Now in her early 80s, Annie Ernaux is among the most celebrated French writers of her generation. Several of her books have been adapted into movies (most recently Audrey Diwan’s Happening and Danielle Arbil’s Passion). In her work, she has always written very frankly about her own life. Now, she has continued the process of self-exploration with her movie debut The Super 8 Years, a film she co-directed with her son David Ernaux-Briot (and which screened this week in Cannes in the Quinzaine).
The film is made up of 8mm movies that Ernaux’s then husband filmed of the family in the 1970s and early 80s. Most are holiday archive showing her and her children on their jaunts to foreign cities. There is also footage of the family home in Annecy and of lavish family Christmas celebrations. In those days, she was regarded more as a typical middle-class wife and mother than as a literary titan in the making. Accompanying the home movie footage is a commentary written and read by the author – and through which she provides a very pointed commentary on when and why all the footage was shot.
Mother and son were giving interviews to accompany the festival screenings earlier this week. Sitting together on a sofa in an apartment off the Rue D’Antibes, they reflected on just how these private films made during their old family holidays ended up being shown in public at the most prestigious film festival in the world.
Some of the material shows Ernaux and her family seemingly having a blissful time in the summertime in London, enjoying themselves in the parks or going down the Thames in a boat. The commentary mentions in passing that Ernaux’s previous visit to the city hadn’t been quite so idyllic. In 1960, as a very young woman, Annie had worked as an au pair in Finchley. It had been a wretched period of her life when she had begun to suffer from bulimia and had even indulged in a little shoplifting.
Why didn’t she go into greater detail about the miseries she once endured in London. This was the period when she started writing her first novel (as yet unpublished). However, as she explains, she had already dealt with this period in one of her subsequent books, ‘A Girl’s Story.’
“I wrote a book about it. That’s why, in the film, I didn’t take more time to speak about it,” Ernaux says of her nightmarish interlude in north London. “These six months spent in England were quite a negative episode in my life…actually, the girl who was with me, when we shoplifted, she was arrested. I even gave a false deposition in court to defend her,” the author recalls her delinquent youth. “At the same time, that was when I started writing…”
In a garden in Finchley, the celebrated writer began work on a novel – and she finished the book too. This was therefore a key moment in her creative life. Working on the commentary for the documentary, Ernaux came up with her own routine.
“I wrote the text following the ideas suggested by my son, David. What I did was I tried to watch all those [Super 8] rushes once again. What I did was that I took notes. These notes opened different paths to different reflections and memories,” the author recalls. The next step was to find an order for the material. She was determined to ensure the text was “fluent” and didn’t have “gaps of breaking points” but would simply “flow until the end.”
Her son takes up the story. “I proposed that my mother should do something with the footage my father had filmed. Some of that had been transferred onto video so we could see it independently. But we also organised some joint sessions together to watch those Super 8 rushes [on film].”
David gave his mother completely free rein on how she approached the documentary. There were no “pre-established notions” on the way the film would be structured. “No, there was complete freedom about it – and that was really important,” the son insists.
Ernaux made the first recording of her commentary on her own during one of the Covid lockdowns. She gave it to her son who then went to the editing room, matched it to the digitised rushes and began cursing the film.
This may be a family affair but Ernaux’s grandkids haven’t yet seen it. They are still too young (11, 9 and 3) to be able to make much sense of it. At least, though, the film will help them to learn more about their grandfather, who is now deceased. (Not that the grandfather features too prominently in the films. He was too busy filming them to be captured in more than fleeting fashion in front of the camera.) They’ll also get to see their own dad when he was a boy the same age as they are now.
“It will give them the simple pleasure to see people they never saw so young, or people that they never knew – and seeing them so lively and so young.”
And, no, the kids don’t yet realise just what a revered writer their granny has become. Her commentary therefore may mean very little to them now, but will be of great value to them in years to come.
The Super 8 Years is sold internationally by Totem Films.
