Towards Affective Listening: Hearing Corporeal Memories in Cameraperson and Stories We Tell

THESIS

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Alper Gobel, B.A.

Graduate Program in Film Studies

The Ohio State University

2019

Master’s Examination Committee:

Margaret Flinn, Advisor

Erica Levin

Sean O’Sullivan

Copyrighted by

Alper Gobel

2019

Abstract

This thesis focuses on two documentaries: Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016) and

Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012). By proposing the term affective listening, it foregrounds affective engagement with the voice of documentary. The thesis argues that listening to the materiality of voice(s) is inextricably bound up with embodied experiences of social subjects. Affective listening creates an auditory experience, establishing a direct link between worldly experiences of documentary subjects and corporeal memories. In both documentaries, listening to multiple voices requires attention to bodily expressions and sensations. The emphasis on corporeal expressions incorporates a multiplicity of affect conveyed through vocal conventions of documentary such as the voice-over and the interview. Consistent with the two documentaries, affective listening emphasizes a multiplicity of affect, a multiplicity that is ingrained corporeal memories.

Dedication

Dedicated to my mother, Sevim Sahin

iii

Vita

2013 (May)...... B.A. Radio, Television, and Film, Ankara

University, Ankara, Turkey

2013 (June)...... B.A. Political Science, Ankara University,

Ankara, Turkey

2017 to present ...... M.A. Film Studies, The Ohio State

University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Film Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Vita ...... iv

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2: Listening to Corporeal Memories in Cameraperson ...... 5

Chapter 3: Listening to Fluid Voices in Stories We Tell ...... 17

Chapter 4: Conclusion...... 32

References ...... 35

Chapter 1: Introduction

“When he was six years old, Stravinsky listened to a mute peasant who produced unusual sounds with his arms, which the future musician tried to reproduce: he was looking for a different voice, one more or less vocal than the one comes from the mouth; another sound for another sense than the one that is spoken.”1

“… a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.”2

Voice has remained central to documentary studies, but it has been examined in relation to a dominant paradigm. The category of voice, according to several documentary scholars, including Pooja Rangan, has been studied as a useful tool, vehicle, or metaphor for conveying the meaning of a given film and ensuring documentary’s truth claim.3 Considering voice as a metaphor has its roots in Bill Nichols’ seminal essay, “The

Voice of Documentary.” In this essay, Nichols draws a distinction between the voice of the text as a whole and its components emerging from interview, dialogue, and voice- over commentary. Nichols argues that “we may think we hear history or reality speaking

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 7. 2 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 66-67. 3 Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction,” Discourse 39, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 280. See also: Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore, “Introduction: Documentary’s Vocal Projections,” In Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 2. 1

to us through a film, but what we actually hear is the voice of the text.”4 Nichols explains what the voice of the text means: it “conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us.”5

In conjunction with visual metaphor, Nichols proposes that a documentary consists of a wide range of voices, all of which “come to function as signs; they bear meaning, though the meaning is not really inherent in them but rather conferred upon them by their function within the text.”6 Within this conventional view, the voice as a useful vehicle prioritizes a coherent and comprehensible message of the text delivered through vocal conventions of documentary such as the voice-over and the interview. Nichols’ meaning- oriented approach ends up with a rigid formula: the more-meaning centered the voices become, the less there is to hear. In other words, Nichols’ theoretical framework privileges the textual message conveyed through speech acts of documentary subjects.

Other documentary scholars have, however, recently challenged prevailing assumptions about the metaphorical use of voice. For example, Pooja Rangan investigates “the persistent logocentrism of voice” that “is conflated with meaning, and specifically, with logos: the referential content or message of the text.”7 Rangan explores how documentary’s meaning-oriented approach to voice “amplifies some features of reality and muffle others.”8 By contrast, Rangan conceptualizes the voice “as a form of

4 Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36, no.3 (Spring 1983): 20. 5 Ibid., 18. 6 Ibid., 20. 7 Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction,” 280. 8 Pooja Rangan, “Auditing the Call Centre Voice: Accented Speech and Listening in Sorali Gulati’s Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005),” In Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary, ed. Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore, (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 33. 2

audibility” that “operates in ways that are both less literal than spoken words and more concrete than mere metaphor.”9 Similarly, Annabel Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore scrutinize “the sense-making imperatives of language that has dominated documentary studies” while simultaneously turning attention to “sonic capacities of human and non- human voices.”10 These current studies undermine the documentary’s discursive regime that gives a secondary status to the voice. Such recent studies, in parallel with the work of

Mladen Dolar, escape the grid of approaching the voice as “a vanishing mediator” that “is the material support of bringing about meaning, yet it does not contribute to it itself.”11

These inquiries shift attention from visual referentiality to sonic materiality, stressing both phonic utterances as well as qualities of sound such as sighs and tones. This departure from metaphorical discourse towards the materiality of voice opens up new channels for rethinking the voice of documentary.

The emphasis on the materiality of voice incorporates a new engagement, especially paying attention to the work of sound studies scholars. For example, Don Ihde highlights the importance of “auditory experience,” suggesting that listening to sounds creates “the richness of primary experience.”12 Likewise, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, the experience of listening goes beyond the meaning-oriented sense of the world, generating a new understanding of multiple senses.13 Consistent with these studies, listening to documentary subjects allows us to discover the relationship between the

9 Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction,” 280. 10 Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore, “Introduction: Documentary’s Vocal Projections,” 1-2. 11 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 15. 12 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (Albany: University of New York Press, 2007), 13. 13 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, 36. 3

embodied dimension of voice and lived experiences. The embodied dimension of the voice bears the reminder that bodies speak to us in a documentary. Documentary listening, as Irina Leimbacher puts it, opens the way for “affective and existential contact.”14

This thesis sets out to listen to the plurality of affect ingrained in sonic events. If

“the work of art is a bloc of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects,” as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, listening to multiple voices plunges us into a multiplicity of affect.15 By proposing the term “affective listening,” the thesis rests on the assumption that Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016) and Sarah Polley’s Stories We

Tell (2012) can be understood through affective engagement. Rather than privileging a meaning-oriented engagement with the voice of documentary, affective listening assumes a direct relationship between the materiality of voice and embodied experiences of documentary subjects. The experience of affective listening suggests that the materiality of voice goes hand in hand with bodily expressions. Affective listening helps us to overcome the limitations of documentary’s metaphorical understanding of voice. Both

Cameraperson and Stories We Tell invite us to engage in auditory experiences in which we can listen to how bodies speak to us. Also, affective engagement indicates that multiple feelings are bound up with corporeal memories. This thesis intends to reveal the plurality of affect at the intersection of sonic events and corporeal memories.

