Annie Ernaux ascended to a new plane of international prominence with last year’s Nobel prize for literature and the 2021 Venice Golden Lion for Audrey Diwan’s movie version of her novel Happening. Now here is a diverting, if minor footnote to her life; with her grownup son David Ernaux-Briot she has curated this presentation of her family’s Super 8 home movies from the early 70s to the early 80s. In this period she was raising two young children and semi-secretly embarking on a literary career whose growing success would put strain on her marriage, although this is one of many things she does not discuss in detail.
The 1970s were a boom time for 8mm home movies, encouraging a whole generation to think of their childhoods as having really existed in that soft Super 8 focus with its vividly primitivist colour, and meanwhile encouraging generations of film-makers to use Super 8 as shorthand for bygone childhood innocence. Ernaux’s own home movies are as poignant and sweet and boring as anyone else’s, and I was reminded of Gilbert Adair’s dictum that home movies all look like the work of the same eccentric auteur, with the same fetish for clumsy closeups, laborious slow pans and interminable, pointlessly dull establishing shots of scenery or tourist landmarks.
Ernaux’s husband, Philippe (whom she refers to formally in her voiceover as “Philippe Ernaux”), was a civil servant who bought the equipment; as the paterfamilias he was the only one usually allowed to handle the camera and so is for the most part weirdly absent from the resulting scenes of family life. This is a very familiar part of all our home movie experiences and at all events, Philippe is not examined in any great depth, or really at all.
The films show Christmases and birthdays with Ernaux shyly and uncomfortably smiling with the kids; there are scenes on their holidays in Spain, Portugal and Britain (which she describes as “the most exotic of the nearby countries”). This high-minded leftist couple also made ambitious visits to Allende’s Chile, Hoxha’s Albania and Brezhnev’s USSR. There are scenes at their homes at Annecy and the Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise, which she says was very different in the 70s to the modernised place that Éric Rohmer recorded in his 1987 film Boyfriends and Girlfriends.
The banality of these happy-family images, amateurishly captured, are in implied contrast to the intimacy, artistry and sophistication of her literary work, although this disconnect is oddly never mentioned by Ernaux. Her elderly mother, whose live-in childcare made Ernaux’s literary career possible, moved out during this era in apparent protest at the declining family atmosphere, so her sudden absence from the home movies is arguably a kind of statement. Ernaux also says that the disappearance of family faces in the latter films is down to the fracturing marriage. Maybe. Or maybe all home movies get duller as the kids get older and won’t participate. Well, it’s an interesting sidebar to the Ernaux canon.
• The Super 8 Years is released on 23 June in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
