A rumination on memory, history and perception, The Super 8 Years allows the newly appointed Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux to transform her family’s home movies into a feminist reclamation, writes Barry Levitt.
French novelist Annie Ernaux has been fascinated by memory throughout her career. In 2022, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for, as the committee described it, ‘the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’. It’s no surprise, then, that the documentary feature The Super 8 Years, assembled from Super 8 home movies shot by her then-husband Philippe, feels like a natural extension of her lifetime investigation of memory. Directed by Ernaux and her son David Briot-Ernaux, the film interrogates Ernaux’s recollections of those years, and generously shares a perspective that imbues the images on screen with new meaning.
The footage (shot between 1972 and 1981) provided Ernaux with, as she puts it, ‘a chance for me to recall decisive years of my life, and for all of us to revisit the light that shone upon the past’. Although The Super 8 Years shows largely joyful moments among family – children celebrating birthdays, gorgeous holiday vistas, and a sea of smiling faces – Ernaux’s narration suggests that what we are actually witnessing is a breakdown of her marriage, and an awakening in herself as she begins down the path towards her new life as a writer.
Her musings add context to her memory, altering our understanding of the scenes unfolding before us. At one point, her son Eric is seen jubilantly blowing out the candles on his 10th-birthday cake, while Ernaux’s voiceover says, ‘We are probably thinking, my mother and I, we the women on the front lines of time: he’s already 10 years old.’ Ernaux is emphasising the power of the passage of time – how poignant it can feel for a mother to watch her child grow up. In another scene, Ernaux is smiling brightly alongside her family, and says of herself: ‘The woman in the image always seems to wonder why she’s there.’ Ernaux’s account challenges our perception of the images presented: where her husband’s lens makes them appear happy, her voiceover tinges them with melancholy. With the gift of hindsight, she questions the memory we see on screen with what she remembers feeling at the time. The result is something radical: it shifts the focus from what Philippe sees, to what Ernaux feels.
The Super 8 Years (2022)
By reconfiguring our perception, Ernaux is effectively substituting the male gaze for a female one, which makes The Super 8 Years not only feel like a fascinating personal history of this astounding woman, but also a thrilling feminist reclamation. Moreover, the fact that the film focuses on, and is invariably about, female subjectivity feels decidedly progressive. The percentage of films made by women pales in comparison to those directed by men, even within documentaries. Of the last 50 films nominated for the Best Documentary BAFTA, 18 (36%) were (co-)directed by a woman. But, of those 18 films, just four meaningfully centre a female subject.
The Super 8 Years (2022)
Ernaux is not alone in using home video to explore women’s lives. Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley broke into documentaries with 2012’s Stories We Tell, which turns the camera inwards at her own family's history, specifically that of her mother Diane, who passed away when Polley was 11. Presented like a puzzle box, it seeks to uncover the truth of her lineage. While Ernaux creates her own narrative from her someone else’s footage, Polley tests how memory lies in the eye of the beholder; fascinated by how each family member recalls certain events, through the prism of her own story.
There’s also French filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose final film, No Home Movie (2015), is a bracing personal exploration of Akerman’s relationship with her mother Natalia, a Holocaust survivor. Playing with the idea of home movies in its title, the film is clear to point out that it is not rediscovered old footage. It’s a study in the mundane, finding immeasurable beauty in the ordinary, painting an incredibly personal relationship between two women who love each other beyond words.
Stories We Tell (2012)
Ernaux’s film also tackles her relationship with her mother, who lived with the family throughout the time the footage was filmed. ‘There may be no greater humiliation for a daughter than to be unable to hide the signs of marital discord from her mother, a silent, disapproving witness,’ Ernaux remarks. It’s quite a harrowing thought – juxtaposed with images of a seemingly happy bourgeois family – and offers a unique, deeply personal perspective beyond what’s presented on the surface.
These intimate documentaries offer their women filmmakers a chance to explore their own pasts while staking a vital place in a male-dominated history. They create unique melodies through memory – exploring how the past can surprise us, how relationships inform who we are and how our memories can deceive us. ‘I now perceive a different reality’, Ernaux states during The Super 8 Years, and by reclaiming the frame, her memories are given a new life, full of insight and intimacy rarely offered to women in film.
WATCH THE SUPER 8 YEARS IN CINEMAS OR ON CURZON HOME CINEMA
