Nadine Whitney: Hi Joachim. I’ve read articles where you use the term polyphonic to describe Sentimental Value would it also be considered “polyvocity” (or “polyvocality”) as it refers to the affirmation of a plurality and multiplicity of voices, experiences, and subjectivities – the many voices within the home.
Joachim Trier: That’s a great statement because you probably know polyphonic as musical terminology, but I’ll start to shake it up from now on and call it polyvocality as it means many voices that also were spread out through time. Many moments of the same place, many voices in the same timeline, many voices in the same place but a different timeline. It’s a bit scattered in a way I think. I like the idea of music. I think compositionally around films, and they are really energy beats through time
Nadine Whitney: Voices and actions through time are the echoes. The echoes that the house watches and reacts to (cracks in the walls). The house is a space of joy, trauma, loss and love. I feel it knows its inhabitants better sometimes than its inhabitants know themselves.
Joachim Trier: I agree and it’s interesting in family life how one could ask the question, “do we really know our story?” All of us having individual experiences and stories that we are negotiating continually to kind of live or to create a sense of identity together, but I imagine that the house would see a bigger picture, a bigger structure to what is transferred through generations that maybe the people were incapable of speaking up. I think that the void of the unspoken in the family is really what we’re trying to trace.
Using the house almost as an entity or character or something like that was kind of an interesting method because it ties into something the cinematic language does regardless of our intention: which is the structuring of spatial treatment. Like in any film if you have a family house and you film people come back into it at different times that takes on meaning. The repetition of scenes in the same rooms will mean something. It’s always a play whether you deal with it consciously or not.
Like in life you know when you need a staging for memories and experiences, and we thought that was kind of then cinematically funny. A challenge was how do we use this house to create a repetition of movements that mirror each other in some ways or complement each other. Psychologically complement each other.
Nadine Whitney: For example, the depression Nora is dealing with, without necessarily knowing about her grandmother. Yet, these are echoes that are passed down through familial ties.
Joachim Trier: I try to avoid, and you know I’m sure I’m completely blind to this, but I try my best to not create an ideologically limited film. I believe, for example, a lot in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theory. I’ve read my Freud and the post-Freudian thinkers like Lacan and am deeply fascinated. Many of them are dealing tremendously with almost what also could be seen as ghost stories, or in a religious context as inherited sin. I don’t want to limit the audience’s interpretation, but I try to make film behaviourally rich and textured so that different people can hopefully take different things away from.
Hopefully then the truth of the experience of inherited grief is present. Some people even now are researching the genetic possibility of trauma so maybe in ten years from now or I hope or in twenty or fifty years my film could still make sense because we experience these things. That’s where I build from for the characters.
