Beginning of the second week in Cannes. Monday, May 23, at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, the star of the day was the writer Annie Ernaux, visibly moved by the ovation reserved for her by the full house of the Théâtre Croisette, before the world premiere screening of Super 8 years, film she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot.
On the screen, slightly damaged, trembling images, a singular grain. From the outset, they take you fifty years ago. Precisely in this year 1972 when the Ernaux family bought a Super 8 camera and decided to film, abundantly, “what we will never see again”, said the voiceover. It is the voice of Annie Ernaux, who poses a sound on silent videos shot by the “filmer”her husband Philippe, whom we will hardly see.
The Super 8 Years, it is the testimony of the life of a French family in the 1970s. The taste, the lifestyle of the time. These interiors (“bourgeois”, says the writer) which take up a disproportionate place, as if to define the framework of a happy family, at least in appearance. Of course, Christmases, markers of passing time, birthdays. Moving, of course. And the family : “In these silent images, the bodies are eloquent”explains the voiceover.
But to this documentary in images is added another story, intimate and political, in voiceover. Look at the woman she was in these years of social transformation, eager to live her singularity, wanting to free herself from her only “nurturing assignment” and organization of domestic life. Especially a woman “drilled by the need to write” as she prepares to release her first book, founding, The empty cupboards (1974).
Finally, a woman “class defector” : how often does she notice, “secretly”, that her cultural level, her teaching profession, her way of life separate her from her “culture of origin”, that of a modest background? Haunting idea. “She is at the heart of my film, my workexplains Annie Ernaux in a question-and-answer session with the public after the screening. It is a fact of the evolution of my life that is fundamental (…) it is a reversal of values that will change my vision of the world”.
Precisely the world, central. The elsewhere. Surprising and amusing mix between the first holiday villages in Morocco or the weeks of skiing in La Clusaz, and journeys that stick better to the anchoring on the left widely mentioned by the writer. How far ? In Chile, during Salvador Allende’s parenthesis. Annie Ernaux Ernaux even recounts having met the revolutionary leader leaving office by chance… In the Soviet Union, and even in Albania, at the time of the communist dictator who could not be more orthodox, Enver Hoxha.
“I do not imagine myself or my family separated from the world and the time, she explains after the screening. It seems important to me to talk about ideology, broader historical events (…) In France, the arrival of François Mitterrand, or in Spain the death of Franco reappeared to me in their present. Or even Albania or the USSR: one could not think, seeing them, that these regimes would not last a thousand years. There is a real past-present clash..
“In itself, I’m not interested in telling my life, but rather in seeing what one life among others can represent (…) Showing what an existence could be like in a given time”, concludes Annie Ernaux at the Théâtre Croisette. Neither really a film, nor a documentary, The Super 8 Years are she said “fragments of a family autobiography”, like its literature. Intimate, political, universal.
Director: Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot
Country : France
Duration : 1h05
Exit : December 14, 2022
Summary: “In reviewing our super eight films taken between 1972 and 1981, it occurred to me that these were not only a family archive but also a testimony to the tastes, hobbies, lifestyle and aspirations of a class social, during the decade following 1968. These mute images, I wanted to integrate them into a story at the crossroads of history, the social and also the intimate, using my personal diary of these years there.”- Annie Ernaux