For the fans of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, The Super 8 Years delivers a real treat. Available in the US in DVD, Amazon Prime and Kino Now, Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot build a film essay that mirrors her prose works. The film is based on the family recordings made in a Super 8 camera between 1972 and 1981, tracing the arch between Ernaux’s first two books and the gradual erosion of her marriage. Most of the recordings were made either as a result of travel or vacation. Kino Lorber, the US distributor, made some felicitous decisions, including hiring Ernaux’s translator Alison L. Strayer to work in the subtitles. At the same time, it is a bit dumbfounding that the film has such limited availability given that Ernaux has a following in the literary world. Hopefully it will become broader.
Expectedly, the film marketing emphasizes the personal side of her work. The poster shows her with her two sons, and the images available in the press kit only offers images of Ernaux or her children. It appears that that the Anglosphere has settled in the most visible dimension of Ernaux’s work, her work on gender and on the self, as Rachel Cusk’s fascinating but telling profile in the New York Times captures. In this, there is little distance from the dismissive consideration that Ernaux receives sometimes from the first establishment—I will not repeat here the nickname that dismisses her personal writing, but you can find it in Cusk’s piece. I guess that the obsession with the self in US and, to some extent, British nonfiction ends up occluding some significant dimensions in her work, particularly the one related to class politics, which is not only palpable across her writing, but a substantive component on her reflections on gender and identity. The most recently translated book of hers into English—Look at the Lights, My Love— focused on the social life of the supermarket, hopefully provides a corrective to this omission.
What struck me the most in The Super 8 Years was rendered completely invisible in the US marketing of the film. Early in the film, Ernaux and her husband travel, with their camera, to Salvador Allende’s Chile. There, she tells us, they experience significant aspects of the utopian project, including the distribution of smocks to children and the participation of an assembly of workers. She meets Allende and captures the power stemming from the various policies aimed at helping the people. All of this makes a lot of sense. How is a woman who grew up in the working class of France around the sixties, and who is keenly aware of the politics of her time, going to write a film devoid of Global Left politics? Her narrative is careful to highlight the elections and the role of the Socialist Party throughout the decade. Evidently, the Annie Ernaux who arrives in Chile is ready to engage with different modes political consciousness.
Even more significantly, there is a moment of political awakening tied to her awakening as a writer. The early part of the film occurs as she is writing her first book. In reference to her visit to Valparaíso, Ernaux mentions that experiencing Allende’s Chile, she was forced to recall her promise “I will write to avenge my people,” an expression that guides her writing and that she most recently invoked in her Nobel Lecture.
Although the film acknowledges the ephemeral character of Chile’s political revolution, devastated by the 1973 coup and Pinochet’s dictatorship, it is very clear that Ernaux does not sustain a melancholy tone to it. A good contrast is the representation of the 1960s in Brazilian director João Moreira Salles’s In the Intense Now. This documentary is a film essay on the defeat of the revolutionary 68 using found footage of the Paris student movement, the Prague Spring and other events, as well his mother’s tapes in a visit to Mao’s China. Without advancing too much of a forthcoming essay where this film features prominently, I will limit myself in saying that Salles has been widely criticized for holding a melancholy, even reactionary, tone that focuses on the defeat of these revolts and in the disconnect between the students and workers.
Ernaux, in contrast, opts to focus on the legacy of the revolutionary dream in her work, and the idea that one must remain faithful to those experiences even when defeat has materialized. There may be an issue of class here: Salles and his better know filmmaker brother Walter are scions of a prominent banking family. Salles, to his credit, has made the critique of his class status central to his cinema. But Ernaux performs in The Super 8 Years a significant gesture: the images in Chile decenter her (she shows in only a couple of flashing moments in the sequence), and keeps the eye of the camera in the people of Chile and in the revolutionary iconography. In fact, the film repeats the gesture in other travels, most notably to Albania, where the paradoxes of a socialist society become evident.
This observational character in Ernaux’s poetics, decentering herself and moving into the representation of the people as such, is clear in some of her works, like the aforementioned Look at the Lights, My Love or in Getting Lost. But it is rarely credited, oftentimes lost among Ernaux reflections on sexuality and gender. But they are also a critical part of her mission, the way she avenges her people. In missing it, we miss the idea of Annie Ernaux as a chronicler of class and revolution, one of the best one sin today’s world literature.