14 Irina Leimbacher, “Hearing Voice(s): Experiments with Documentary Listening,” Discourse 39, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 298. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 164. 4

Chapter 2: Listening to Corporeal Memories in Cameraperson

Cameraperson begins with a prologue in which the high-pitched sound of chirping birds permeates the dark screen. Accompanying text written by the filmmaker

Kirsten Johnson is seen on the screen:

For the past 25 years I have worked as a documentary

cinematographer. I originally shot the following footage for other

films, but here I ask you to see it as my memoir. These are the

images that have marked me and leave me wondering still. With

love.

At first glance, Johnson’s textual voice—intensified by her initials appearing below the text—assumes a position of power, the power that emanates from the non-diegetic world of the film. The disembodied voice of the text seems to establish an omnipotent authority over the diegetic world of the film. However, Johnson subverts the implied sovereignty of the disembodied voice, as the opening of the film advances. Her embodied experiences incorporate the haunting and vivid memories of a documentary cinematographer, echoing throughout the film, similar to the melody of chirping birds that echoes in the screen space.

As soon as the preface fades out, a new title—accompanied by the same melody of singing birds—appears on the screen: Foča, Bosnia. From this moment on, the titles 5

attempt to organize the fragmented structure of the film, indicating where the original footage was shot without referencing the specific films. In Foča, Johnson’s camera zooms in on a male shepherd riding a white horse and herding sheep along a rural road. A low- angle shot shows the shepherd looking directly into the lens, smiling and gesturing toward Johnson. In response to him, we hear Johnson giggling behind the camera.

Johnson follows the shepherd with a hand-held camera as the images jiggle on the screen.

We listen to a medley of sounds: the flow of disconnected words in both English and

Bosnian, and non-linguistic utterances such as laughter. Thereafter, Johnson begins running down the road in the hope of finding the right composition for the scene; thus, the resulting images are shaky and erratic for at least ten seconds.

As soon as the preface fades out, a new title—accompanied by the same melody of singing birds—appears on the screen: Foča, Bosnia. From this moment on, the titles attempt to organize the fragmented structure of the film, indicating where the original footage was shot without referencing the specific films. In Foča, Johnson’s camera zooms in on a male shepherd riding a white horse and herding sheep along a rural road. A low- angle shot shows the shepherd looking directly into the lens, smiling and gesturing toward Johnson. In response to him, we hear Johnson giggling behind the camera.

Johnson follows the shepherd with a hand-held camera as the images jiggle on the screen.

We listen to a medley of sounds: the flow of disconnected words in both English and

The next low-angle shot features the shepherd and a group of bleating sheep from a distance. Johnson’s hand emerges from the left and pulls green blades of grass from the ground. The scene comes to an end, as we hear Johnson’s breath behind the camera. The entire sequence makes it clear that Johnson’s hand in front of the camera and her voice behind the camera undermine the indirect authority of the textual voice in the prologue.

The sequence shifts the focus from the disembodied voice to the materiality of voice, giving us a sense of Johnson’s physical as well as existential contact with nature and people. The sequence sets the tone for the rest of the film, addressing affective listening in miniature. Affective listening reveals the connection between the materiality of voice and corporeality, in a similar way to the blending of Johnson’s own voice and hand. As the film unfolds, affective listening indicates that bodies are deeply inscribed in traces of worldly experiences. Rather than focusing solely on what people say to us, affective listening demands our attention to bodily sensations and expressions for the rest of the film.

A new title lingers on the screen: Nodaway County, Missouri. A long take offers a panoramic landscape view of a highway, a car moving down the road and a storm approaching in the gray sky. As the opening credits start to roll, the sound of crickets permeates the screen. The sound of crickets recalls and joins the chorus of singing birds in the prologue. The audible but invisible presence of the crickets attests to the existence of multiple senses camouflaged in the panoramic view of the highway. In other words, the richness of soundscape is hidden in plain sight. Later, the roar of thunder and a flash of lightning suddenly fills the sky, causing Johnson to gasp in surprise. This sound breaks

down the vocal hierarchy associated with “vococentrism.” As Michel Chion points out,

“vococentrism” puts a priority on speech acts, all of which is assigned to convey the message of the filmic text. According to Chion, “vococentrism” ignores all other sonic elements ranging from whispers to sighs, privileging what the words signify.16 Chion’s analysis heightens our sensory awareness of vocal components containing both linguistic and non-linguistic utterances. This awareness becomes clearer as we keep looking at the highway sequence. As the title of the film, Cameraperson, appears on the screen, we hear

Johnson sneeze and watch the resulting film quiver in reaction to her bodily expression.

Similar to the sound of a gasp, Johnson is caught up in her sneeze at this moment.

Johnson’s film centers on the carnal density of auditory experience, diverting our attention from the metaphorical significance of the voice to the materiality of voice. The film brings the embodied materiality of sonic elements to the fore: the blending of human and non-human voices as well as non-linguistic and pre-phonic sounds such as laughter, giggles, breath, gasps, and sneezes. Consistent with affective listening, Cameraperson suggests that bodily expressions characterize the voice of the text.

