The voice-over technique in four films by Sarah Polley

Abstract

This article discusses the use of the voice-over technique in four films by the Canadian actress, director and screenwriter Sarah Polley: Away from Her (2006), Take This Waltz (2011) Stories We Tell (2013) and Women Talking (2022). In order to inscribe the critically neglected tool within an irreducibly audiovisual ensemble and unpack its multifaceted and multifunctional meaning-making system, a multimodal stylistic lens and toolkit have been adopted. Results show that the cinematic strategy is used across the films by the Canadian director with different extent, in different forms, and with different functions, thus showing the artist’s talent and creativity. The voice-over functions are mainly related to the enactment of processes of characterisation, narration, and screen adaptations. However, and most interestingly, the strategy is used to question and challenge the very modes and forms of these phenomena. In Away from Her, it challenges the traditional characterisation of a patient affected by Alzheimer’s disease as a passive and weak human being. In Stories We Tell, it subverts the narration process itself as univocal, linear, and stable, showing an ultimate meta-narrative concern. In Women Talking, it negotiates the process of screen adaptation, by replacing the male narrator of the adapted text with a female homodiegetic retrospective voice-over narrator as survivor and witness. Even its (almost) absence in Take this Waltz can be perceived as meaningful, as it is related to the multimodal shaping of the trope of absence that Polley presents as her main aim