The Super 8 Years

The French writer Annie Ernaux is hav­ing a moment: 2021’s Gold­en Lion win­ner Hap­pen­ing was adapt­ed from her book recount­ing her ille­gal abor­tion in 1963. Many of Ernaux’s slen­der books, such as the gor­geous ​‘A Woman’s Sto­ry’, about her mother’s life and death, take the form of qua­si – third per­son mem­oir, mix­ing seem­ing­ly objec­tive nar­ra­tion with oblique impres­sions nev­er quite pin­ning down an elu­sive sub­jec­tiv­i­ty still lin­ger­ing some­where in the past.

Giv­en Ernaux’s inter­est in the art of remem­ber­ing, it is no sur­prise that she is in the pos­ses­sion of home movies. Nor is it sur­pris­ing that The Super 8 Years, an hour-long auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay film made from her own fam­i­ly archives with her son David Ernaux-Briot, is a gor­geous and intel­lec­tu­al­ly expan­sive film, a wor­thy addi­tion to the oeu­vre of one of Europe’s great­est liv­ing authors.

Ernaux’s then-hus­band Philippe bought a Bell and How­ell Super 8 cam­era in 1972, she says in voiceover, over estab­lish­ing shots of Annecy, where Philippe and Annie lived at the time, along with their two sons. Ernaux both wrote and reads the nar­ra­tion, and appears onscreen more often than her ex-hus­band – as she says, he most often filmed and she was most often on-cam­era, a famil­iar gen­dered direc­tor-muse relationship.

The film spans the years 1972 to 1981, dur­ing which the cam­era most often came out on spe­cial occa­sions: hol­i­days; vaca­tions; and new hous­es. Ernaux tracks the march of his­to­ry away from the left-wing break­throughs that coin­cid­ed with her intel­lec­tu­al and polit­i­cal awak­en­ing in the 1960s, tak­ing note of French pres­i­den­tial elec­tions along­side the songs on the radio and the books on her nightstand.

Ernaux is one of the great chron­i­clers of con­sumer soci­ety, and The Super 8 Years is a gen­er­al social his­to­ry assem­bled from per­son­al data. The bare­ly-per­ceived polit­i­cal com­pro­mis­es and dis­ap­point­ments of these ​“new­com­ers to the bour­geoisie” colour the cel­e­bra­tions of leisure and domes­tic­i­ty, from the nov­el­ty of air trav­el (they always filmed the jet before they got on in those days) tak­ing them on an exot­ic but duti­ful expe­di­tion to Allende’s Chile; to the ski con­do they bought in the mid-’70s and the pro­to-yup­pie inno­cence of all that sport­ing knitwear; and, final­ly, at last, too late, to Moscow, where Annie and Philippe’s mar­riage ends along with the Sovi­et Union.

It’s Ernaux’s mas­tery of the memoirist’s art, the gath­er­ing up of scat­tered pearls of rec­ol­lec­tion, that places The Super 8 Years in the pan­theon of nar­row-gauge diary films. She more than earns the epi­thet she bestows upon her­self and her moth­er in the film: ​“women on the front­lines of time.”

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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