Once the film’s opening credits come to an end, a new title is seen on the screen:

Brooklyn, New York. A number of close-ups, accompanied by the diegetic low-pitched beat of a rap song, depict a male boxer—James Wilkins, whose name appears below the screen—warming up in the locker room before a boxing match. One of the shots shows

Wilkins sitting on a bench next to a man of color, presumably his coach, who starts talking to Johnson. While the man tells her: “Nothing wrong with being close,” Johnson

16 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6. 8

replies: “That is what I always say.” This conversation reminds us of Johnson’s physical contact with nature and people, pointing to corporeal memories of a documentary cinematographer whose voice is resonant with the world and others. In this scene, a boom microphone is also seen within the frame, evoking the image of Johnson’s hand in front of the camera in Foča, Bosnia. The visibility of the boom microphone implies that the footage includes technical glitches. Johnson’s collage work does not attempt to minimize the chances and errors inherent in filmmaking. The remnants of the former films are tied to the remnants of memories and constitute the imperfections of Cameraperson. This scene gestures towards the shared experiences among the film crew, blurring the lines between the cameraperson and boom operator. The film highlights the importance of labor manifested in the bodily experiences of the film crew.

Later, a medley of disjointed scenes appears on the screen. We notice a sense of unity among the chaos: all the shots show people walking through the streets and roads of the world. There are no title cards or labels to locate the images, but we hear various ambient sounds. We see a group of African people walking in a rural area, a female marching band playing a song as they walk along an avenue. Johnson joins the chorus of people: the shaky footage depicts her shadow, cast on the street, as she hurtles herself and her camera into a massive demonstration. The sense of harmony offers a mode of auditory experience: walking through the ambient sounds. The melodic fragments come to an abrupt end, as the screen is obliterated by a scratch and noise. By juxtaposing a set of images and sounds—taken from various locations—Cameraperson constructs itself as a montage film. In this sense, the above-mentioned obliteration of screen by the glitch

effect self-reflexively draws attention to the film’s own production. From this moment on, the melody of voices from all around the world is bound up with a multiplicity of affect as well as corporeal memories.

Corporeal dimensions of memories rise to the surface as the film advances. The film features fragmented interviews with individuals whose accounts of past experiences remain embedded in their bodily gestures, postures, and sensations. Their verbal expressions become inseparable from their corporeality. For instance, Johnson interviews a young man named Najibullah Afghan in Kabul, Afghanistan. As the interview unfolds, we learn that he lost his left eye after being hit by shrapnel during an explosion in Kabul, an event that also took his brother’s life. In a close-up of Najibullah’s face, Johnson’s voice-off is heard saying: “Tell me things you remember about your brother.” Then, the young man begins to tell his recollections in Dari—a variation of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan—while covering his left eye with his left hand. The hand over his left eye gives the impression that he is still haunted by memories of violence. Afterwards, he says: “… all I remember was my brother’s voice. My brother screamed ‘Ahh,’ and then it was over. I was knocked out and I fell down. And then after a few seconds, I shouted and screamed. And then I wondered where my brother was.” In close-up, his utterances reenact moments of the past and make the sound of scream heard in the present. The sound of “Ahh” embodies what the materiality of voice can do in cinema as

Roland Barthes explains: “It suffices that the cinema captures the sound of speech close- up and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the

fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle.”17 The presence of the human muzzle continues to resonate in their conversation. Toward the end of the conversation, Johnson bursts into tears: “You were making me cry even though I do not understand the language.” Najibullah’s voice generates insights into how a body can speak to us. His corporeality, with its flesh and blood, transcends the limitations of language and makes us distinguish the materiality of voice. The materiality of his voice— its grain, timbre, and tone—constitutes a physical form of expression. Najibullah’s bodily posture reveals the affective listening, creating the shared experience between the self and other. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out, “listening must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociably

‘mine’ and ‘other,’ ‘singular’ and ‘plural.”18 In a similar vein, affective listening makes corporeal memories heard while simultaneously crossing the boundaries of self and other.

Another conversation takes place in Huntsville, Alabama, where Johnson interviews a young woman of color seeking an abortion at a health clinic. The beginning of the interview is interrupted by superimposed text, in which we learn that the woman asked that her identity be concealed. The scene depicts the woman sitting in a chair, clasping her hands together tightly between her knees. In a close-up of her knees, the woman begins speaking with Johnson. We find out that she already has a child. Now, unexpectedly pregnant with another, she is visiting the health clinic to consider having an abortion. Her trembling voice is intertwined with silences, whispers, and whimpers over the course of the interview. In this sense, the tone of the voice gives the impression that

17 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 67. 18 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, 41. 11

the words are insufficient to describe what she feels. By holding the camera in a close-up of her knees, the film also plunges us into the depths of corporeality. What affects us the most during this interview is to bear witness to her bare hands. As the woman struggles to describe her experiences, her clasped hands move back and forth across her ripped jeans.

There is a quiver in her voice as well as a quiver in her hands. The movement of her hands are intertwined with her voice-off and embody corporeal expression. Corporeality creates a new kind of hearing, as explained by Frances Dyson: “…hearing is not a discrete sense, to hear is also to be touched, both physically and emotionally.”19 Affective listening becomes a medium of perceiving worldly experiences, but it also becomes a way of being emotionally touched by corporeal memories.

