The last time we enjoyed a protracted cinematic appearance by a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature – unless I’m forgetting an Olga Tokarczuk movie – Bob Dylan was indulging Martin Scorsese in Rolling Thunder Revue. Annie Ernaux’s The Super 8 Years could hardly be more different, but it is equally in tune with the work that made the writer famous.
Lauded for fiction derived from lived experience, Ernaux here digs through home-movie footage from the 1970s that sheds light on years raising children and finding herself as an artist. The “film-making” itself (would they have used that word?) comes to reflect alterations in domestic relations.
Ernaux notes that, in those days, the husband was expected to operate such expensive equipment. Early on, the Super 8 camera bounces around children and grandparents. Later, as she and Philippe Ernaux drift apart, it sits back and records with greater dispassion. Every time you lift a camera you are saying something about yourself and the subject.
Refreshingly, it transpires that French intellectuals shoot pretty much the same events the rest of us shoot. We see kids opening Christmas presents. We get to see a great deal of a cat that is happy to be hugged. And, of course, we enjoy holidays. It is hard not to raise the tiniest of smiles at the decisions made. Noting that the family doesn’t wish to “lie on the beach like idiots”, she explains that instead, as members of the “non-communist left”, they travelled to Salvador Allende’s Chile.
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That trip goes well, but a later journey to Albania is considerably less fun. Any Francophobic English viewers tempted to snort at this should be aware that she regards England as “the most exotic of nearby countries”. Finchley, in north London, where Ernaux worked as an au pair at about the same time as it became Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary constituency, is described as a “chic suburb”. Very well-mannered of her.
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Cheap gags aside, The Super 8 Years comes together as an effective gloss on a life that has already been carefully examined. Narrated in lucid, unpretentious language by the author, the film also reminds us that the medium has changed irretrievably. One can, of course, still shoot home movies on film, but the availability of cameraphones means the footage no longer has that precious self-curated rarity. A dispatch from the dark ages.
