History will perhaps remember that the year she received the Nobel Prize for Literature, an 81-year-old first-time filmmaker was also honored with a selection at the Cannes Film Festival. At the Directors’ Fortnight, Annie Ernaux came to present the Super 8 Years, documentary co-directed with his son David Ernaux-Briot from family video archives. On the stage of the Théâtre Croisette, arriving with small steps in a white jacket and black trousers to loud applause (Tom Cruise only had to get dressed), the writer said a few words before the screening in order to summarize her project: to write a text intended to be read in voice-over on images shot by her husband, Philippe Ernaux, between 1972 and 1981. She specified that this text, where one recognizes the inimitable clarity of its sentence and the sociological acuity of his voice (the Super 8 camera, “desirable object par excellence, much more than the dishwasher or the color TV”, videos capturing “which will not happen twice”), this text, therefore, “belongs to the rest of his work”. With this something different: the necessary adaptation to images, to archives, this “back and forth between material reality, images, my memory and writing”. To which one would add that, pre-existing to writing, these images make it less urgent here than in his books.
The film is a tableau of time and environment, that of the “recent bourgeoisie” who, in a cake shovel collar and scarf, spends his holidays in Chile thanks to the New Observer or in Morocco in a holiday village, and settles in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise, then in the open countryside… Here, as always, what pleases in the markers, even in their maddening banality, is the inscription of an existence in time and the collective. The writer, college literature teacher, then wrote «a secret». What we see in the image is below what she will make of it, later, but it is the matrix.