The next interview takes place in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Johnson listens to a female witness of the Bosnian War. Superimposed on the images, the opening text tells us that the woman, a Bosnian Muslim, was a former resident of Foča. The film depicts the woman sitting on a couch in a living room, clasping her hands on her knees without revealing her face. Johnson’s camera zooms in on the woman’s clasped hands and follows them throughout the interview. She struggles to describe what she experienced at the Partizan Sports Hall in Foča in 1999. Her first words: “I survived all the worst.” We learn that a Serbian soldier raped her and another woman. In a shadowy light, we witness to the woman’s hands. The light playing over her wrinkled hands becomes the bearer of what cannot be conveyed by language. Her speech is interrupted with sighs and silences, reinforcing the impression that her hands bear the traces of history, rather than the words

19 Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 4. 12

spoken. By focusing on close-ups of hands, Cameraperson prevents us from seeing who is speaking. As Salomé Voegelin demonstrates: “Seeing is always happens in a meta- position, away from the seen… Seeing is believing.”20 Johnson’s film, on the other hand, makes extensive use of hands in close-up. People’s hands fill the screen space—invoking the image of Johnson’s own hand pulling green blades of grass from the ground at the beginning of the film. Cameraperson thus puts us in a position where we listen to embodied voices while being immersed in the ocean of corporeality.

Corporeality comes into play once again as the film cuts to a sequence where another documentary filmmaker, Kathy Leichter, is seen on screen in her own movie about her mother’s suicide. In Westport, New York, she is sitting on her mother’s bed, where scattered piles of papers and clothes amassed in bags and boxes bear witness to the remnants of her mother’s life; we understand that her deceased mother was obsessed with collecting all different kinds of objects. Leichter addresses Johnson and screams: “I am sick of it!” while furiously throwing around stacks of papers. Johnson wants her to explain how and why she feels frustrated. Leichter shakes her head in disagreement, accompanied by a deep sigh. She screams: “I am done with all this stuff” and continues tossing around papers. Leichter ends up sitting down on the floor and covering her eyes with her own hands: “I just feel like now I have to clean this up. Now I have to figure out what I am doing. I have to get this back in order.” Her emotional unpredictability is interrupted by the sound of rumbling: outside we see the unpredictability of nature in the form of snow sliding from the roof and piling up in the backyard. “That was crazy”

20 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), xi, xii. 13

Johnson says. And the sound of laughter echoes in the room. As Trinh T. Minh-ha notes:

“The purposeful, object-oriented camera eye does not allow any filmed event to be simply fortuitous. Everything must be bathed with meaning.”21 Johnson’s camera documents fortuitous events that resonate in harmony with each other.

Johnson’s collage work also includes personal footage depicting her relatives. At

Headquarters Sheep Ranch, Wyoming, the film features Johnson’s mother, Catherine Joy

Johnson, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. In a rural setting, she enters the frame from the left and walks out of the frame to the right. Then, the film cuts to a scene in which the mother is positioned in the center of the frame and looks directly into the camera and says: “You caught me.” This utterance makes Johnson and her mother laugh and giggle for a few seconds. Later, Johnson asks her mother for permission to keep shooting and recording, but she does not respond. Instead, she gives Johnson a puzzled and blank look, leaving the impression that she is also caught up in nature. Johnson calls out to her mother again, however her call dissolves into the sound of the howling wind.

Later on, in the film, we return to this pastoral sequence. A long take shows

Johnson’s mother standing in the middle of nature alongside a fence. As she starts wandering around, a strong breeze blows through the bushes and pulls her mother into the middle of the frame. She seems to become engulfed in nature: her clothes flap against her body and her hair blows as the wind rushes over her. The sequence goes beyond the limitations of language, as Don Ihde points out: “For the human listener there is a

21 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity,” In When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York & London: Routledge, 1991), 53. 14

multiplicity of senses in which there is word in the wind.”22 In a similar vein, for the documentary listener there is a multiplicity of affect in the middle of nature. The howling wind bears the traces of bodily experiences. Johnson’s mother’s posture embodies affective listening, as she is caught up in nature. We listen to the howling wind at the intersection of the materiality of voice and the physicality of lived experience. Her mother’s corporeality, with its flesh and blood, is dragged by the irresistible force of the howling wind, evoking her memory loss. Also, this sequence reveals the deep connection between Kirsten Johnson and her mother, who once was a photographer. The daughter as cameraperson pays tribute to her photographer mother and her labor as a source of true inspiration. Johnson materializes her affection for her mother and her memory loss and combines it with the intangible dimension of sound. The howling wind becomes an affective expression: Johnson emotionally tries to resist her mother’s memory loss while recording her in the middle of nature. Listening to the wind puts us in a transparent position where we are touched by multiple feelings.

Braided with the depiction of her mother in the wind, text appears on the screen:

“Beaux Arts, Washington. My childhood home.” The sound of chirping birds reverberates across the screen space, multiplying the melody of birds in the prologue.

Next, the film depicts the corpse of a bird lying on the ground in a shadowy light cast by surrounding trees. Accompanied by the sound of chirping birds, this scene leaves us perplexed. The film cuts to another scene where Johnson’s father and Johnson’s twins watch a cartoon on TV. In a close-up, we see a plaque dedicated to Johnson’s mother. At

22 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 4. 15

this moment, we realize that her mother has already passed away. Tying the depiction of her mother’s body with the corpse of the bird, the film addresses corporeal memories embedded in sonic events. The melody of birds oscillates between life and death as well as self and others, combined with corporeal memories of a documentary cinematographer. Johnson’s haunting and vivid memories document her affective and existential contact with people and nature over her twenty-five-year career. As Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari note, a work of art allows us to “extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations.”23 In this sense, Johnson’s mother posture caught up in the howling wind unfolds a bloc of sensations and establishes the connection between a multiplicity of affect and corporeal memory inscribed in the soundscape.

23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 167. 16

Chapter 3: Listening to Fluid Voices in Stories We Tell

Cameraperson builds a generational bridge between the cinematographer daughter and the photographer mother. Johnson materializes her corporeal memories while simultaneously aiming to honor her mother memory and her legacy. Stories We

Tell follows a similar path: the actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley intends to bring her late mother to life while creating a memory work. Polley’s film is engaged primarily in dealing with the life of her mother, Diane Polley, who had a tangible impact on other’s lives as a lover, mother, stage actress, and friend. Stitching together the voices of extended family members and friends along with home video footage, reenacted scenes, photographs, and newspaper clippings, Polley sets out to chronicle Diane’s life at the intersection of vocal and visual plurality.

