The Super 8 Years: A Home Movie “We-Moir” From A Nobel Laureate
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
French author Annie Ernaux was relatively unknown in the English-speaking world before she won the Nobel Prize for literature last year.
Her best-known book, The Years — published in France in 2008 and in English translation a decade later — is an autobiography written in the third person as Ernaux ruminates on her life and the changes in French society in the six decades following the WWII.
In The Years, Ernaux describes her project as an attempt to portray “an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation,” or what Edmund White, reviewing her book in the New York Times, called a “We-moir.”
Ernaux’s intimate style is as addictive as long letters from a close friend, and The Years can lead you to a series of interconnected works (A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, A Girl’s Life, Happening, Simple Passion) that are like closeup shots on stories offered in an aerial view in The Years. Part of the pleasure of the new documentary, The Super 8 Years, is that it feels like yet another novella from the author.
Three of her books have been adapted into fictional films: The Other One (2014), A Simple Passion (2020), and most recently, Happening, about her illegal abortion when she was a student in the early 1960s, released last year. (You can read our Original-Cin review here).
But in The Super 8 Years, we go directly from the source, a short 61-minute documentary compiled from home movies written and narrated by Ernaux in collaboration with her son, David Ernaux-Briot.
The movies cover an eight-year period from 1972, when her husband Philippe Ernaux — a civil servant at the Annecy City Hall — acquired a Super 8 camera to record family life with their two sons. It ends when the Ernaux marriage ended and Philippe left with the camera, leaving Annie with custody of the two boys and the reels of Super 8 film. During most of this period, Annie, then in her thirties, was a schoolteacher, later a professor, and just beginning to get her writing career launched.
Like most people, Philippe Ernaux — the family’s adult male and therefore its designated cinematographer — used the camera to record happy moments, including birthdays, Christmases and family visits. We have scenes with Annie’s widowed working-class mother, Blanche, who lives with them and helps take care of the boys. They visit Philippe’s middle-class in-laws. Ernaux, elegant and serious, often looks awkwardly self-conscious as she meets her husband’s gaze, while her boys clown for the camera.
The camera comes out during many family trips, for business and pleasure, to Germany, Morocco, Chile, London, Corsica, Moscow, Albania, Portugal, and Spain. Throughout, Ernaux, whose sympathies are left-wing, ruminates on the shifting political landscapes, the class divisions between tourists and the service industry workers in foreign countries and the failing state of her marriage.
On the Chile trip, the tour group is welcomed by Salvador Allende the year before his death and the military coup that ended his socialist government. In Albania, the still-Maoist regime seems trapped in a pre-industrial past where filming opportunities are restricted.
During this period, Ernaux also becomes a writer, often working secretly, stealing time from her day job and household work. She sends out her first novel for her autobiographical book, Cleaned Out, for publication at 33 and it was accepted. But publishing a book did not, she recalls, change her life as she expected it would. The period the film records is filled with a sense of melancholy, of her frustration, of a marriage ending, of political hopes dashed.
It was years later, when her now-adult sons expressed interest in learning more about their grandparents, that the faded films were watched again. Ernaux’s precise and thoughtful commentary connects the images to memories, discovering yet another harvest from the well-cultivated field of her autobiography.
The Super 8 Years. Written by Annie Ernaux. Directed by Annie Ernaux and David Erneaux-Briot. Opening at Toronto’s at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema January 13. It is also available for free with a Public Library card on Kanopy.