The original French title of this documentary, Les années super 8, recalls ‘Les années’ (2008), possibly the most-admired of author Annie Ernaux’s novels. Her oeuvre, especially celebrated in her native France, combines autobiography with a sociological look at contemporary events. (Last year’s impressive Venice winner L’événement (Happening by Audrey Diwan) was based on her novel of the same name.)
Her feature documentary debut, co-directed with her son David, does the same. It consists solely of home video footage, shot by Ernaux (1940) and her family between 1972 and 1981. Edited chronologically, it echoes the life events that took place during that period, including the publication of her autobiographical novels ‘Cleaned Out’ (‘Les armoires vides’, 1974) and ‘A Frozen Woman’ (‘La femme gelée’, 1981). The latter described her marriage to Philippe Ernaux, who shot most of the footage included in The Super 8 Years, and has since passed away.
When they eventually separated, her husband took the camera, and left her as the “guardian”, as she calls it, of the silent films, a representation of their time together. She only recently revisited them, and this feeling of looking back after a considerable amount of time permeates the film, with Annie Ernaux’s voice-over sounding distant, wistful, almost monotonous throughout. As if all the emotions once associated with these images have long since disappeared.
The images themselves are mostly generic. It’s a family, there are Christmas presents, visits to relatives, and trips abroad. Philippe is not an especially gifted camera person. Even those countries which are inevitably intriguing for 21st-century eyes (Chili, Albania, Moscow) offer few thrills. In Morocco, they willingly stay within the confines of the tourist area; in Albania, they are ordered to do so. In each case, the images are equally predictable.
Annie Ernaux does mention historical events, the successive French presidents, et cetera, but with little to no context or evaluation. They feel disconnected from the images, tacked on, sometimes even pedantic, as when she notes in retrospect that West Germany seemed remarkably calm to her, a year after the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof were imprisoned – lending a forced political weight to a simple trip over the border.
At other times, she goes into her personal history, where she was at the time, how she felt, writing her first book in secret (not daring to tell her husband), feeling judged by her mother et cetera. But these comments are almost as brief, and almost – though not quite – as disconnected from the unremarkable home videos. There are a few attempts to increase their emotional impact by manipulating the images, such as freeze-framing a glance into the camera, but too few and too far between to have much of an overall impact.
This sense of disconnection might also have something to do with the literary quality of the voice-over. Ernaux’s style, as in her writings, tends to the neutral and objective, withholding judgment. Speaking of herself in the third person, as she did in her book Les années, she intentionally distances her current self from her past. And it may be my Dutch sensibilities, but I found some of her texts a little overcooked; for example, I counted at least four instances where something being described as ‘feverish’, like presents being unwrapped, felt exaggerated. As if there was less in the images then she was implying. Or, there was something in her memories which hadn’t been captured by the camera.
The one thing which helped most to bring those silent, half-forgotten images closer, was the sound design. Added sounds of wind and water, specific noises and sound effects, helped to breathe some life into the footage. But the realisation that these, of course, are fake, made-up afterwards, paradoxically increases the perceived distance from those original moments in time.
I am sure that fans of the writer, especially those who have followed her autobiographical work through the years, will enjoy this documentary, which will provide them with images of periods and people they have only read about so far. Interestingly, the voice-over itself is such a literary text, that it could be published almost unaltered without readers realizing it had been written to accompany moving images. Which is another way of describing that disconnect.
In the end, the one thing which I found most intriguing about this documentary, the one thing it documents more than anything else, is that sense of disconnect. Not just the distance, but a sense of historical detachment. The text feels disconnected from the images, the images from the historical events mentioned, the remarks about her private life from the politics and publications she references, the here and now from the then and there.
Her husband, she notes, had a strange tendency to film the objects in the room, often the same ones in different places where they lived. Annie Ernaux dismisses these recordings as in essence useless, because “it’s the people we are touched by in films of later years.” It is exactly because in this film these people remain at a distance that her husband’s shots of furniture, paintings, and lamps are actually the most moving to me. As if he knew that one day all those people, their emotions, their thoughts, their relationships, would be lost in time, beyond the reach of words – even those of an author of such renown. That only these objects would continue to be what they always were. Unchanged, uncommented upon, and in a way the only things left.
France, 2022, 61 minutes
Director David Ernaux-Briot, Annie Ernaux
Production Les Films Pelleas
International Sales Totem Films
Producer David Thion, Philippe Martin
Script Annie Ernaux
Cinematography Philippe Ernaux
Editing Clément Pinteaux
Sound Rym Debbarh-Mounir, Mélissa Petitjean
Music Florencia di Concillio
With David Ernaux-Briot, Annie Ernaux