This audio-visual collage relies heavily on a medley of voices, as pointed out by

Polley’s sister Susy at the beginning of the film. Sarah asks Susy to tell the entire story of their family, giving priority to Diane’s life events. In response to the request, Susy says:

“Like a medley.” The documentary becomes inseparable from Polley’s late mother personality and voice. In terms of her personality, both Susy and John—Diane’s children from her first marriage—identify the distinguishing characteristics of their mother: the former says: “she was infectious, enthusiastic, and excited about everything,” and the 17

latter describes her as “having a contagious personality.” Geoff—a stage actor who performed in the play Toronto with Diane—places a special emphasis on her voice: “You cannot talk about Diane, I do not think, without talking about her laugh. It infused every situation that she was in.” In a similar vein, Mark—Diane’s son from her second marriage—remembers his mother’s voice: “My memory of mother is of someone who was very loud… She was a fun person to have in an audience because she laughed loud.”

By juxtaposing the voices of individuals with the memories they bring back, Diane’s voice becomes infused in the voice of the film. In this regard, Polley pays homage to her mother’s life by constructing a medley of voices.

Stories We Tell creates an atmosphere in which a medley of voices becomes fluid.

Vocal conventions of documentary such as voice-over and interview are displaced and shuffled in various ways over the course of the film. Michael—Polley’s father—recounts his version of the story through voice-over narration, but he also features in the on-screen interviews. The director Polley listens to the corporeal memories of people, yet her own memories are also heard through voice-over. Harry—the Canadian film producer and

Polley’s biological father—relives his own memories of Diane during his interviews, but his voice-over reverberates through email exchanges with Polley. Interview subjects— more specifically Polley’s siblings—are asked to revisit their memories of Diane; however, they also address the director directly by raising questions or initiating conversations. Voices become fluid because they subvert the stable and permanent position of vocal conventions such as voice-over and interview. They escape the trap of being only material support to the extended family members’ speech acts. The fluidity

makes us realize how corporeal memories—attached to bodily remembrances—vary from person to person and from affect to affect. Listening to fluid voices immerses us in a multiplicity of affect as well as in corporeal memories.

Given the importance of Diane’s significant and lasting impacts on people’s lives, the film focuses mainly on one part of Diane’s life: in 1978 Diane had a love affair in

Montréal while performing in the play Toronto. This imperfectly hidden relationship—it was an open secret to her friends—marks the beginning of a set of events that impacted many people’s lives in both direct and indirect ways. The ultimate result of this affair was

Sarah Polley herself, and the question of her parentage consumes a large portion of the film. Polley’s search for her biological father originated in a joke among family members: Sarah “didn’t look like” her father Michael. This family story—instigated by her brother John who once overheard Diane on the phone telling someone that, “she was pregnant and not sure who the father was”—had been known amongst the siblings for many years. The story stayed alive and gained momentum after Diane died of cancer when Sarah was eleven. In her late twenties, Polley embarked on a mission to unearth the secrets of her mother’s love affair. Polley contacted a well-known film producer, Harry

Gulkin, a man who worked with her mother and who she remembers hearing about. She meets him in Montréal, hoping to gain insight into what took place back in 1978. Harry confirmed her mother’s affair, and when asked if he knows who Sarah’s biological father is, he offered a more surprising answer, “me.”

A sequence reenacts this moment of revelation near the middle of the film. This entire sequence elucidates how vocal and visual plurality as well as reality and

representation are combined. The sequence begins with an email exchange in which the voices of Harry and Sarah are entwined off-screen—a gesture toward their attachment— while arranging a meeting. The absolute clarity of their voices stands in stark contrast to the accompanying grainy and soft images. The tone of their voices makes it clear that their words are rehearsed. By contrast, the noisy images evoke the aesthetic of home video footage, making direct appeal to the footage circulated in the film. From the very beginning, the sequence tries to blur the lines between real life and represented events.

The complexity of reality becomes clearer when reenacted scenes depict Polley and

Harry meeting at Méliès Café in Montréal sitting at the table and talking to one another.

However, their voices remain completely unheard, as the accompanying soft piano melody creates an enchanted atmosphere. The combination of mute voices and piano evokes the quality of a silent film, creating the aura of revelation. Filled with the sense of expectation, the grainy images are intercut with Harry’s interview. His soothing voice provides details about the conversation while expressing his affection for Sarah.

Harry’s account of history is interrupted with Michael’s voice-over narration and interviews with Polley’s siblings who all recount their version of the meeting. A medley of voices reverberates across the screen, emphasizing the importance of this revelation for the entire family. This vocal plurality creates a sense of tension, turning the soft melodic piano solo into a melancholic tune. The existing tension comes to an end, as

Harry unveils the secret: he is Sarah’s biological father. His thrilled voice is intercut with

Michael’s rough voice: the contrast between the tone of their voices hints at the complexity of family history. The sense of complexity becomes obvious when Michael

says in the voice-over: “Sarah is speechless.” The sequence shows Sarah talking to her biological father and laughing at café. Her voice remains mute, however her visible laugh complicates Michael’s narration. Sarah’s visible but silent laugh also reminds us of the stage actor Geoff’s emphasis on Diane’s laugh: “You cannot talk about Diane, I do not think, without talking about her laugh. It infused every situation that she was in.” Sarah reenacts the real-life event while playing multiple roles: actress and daughter. The combination of her muteness and her visible laugh invokes the spirit of her late mother.

Sarah’s muteness embodies her affection for her late mother. Her visible laugh creates a sense of incarnation, gesturing toward the shared energy and acting career among mother and daughter.

