The images of the film have faded, but the memories they evoked are vivid and full of feeling. In one go, a little boy pushes a large wheelbarrow. In another, an old man and a woman pose with the clumsiness of an earlier generation that never learned to look at ease in front of any camera. And then there’s the vision of the young woman at a desk, pen in one hand, staring at the camera with a tight, unwelcome smile. I like to think she’s impatient to get back to the papers on the desk, to get back to her writing and to herself.
The woman – French writer Annie Ernaux, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in October – doesn’t smile much in “The Super 8 Years,” a wistful remembrance film she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot. On December 7, at her Nobel Lecture, Ernaux spoke of her roots in the French countryside, her love of books, and her desire to write, a desire thwarted by her position as a woman. “Married with two children,” she said, “a job as a teacher and full responsibility for household affairs, each day I moved further and further away from writing and my promise to avenge my people.”
You occasionally see that woman in “The Super 8 Years”, which was made before she became a Nobel laureate – what timing! Directed by Ernaux-Briot, and written and narrated by Ernaux, it consists of somewhat degraded home movies from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. In the winter of 1972, as Ernaux explains in voiceover, she and her husband, Philippe Ernaux, bought a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera and projector. Years later, she and Ernaux-Briot revisited these fragile mementos and, with some deft editing, sound effects and music (the original material is silent), created this short, powerful, quietly elegiac feature.
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For Ernaux and her husband, the Super 8 camera was “the ultimate desirable object,” more coveted than a dishwasher or even a color television. “Film really captured life and people,” Ernaux explains, though it was complicated how it captured life and people. This is evident the first time you see the younger Ernaux enter a house in “The Super 8 Years” with two cardboard boxes in his hand. She wears a dark hooded coat and an awkward, inscrutable smile, as if she was uncomfortable about being (caught) on camera. Or maybe she’s ashamed of (or of) Philippe, who, as Ernaux explains, made most of the home videos.