Irene Olivo

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Mediums of the Past in Annie Ernaux’s The Super 8 Years

 

‘To keep a record of happy moments and beautiful things is the natural desire that runs through the images of spring and summer ’72. To film what you will never see twice,’ narrates Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux in her documentary, The Super 8 Years. Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 after a literary career spanning nearly five decades. From her first published novel, Cleaned Out (1974), an autobiographical work of fiction, the writer introduced subject matters which would later form the skeleton of her prose; from her abortion to family life set around her family’s shop, from her parents to her education, from her body to her adolescence.

Since then, Ernaux’s writing has dabbled in the liminal space between fiction and memoir. In the words of Professor Anders Olsson for the Nobel prize presentation speech: ‘For Ernaux, language is a means to dispel the fog of memory and a knife to uncover the real’. Speaking to a crowded marquee at this year’s Charleston Literary Festival, Ernaux said that she often publishes her diaries – Getting Lost (2001) being one example – ‘to put her novels at risk.’ With this in mind, Ernaux’s work takes on new meaning as we read her fiction through the fog of her memory, and then go through her diary entries uncovering the real. Ernaux teaches us that points of view matter, and that there will always be multiple ways of telling the same story.

This also is a leading thread throughout The Super 8 Years. Revisiting a decade’s worth of 8mm home movies originally shot by Ernaux’s then-husband Phillippe, Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot, present us with an intimately crafted portrait of the Ernaux’s domestic life between 1972 and 1981. Charting key moments in the family unit and political landscape of the seventies in France and beyond, Ernaux takes us through the footage with today’s pen and voice, re-tracing key moments in her desire to write, and write to avenge her people. David, on the other hand, works through the footage in the editing room. In The Super 8 Years, editing the past is a family affair.

Through vignettes of grainy, handheld footage, the camera often dwells on Ernaux, her gaze initially looking back into the camera and progressively moving beyond it or lowering as if the camera was an intrusion into the living inside of her head. We see Ernaux at her desk, surrounded by paper, perhaps marking homework for her job as a high school teacher or perhaps writing her diaries, the powerful memory tool which would serve her later on in her writing career. Only on one occasion, do we see Ernaux’s point of view from behind the camera. The family is filmed while on holiday in a Moroccan resort. Annie films Philippe, sun-kissed and smiling in a seventies’ hairdo. This is the only moment in the film where Ernaux’s voice over narration stops.

Ernaux writes by images, thus this documentary occupies a crucial space in our understanding of her work on memory and on the past. In her books, we, as readers are left to craft images from the ones she gives us and their unreliability as she, for example, begins The Years with the line: ‘All the images will disappear:’ In her literary oeuvre, Ernaux lists snippets of life remembered and memories sparked from the journals of her past. This is Ernaux’s invitation to narrate the self and, with it, everything that is outside; from songs and films which formed the shared landscape of a time, to political marches, to the nurse’s words on the day her mother died.

The first few pages of an Ernaux book begin with a sort of research method, an awareness she passes on to the readers about how she comes to narrate those facts of the past to us today. She writes about the images which have indeed been recorded and remembered and wonders about what might have happened which she doesn’t remember, always returning to fact through objects she calls ‘material traces’. In her book Shame (1997), Ernaux recounts a traumatic episode in her family life, one in which she witnesses her father’s attempt to kill her mother, an episode which abruptly places the writer in the painful passage into adult life. Within the book, Ernaux brings up the material traces she has kept from this specific time; these are often postcards, church music sheets, school objects, photographs which bring outfits of the time to life, the colours of her adolescence, in the same way Ernaux’s voice over in The Super 8 Years comments over Philippe’s stylistic choice to film the décor of their homes and his need to film lifeless objects almost like to mark their place in their family life before they got moved.

Although Ernaux’s work covers a range of harrowing subject matters, her writing is largely void of drama and embellishments. The Super 8 Years seems a natural continuation of her writership. The film begins like an Ernaux novel would. With her research method into the past, the material traces she’s found about a time, a carousel of images. Ernaux’s narration places the images in time and space as she spots the material traces framed on camera in those first few shots, documenting her and Phillipe’s induction into the bourgeoisie through artefact: the carefully chosen antiques and the trendy wallpaper.

Ernaux’s voice over throughout the film often dwells on these objects and the privileges of her life at the time, which were signifiers of her family’s entry into the bourgeoisie. Ernaux’s commentary on the past is never judgmental, but it is through her language that we can feel the inner battle between her belonging to the working class of her birth and her move into a bourgeois world through her education. It is in Salvador Allende’s Chile in the spring of 1972, that Ernaux reminds herself of that initial promise to write to avenge her people, a promise she will act upon as she returns to France. The images shot by Philippe in Chile are those of nationalised factories, queues to collect subsidised school frocks, smiling children and workers – a people’s socialist dream. This footage, part of the family memory box, unintentionally became a rare portrait of the country before the Pinochet dictatorship, which would terrorise Chile until 1990. Ernaux feeds these unique images to us and reminds us, and herself, of her intent when writing, one which cannot be separated from the political landscape and from her class. For Ernaux, The Super 8 Years is as much about writing over recorded memories as it is about intention. She narrates what her memory gives her access to, and through this access to the self we witness and understand the outer turmoil. The writer describes the secret torment which accompanied those moments on camera: her need to write, to put all the events in her life into a novel, a red and violent novel.

Building up to a tension that is communal and political, as well as personal and domestic, Ernaux leaves traces about the dissolving of her and Philippe’s marital life in the second part of the film. She begins this process at the beginning, by referring to her ex-husband by name and surname only, taking a distance from the man she once knew. Of their family mission enabled by the super 8 camera she says: ‘We unconsciously sought to give the present a future and create, image by image, scene by scene, something like a family fiction to which each would later add a subtext.’

Circling back to Ernaux putting her novels and her diaries into conversation, there is one version of this documentary which we can now see in cinemas and which has been worked on as a family effort, but there could be four more versions of it from the points of view of Philippe, their sons Eric and David, and Ernaux’s mother Blanche. The same family story could be told from multiple perspectives and each would have to delve into that fog and resurface with a version of the truth. Memory is a funnel from which a few fragments are distilled into coherence. The Super 8 Years is an intimate look into Annie Ernaux’s memory box, a continuation of her literature, and a nod to the visual elements of her bibliography. It is a reclaiming of a time in which she was a wife and a mother on the outside, while within she itched to branch out to the freedom writing could give her.

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Irene Olivo is a London-based writer and co-founder of the book and culinary community The Salmon Pink Kitchen, celebrating women in the kitchen as a political act. She also writes the TV and pop culture newsletter Behind the Red Curtains on Substack.