This sequence also embodies what Jared F. Green calls “documentary effect” that is, “the semiotic process by which the real is produced as a symptom of its transformation into image.”24 Green attempts to complicate the binary opposition between fiction and non-fiction as well as representation and reality, the opposition that is rooted in cinema history. Referring to the films of the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès—whereas the former features scenes from everyday life (realism), the latter creates stories (fiction)—

Green contradicts this dualistic assumption, accentuating “the reciprocal relationship between cinematic artifice and realism… The Lumières’ attention to scenes of everyday life did indeed formulate cinema’s realist conventions, but it took the elaborately fantastical films of Méliès to train spectators to regard the Lumières’ films as real.”25

24 Jared F. Green, “This Reality Which Is Not One: Flaherty, Buñuel and the Irrealism of Documentary Cinema,” In Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. Garry D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2006), 67. 25 Ibid., 67. 21

Invested in this reciprocal interaction between actual and fictional, Green defines documentary as a metatext, which “allows us to observe the world and the mediation of the world at once.”26

Taking a cue from Green’s analysis, my reading of the aforementioned sequence epitomizes how Stories We Tell as a metatext constructs documentary effect, the effect that gives unmediated and mediated access to the world at once. To put it another way, the sequence addresses both actual and fictional events that ensure unmediated and mediated access to the story. In real life, Sarah Polley is reunited with her biological father while tracing her mother’s love affair in Montréal. Michael’s voice-over narration and interviews with Polley’s siblings —through the staged sequences—follow those events as the revelations occurred to Polley. At the same time, the entire sequence depends on a reenactment: Polley and Harry impersonate the real-life event. The grainy and scratchy images flickering on the screen accompanies this staged sequence and resembles a kind of home video footage. The real-life event comes into contact with the staged event and generates “documentary effect” on the occasion of a meeting between

Polley and Harry. The rest of the film maintains the audio-visual collage in tandem with documentary effect.

The acknowledgement of this reality sets off a domino effect that eventually results in the production of Stories We Tell. Polley’s film creates fluid voices that reveal the affective dimension of memories. For example, Michael’s voice-over narration in the third-person—based upon his written account of the family story—serves to destabilize

26 Ibid., 72. 22

and diffuse the authority of voice-over commentary. According to Charles Wolfe, the disembodied voice—pertaining to the “Voice of God narration—usually assumes “a position of absolute mastery and knowledge outside the spatial and temporal boundaries of the social world the film depicts.”27 In a similar vein, Mary Ann Doane proposes that this absolute immunity “produces its truth because the voice is not localizable, because it cannot be yoked to a body.”28 By contrast, Michael’s voice-over emerging from the diegetic world of the film does not attest to superiority over the images and other voices.

From the very beginning, Michael’s narrative text—which arises as a byproduct of his discovery that he is not Polley’s biological father—becomes embroidered with his rasping and accented voice. His timbre subverts the ideal characteristics of voice-over commentary—typically narrated by a smooth and deep male voice. Michael’s voice, as

Mladen Dolar puts it, “makes us aware of the material support of the voice.”29 The disembodied voice turns into the embodied, accented and rough voice.

Stories We Tell, accompanied by reenacted scenes, begins with a prologue in which Michael’s voice reads—from off-screen—an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace: “When you are in the middle of a story, it is not a story at all… It is only afterwards that it becomes a story at all, when you are telling it to yourself or to someone else.” This excerpt is woven into Michael’s storytelling, mingling with the title of the film: Stories We Tell. His third-person narrative intersects with the voices of other subjects, yet it dissolves into his first-person interviews. His voice is not localizable, but

27 Charles Wolfe, “Historicizing the ‘Voice of God’: The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary,” Film History 9, no. 2 (1997): 149. 28 Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 42. 29 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 20. 23

not in the sense that it emanates from absolute power. It is not localizable because his voice oscillates between his narration and interviews, in a similar way to his way of filming: “every time you see a group of people in my Super 8 movies, every time you see a few people you get interested, the camera goes away and looks at the roof of a house or something, or disappears in the distance.” In this sense, his voice-over narration loses its privileged position.

For example, Michael—in the third-person—narrates the story of how Diane fell in love with him, while she was watching his performance—as the leading actor Mick— the play The Caretakers in 1965. They are introduced after one of the performances.

Later, they act together on stage in The Condemned of Altona. Superimposed on the grainy reenacted scenes, his story is intercut with the interviews, where Michael—in the first-person—speaks to us: “I think Diane fell in love not with me, but with the character

I was playing on stage… It is such an exciting and dominating character.” Michael’s interviews undermine the vocal hierarchy of voice-over narration, that is to say, his humorous speech breaks down his “exciting and dominating character.” His sense of humor becomes clearer as his voice is intertwined with the voices of extended family members whose memories provide details about his personality and marriage with Diane.

The film underlines the differences between Michael and Diane: whereas the former was introverted and passionless, the latter was gregarious. In an interview setting, Michael, with a laugh, goes further: “I used to think a night with a dead wombat might turn out to be more exciting than a night with me after you have been with me for twelve years.”

Michael’s humorous voice—generated by intermittent contact between voice-over

narration and interviews—makes it clear that he does not exercise absolute authority over the diegetic world of the film. Self-depreciating humor, as Stella Bruzzi points out, constitutes “an ironic narration” and shatters the implied mastery of voice-over commentary.30

Continuing to shape the narrative arc of the film, Michael’s voice-over chronicles the family events. However, his narration does not cover the whole family history. For example, it remains silent about Diane’s first marriage, suggesting that his narration does not act as a governing authority. His flawed narration—including his irony, repetitions and digressions—is connected to his fluid voice that oscillates between voice-over and interview. He has neither stable position nor center of power. He is assigned to read the story as a “punishment” from off-screen—he uses this term, “punishment,” before he starts reading the text at a recording studio. Yet he is seen sitting around in a messy living room or the interview room, where he is imprisoned. His kitchen is piled up with dirty dishes and his desk is surrounded by cigarette butts. He is an emotional storyteller who, subjugated to corporeal memories, makes digressions and talks to his comrades: “Flies are frequently my companions in this loft. They invariably arrive only one at a time, and I do my best to make them feel comfortable. I told you already that I am not a particularly sociable person. There is no doubt that I am more ease with flies. Or at least solitary ones.

