By Glenn Dunks
At one point early on in The Super 8 Years (Les années Super 8), Annie Ernaux notes in her soothing, authorial voice that a trip to the countryside—all tall grass, wildflowers, and mud—was like experiencing nostalgia for something she had never even experienced before. A sort of primal part of the human existence that wishes for the calm, the peace, and the relative relaxation of existing within nature without the extravagancies of modern life. It’s an amusing bon mot from the Nobel Prize winner, since this documentary feeds into that very concept:
I have never experienced the world that Ernaux embeds us in, but she welcomes the viewer through narration and the intuitive editing of Clément Pinteaux in such a manner that it feels like reliving a memory that I have never experienced. I was transported. A brisk dream of 65-minutes built entirely out of her family’s super 8 camera home movies that is all fleeting memories stung with melancholy and bliss.
Come to think of it, a more fitting double-feature with Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun I could not imagine.
Ernaux takes us on a globe-trotting journey with her young family of the early 1970s through to the early ‘80s. A narrative of a fracturing marriage emerges as trips to England and Russia, ski resorts and private beaches on the Adriatic, and more become more and more scattered and bifurcated. But this is a movie not about story, but images and moments in time. In many ways it plays like the unseen offcuts of the life of a woman from some classic French film. Watching this, and I immediately felt I was watching an avant-garde experimentation on a cold winter’s night at New York City’s Anthology Film Archives.
But this is what movies can do—and don’t do enough. I mentioned Aftersun for a good reason, as these are two films that weasel their way into the mind of an off-screen person, their interpretation of history through the lens of a home camera. Ernaux’s voice is present throughout coupled with original score by Florencia Di Concilio
(Super 8 was, after all, a silent celluloid medium), and although co-directed with her now grown son David Ernaux-Briot, she is clearly the voice we are tasked with following. As she herself struggles to necessarily recall everything about her journeys, she allows the viewer to connect time with our own imagination. She makes assertions about herself that one can only make with the passing of time, confronting her image and her role as wife, mother and woman. This perhaps shouldn't be surprising from somebody who became a Nobel laureate earlier this year for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory." But what is surprising is just how graceful and captivating it is for something seemingly so simple.
Along the way Ernaux touches upon politics in a way that befits the very white bourgeois world within which her family existed. Appropriately so, this begins more so as the nuclear family around her begins to disintegrate. It’s fitting that Ernaux tells us the original impetus for buying the camera in the first place was to “film what they will never see twice”, because with The Super 8 Years we are offered a unique opportunity to experience a life that is deeply personal, intimate and yet surprisingly expansive and something one won't experience again.
Release: In limited release in NYC through Kino Lorber.