'The Super 8 Years' review: Annie Ernaux's home videos offer tender insight into her real life work

Every time Annie Ernaux looks at the camera in "The Super 8 Years," her face displays an alluring combination of calm, disappointment, impatience, and acquiescence. She looks at her ex-husband (and father of her two children) Philippe, with whom she was with for 17 years. It was his idea to get a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera just before the family moved to Annecy in their 30s with their boys, then 7 and 10. Philippe was the self-determined 'head director', but it was Annie who was ultimately tasked and tasked with making sense of these images decades later, and finding meaning and faith in the vanishing world that he immortalized.

Philippe's images don't necessarily hold the key to a new way of filming or a tragically unknown cinematographer. Taken out of context, these family videos are as interesting to strangers as hearing someone's phone call on the bus or train. Glimmers of gossip may appear from time to time, but privacy and fundamental interest are reserved for those around the person filming or speaking, and them alone.

But something happens when Annie resurrects those images. She and Philippe divorced not only because of this, but it was after realizing that the pictures were changing drastically. It was no longer just about capturing civilizations in decline, through the family's travels to Morocco, Albania, Moscow, London and more, but the fabric of the family itself was beginning to unravel. . So much disappeared from the frame: the literal appearance of Annie and the boys, the emotional attachment that made the first images so much more tender, a rare constant in a changing world.

This realization grows slowly in the film, as if you spend nearly two decades thinking you're building something with one hand while reaching out to your loved ones with the other, only to find out later that you're trying and fail to catch thin air for years. This sad conclusion can only come in hindsight, and much of "The Super 8 Years" may feel like a simple and perhaps unexceptional time capsule until it opens up universal questioning about what memory - and film - can save rubble. p>



Ernaux received the 2022 Literature Novel Prize "for the courage and clinical acumen with which she discovers the roots, the remoteness and the collective constraints of personal memory". It's exciting to recognize that you're watching the poetry in motion in "The Super 8 Years." The film is very vaguely reminiscent of Laura Poitras' recent portrayal of photographer Nan Goldin in "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed", particularly in the way both films rely on the animated nature of cinema to force viewers to consider the thoughts, words, and artistry of these incredibly alive women, finally.

Goldin talks about photographing people so as not to forget them, in order to keep the dead alive. Ernaux notes that women are often "on the front line of time" as she watches her son blow out the candles for his 10th birthday with a bittersweet melancholy that this exact celebration will never happen again. It's about filming "what you'll never see twice", which, while alive, is nothing special until you can only keep it as a relic.

The film also delves into a compelling recent trend of dissatisfied women in their 30s wondering when their life is really going to begin. Ernaux, narrator, comments on her own expression as it evolves over the years, looking at Philippe. “The woman in the picture still seems to be wondering why she is there,” the narrator notes to herself, unsure of the conclusion to draw beyond final acceptance that she is unconvinced. that her destiny as guardian in this family is enough. This is what drives Julie forward in "The worst person in the world" by Joachim Trier, perhaps this recognition of uncertainty is enough to finally dare to consider pleasure as a duty and say out loud that we feels a spectator of his own life.

Ernaux has nothing to teach us, per se, about what to do with broken pieces or how to fix them. It's just a relief to share them. It's a privilege to be invited into the world of this outstanding writer with unparalleled emotional intelligence who is brave enough to point fingers at every part of her life that to some extent has failed. It's a huge responsibility to entrust...