I must confess that I talk to them and I am not at all discomforted by their failure to reply.

And they are alone, like me.” The power of storytelling as embodied by Miachael as storyteller, thus does not imply an authorial position and voice, rather it provides us with

30 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (New York & London: Routledge, 2000), 51- 57. 25

the shared stories. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, “experience which is passed on mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.”31 Michael’s storytelling emphasizes the shared experiences transferred from mouth to mouth.

Diane’s two children from both her first marriage (Susy and John) and the one from her second (Mark), all undertake the primary role of commenting on issues surrounding their mother’s broken previous marriage. Their verbal expressions fluctuate between voice-off and interviews while pulling corporeal memories from the wreckage of the past. Their remembrances and feelings are braided with visual threads of grainy reenacted scenes, family photographs and newspaper clippings. Drawing on this visual support, John recalls the specific details from this marriage: Diane was unhappy because her life “was very regulated and controlled” by her husband George. According to Mark,

George was the person that Diane’s parents “would have been very happy with. He had money and a good job.” Diane’s unhappiness eventually propels her to leave the marriage, though Susy explains the catalyst: “The trigger that compelled her to leave was that she really fell in love with Michael. She saved herself.” The marriage ends in divorce and the separation of Diane from Susy and John. Diane loses custody of her children as

John points out: “It was apparently the first time in Canada that a woman had ever lost custody of the kids because she left her husband for another man.”

Then the long-term impact of this separation comes to the forefront. Susy and

John’s memories are intertwined with multiple feelings. For example, they struggle to elucidate how they felt a mingling of yearning and grief because they were only able to

31 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Boooks, 1969), 84. 26

see their mother once a month. Additionally, they suffered physical and emotional abuse from their stepmother and caretakers throughout their childhood. Mark’s trembling voice tries to manifest multi-dimensional scale of affect: “She was not there to protect their kids, but my mother must have thought, ‘What did I do wrong that led to this?” Later, he continues: “I think the impact must have been terrible and must have made her sad all the time…Maybe she was just keeping busy to forget the pain.” This entire section demonstrates that the fluctuation of voices relates to affective memories. The bodily recollections are plural because Diane’s life affected her children’s lives in many different ways. We thus see and hear the plurality of affect inscribed in corporeal memories of individuals.

The plurality of affect becomes even more obvious as soon as Harry unleashes a flood of his memories. His voice—analogous to that of the others—proceeds fluidly: his interviews intersect with his voice-over via email exchanges with Polley. In an interview setting, Harry brings his love affair with Diane into the light. Their love story binds the multilayered facets of the cyclical history attached to the plurality of affect. Diane fell in love with Michael on the occasion of The Caretakers while grappling with an unhappy marriage with her then-husband George. In this occurrence, Diane was an audience member; Michael was the leading actor. In comparison with this case, Harry fell in love with Diane on the occasion of Toronto while Diane was handling her disappointment with Michael whose voice-over narration sums up the setback: “Diane had often complained of Michael’s coldness towards her… Michael knew he disappointed her…”

History repeats itself, but with nuances: Diane was a cast member; Harry was an

audience member in Toronto which took place in Montréal. These cyclical coincidences seem to have at least one thing in common. As Roland Barthes explains, the loved being is caught in action on stage by “the amorous subject” who “perceives the other as a whole… It is the other as a whole who produces in him or her an aesthetic vision: s/he praises the other for being perfect.”32 Michael is caught in action on stage by Diane who is besotted with him. Later, Diane is caught in action on stage by Harry who is besotted with her.

Given the importance of Harry’s memories, we listen to them as a lover’s discourse. As Roland Barthes explains: “the lover is not to be reduced to a simple symptomal subject, but rather that we hear in his voice what is unreal and intractable.”33

Harry’s voice is intractable because it is deeply ingrained in his lived experiences. His voice oscillates between interview and voice-over. His voice flows through bodily recollections. For instance, he expresses his affection toward Diane: “When you are in love, you become utterly selfish… You just want to consume the object of your love and nothing else exist.” Similarly, Diane’s friend Deirdre adds that “Harry developed this great, grand passion for Diane.” Later, Harry delves into the details of their “open secret” affair, particularly giving emphasis to life events surrounding the birth of Sarah Polley and afterwards. Their relationship continued to develop for a couple of years. After Sarah

Polley was born, the relationship, according to him, existed as “a pretty open thing.” The film cuts to interviews with Diane’s friends once Harry says: “You need witnesses who

32 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 19. 33 Ibid., 3. 28

confirm you.” Diane’s friend Claire casts a doubt on Harry’s bodily remembrances: “It was very discreet. I do not think it was really common knowledge.” In a similar vein,

Diane’s friend Victoria articulates: “I told her I would never discuss it with anyone, and I never did.” This controversy arises because of the tension with “the voice of the intractable and enchanted lover” as in Roland Barthes’ emphasis on the lover’s discourse.34

Harry’s intractable and emotional voice reaches a climax at the intersection of his voice-over and interview. His tone of voice is predicated on the fact that he felt obliged to keep himself away from his daughter over the years. He recalls what Michael’s sister

Anne told him at Diane’s funeral: “Her heart belonged to Michael.” His reunion with

Polley years after puts himself in a situation, where he perceives both “a great joy and sadness.” Email exchanges between Polley and Harry in voice-over celebrates family reunification that corresponds to their “the honeymoon period.” Nevertheless, the email exchanges delineate the ways in which the father-daughter pair experienced conflict.

