The Super 8 Years
French author Annie Ernaux – working with her son David Ernaux-Briot – has turned old home video footage into a delicate visual odyssey
This documentary project by French writer Annie Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot is a personal, self-narrated film that will surely appeal to fans of the eminent author. However, apart from its obvious merits – the sunbleached 70s imagery and Ernaux's beautiful prose – it’s hard to imagine The Super 8 Years not feeling slight to everyone else. To fully appreciate the collage of silent home video footage that comprises the film is to view it in the context of Ernaux's lifetime of autobiography and fiction, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature just last year.
The Super 8 Years is a snapshot of family life; one that drops us in late-20th-century France in the company of the writer, her mother and children, and her near-unseen husband, Philippe, who is behind the camera. 'Home video' may admittedly be the wrong term for footage that takes us to so many foreign locations: to Corsica, Russia, Britain and Albania, where men exchange their tight-fitting flares for Chinese worker’s trousers in an attempt to ditch any and all signs of decadent bourgeois civilisation.
At just 60 minutes, the film certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome but it doesn’t quite make a strong case for itself in its own right either. The Super 8 Years is a moving epilogue to a half-century-spanning œuvre of undeniable quality. But it is still just a video montage of domestic life, which some will surely find gorgeous and others inconsequential on its own.
Released 23 Jun by Curzon; certificate 12A