The recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux, today presented her film The Super 8 Years at the New York Film Festival, a film in which she shows the subtle degradation of life as a couple through a compilation of home videos of his family.
Ernaux, a special guest at the New York Film Festival, has participated in a discussion after the presentation of the film in which she has underlined that the value of the images, despite their homemade nature, is to show “the family as the first space of sociability that exists” and also to value “the evolution of bodies and aging”.
All the images were recorded by her then husband, Philippe Ernaux. It was after her death that the author and her son decided to make a film in which she wrote the voiceover that describes the different moments that appear in the film.
Thanks to this narration of the images, the viewer can know that in those years of apparent domestic happiness ‘the writer’ was germinating. In fact, it was in the early seventies that Ernaux became aware that her upbringing and her culture had made her break with the world to which she belonged. It is from this dislocation that the author appropriates the conscience of being out of class that profoundly permeates all of her work.
That is why it is no coincidence that the documentary only consists of the images recorded from the shoulder of her late husband in perpetual movement. According to the author, the film “captures a trembling vision of a world in perpetual motion that strongly cuts through our individual existences.”
During the course of The Super 8 Years, the Ernaux family shares Christmas with the family and travels from Chile, Morocco or Albania. Also included are videos of their trip to Spain in 1980, where the couple suffered a serious crisis that marked the beginning of the end of their relationship.
Thanks to the passing of the years of family customs, Ernaux evidences from the nuances of shared daily life how the love she shared with her husband is transferred to her love for writing.
In constant contradiction between her duties as a ‘housewife’ and her vocation as a writer, the author intends to fulfill the promise she made at the age of 20: “Write to avenge my race.”
Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature and valued as a symbol of contemporary feminism thanks to the political tone in all her work and her involvement in the fight for abortion before its decriminalization in France in 1975; now it is the center of attention of the New York Film Festival.
Consequently, his first film, which would not have been of great cinematographic interest, has received quite an unexpected value. The super 8 years will be released to the public from mid-December and thus, a new facet of the new face of the Nobel Prize for Literature is revealed, with a new and deeply personal format.