Their “difficult period” revolves around the question of how the history of the extended family can be materialized. Whereas Harry wants to give weight to his memories with

Diane, Polley desires to include all different voices and their memories. The former is interested in publishing his memoir; the latter intends to make a documentary about the family history. Near the end of the film, Harry shares his frustration with this medley of voices:

34 Ibid., 22-24. 29

First of all, there are the parties to an incident—those who were there and who

were directly affected by it. Then, there is a circle around that of people who were

affected tangentially because of their relationship to the principal parties. And

there is another concentric circle further out there which basically has heard or

been told by one of the principal players about it. And all of these may have

different narratives and these narratives are shaped in part by their relationship to

the person who told it to them and by the events. One does not get the truth

simply by hearing what their reactions are… The same set of circumstances will

affect different people in different ways. Not that there are different truths. There

are different reactions to particular events… The crucial function of art is to tell

the truth and to find the truth in a situation.

Harry’s discourse resonates in Roland Barthes’ remarks: “every episode of language refers to the sensation of truth; the amorous subject experiences in thinking of his love, either because he believes he is the only one to see the loved object in its truth, or because he defines the specialty of his own requirement as a truth.”35 Harry’s emotional voice tries to highlight his authority while appealing to his truth claim. However, his voice embodies what it is at stake in the film. There is a multiplicity of affect because a series of events impacted different people in different ways. His voice thus attests to affective as well as corporeal memories.

Sarah Polley’s discovery of a new father propels her to make a film about her late mother. Stories We Tell is Polley’s dedication to her mother whose life is impossible to

35 Ibid., 229. 30

pin down as a lover, mother, stage actress, and friend. There is an email exchange between Michael and Polley near the end of the film. Polley offers one final clue as to why she embarked on this journey:

Michael: “My dear Sarah, when you make a documentary about your own

discovery of a new father, are you doing so to avoid your own deeper concerns of

its real impact on you? Is that why you describe it as a search for the vagaries of

truth and the unreliability of memory, rather than a search for a father?”

Polley: “Hey Dad, I have been thinking a lot about your last email. Maybe you are

right. Maybe there is something underneath my need to make this film that I have

been denying. Every time I feel I have my footing, I lose it. I cannot figure out

why I am exposing us all in this way. It is really embarrassing, to be honest. Have

I totally lost my mind, trying to reconstruct the past from other people’s words?

Trying to form her? Is this the tsunami she unleashed when she went, and all of us

still flailing in her wake, trying to put together in the wreckage, and her slipping

away from us, over and over again, just as we begin to see her face?”

As this email exchange demonstrates, Polley intends to construct the life of her late mother from the extended family’s memories. All different recollections rise the surface through fluid voices that are bound up with multiple feelings.

Chapter 4: Conclusion

An examination of Cameraperson and Stories We Tell addresses the role of two female directors, Kirsten Johnson and Sarah Polley, as they create memory work.

Cameraperson becomes invested in the lived experiences of documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. The documentary consists of interviews with social subjects and observational records from all around the world while simultaneously documenting Johnson’s embodied experiences over her twenty-five-year career. Stories

We Tell originates in actress and director Sarah Polley’s search for her biological father.

Polley sets out to chronicle her late mother Diane’s life as well as Diane’s long-term impact on her extended family members. These directors’ practices open up the way for a relational approach to lived experiences. Both of the filmmakers’ voices, memories and feelings are deeply connected to others’ experiences. Affective listening shows that the existence of self remains attached to the existence of others.

The relational aspect of worldly experiences points to a common theme: both directors pay homage to their late mothers by making these documentaries. Johnson and

Polley express their admiration, appreciation, and affection for their mothers; they also engage in dialogue with their late mothers’ artistic practices. These two daughters seek to engender a maternal and generational continuity by creating memory work. In this sense, 32

Cameraperson establishes a deep connection between Johnson and her late mother

Catherine Joy Johnson. The film features Johnson’s mother, who was suffering from

Alzheimer’s disease. The most emotional sequence takes place in a rural setting, where

Johnson materializes her affection for her mother. This long take shows Johnson’s mother caught up in nature: a strong wind drags her body into the middle of the frame alongside a fence. Johnson’s mother’s posture is immersed in the sound of howling wind, evoking the feeling of inevitable memory loss. At the same time, Johnson as a cameraperson tries to fend off memory loss while capturing this haunting sequence. This memorable sequence allows Johnson to pay tribute to her mother’s labor and artistry as a source of inspiration. The cinematographer daughter, to put it another way, expresses her gratitude to her photographer mother.

Stories We Tell reveals the relationship between Sarah Polley and her late mother

Diane Polley. The actress and filmmaker daughter makes a documentary about her mother’s enchanting life. Polley interviews extended family members and friends, trying to flesh out Diane’s story as a lover, mother, stage actress, and friend. Polley weaves her mother’s life stories into a multiplicity of voices, evoking the feeling that her mother’s life cannot be reduced to a single narrative. All the different accounts, as the title of the film alludes to, recognize the uniqueness of a life. Dedicating the documentary to Diane,

Polley demonstrates her affection for her late mother. Polley also acts in a number of reenacted scenes over the course of the film, recalling her late mother’s career as a stage actress. Her “acting” in the role of daughter intends to highlight the importance of parental influence and bond. A significant sequence takes places at the Méliès Café in

Montréal, where Sarah meets her biological father Harry. Sarah acts in this reenacted sequence as both daughter and actress. Not only does Sarah show her affection for her mother, but she also celebrates the artistry that was passed on from mother to daughter.

Both Kirsten Johnson and Sarah Polley embody the primary purpose of this thesis: affective engagement. First, they create an auditory experience in which we listen to multiple voices that are bound up with multiple senses as well as memories. Second, those memories are deeply ingrained in their affection for their late mothers. Their memory work affectively provides a generational transition from mothers to daughters.

Both Johnson and Polley engage in their mothers’ artistry in the guise of affective listening. Johnson listens to her mother whose body is dragged by the irresistible force of howling wind. Polley listens to the extended family members while constructing the enchanted life of her late mother.

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