The Super 8 Years: The Years
The Super 8 Years
Home videos shot by Ernaux and her family from 1972 to 1981 and feeds into the themes of her work over the past 60 years.
“The Super 8 Years” — directed by Annie Ernaux, the French writer who snagged the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 — takes us on a bittersweet, nostalgic journey through her domestic life from 1972 to 1981. Shot mostly by her then-husband, Phillipe Ernaux, with a handheld camera, the film shifts between moving and still frames, creating a peculiar, almost voyeuristic look at her personal world. What stands out is Ernaux’s voice — or should we say, her lack of it? The film feels like her books, where the impersonal tone almost becomes an art form, distancing us from the reality it’s trying to convey. In a sense, the narrative of the family, the individual, or even the broader world is examined from a detached, almost omniscient perspective. It’s like peering into a life that’s both intensely personal and entirely out of reach.
What makes Ernaux’s work so fascinating is her ability to ditch the “I” in favor of “we,” especially when reflecting on the generations before her. In the film, this detachment is taken to the next level — instead of focusing solely on the "I," the “self” becomes almost entirely absent, leaving behind a hollow, ghostly voice narrating events. It’s like her own life is up for inspection, but she’s not really *there* in it. It’s like a strange absence that gives the past a weightless, dreamlike quality.
For Ernaux, "film captures life and people, even if it’s silent." And she's right — there’s something deeply powerful about the unspoken truths that images can capture. The way film doesn’t hide the flaws, the cracks in the facade of decorum. It’s raw, it’s honest — sometimes brutally so. The passage of time, frozen in grainy Super 8 footage, pulls us into a nostalgia for a moment that feels as though it’s trapped somewhere between memory and myth. The happiness of the past feels so far away that it practically stings — like an old wound that refuses to heal. Ernaux flatly describes it as "a kind of violence." It’s the violence of time, of lost moments, of things we can never get back.
And then, the film pauses. Everything stops, and the images become still, as though the narrative itself has fractured, splintered into pieces. The sound fades into nature, and everything begins to flow again — but it’s a slow, almost hesitant flow. The stillness feels like a moment of reckoning, a space where memory starts to break down and the past becomes less clear.
The film’s most poignant moments come when the images shift into close-ups of children. Here, Ernaux captures a generation caught between historical forces they can’t yet understand — the colonial past, the revolutions, the wars. These children are both blank slates and vessels of collective memory. They know nothing, yet they carry everything. Ernaux’s film seems to say, "This is the next generation, and they, too, are caught in the whirlpool of modernity." In her book *The Years,* she writes, "The time of children replaced the time of the dead." This idea of time moving forward, leaving the past in the dust, is both heartbreaking and inevitable.
Ernaux also reflects on the sense of dislocation that defined her generation. "We were mutating. We didn’t know what our new shape would be," she writes. It’s the sense that you’re drifting through time, not really sure where you’re going, but knowing you can’t stay where you are. The film cuts between family trips across Europe, through landscapes that seem to change as quickly as the political tides — from Moscow’s decline to the communist wave across France, from the rise of Chinese industrial production to the evolving identity of Albania. The images are scattered, fleeting, like time itself.
And yet, amid all this movement, there’s a feeling of powerlessness — the kind of powerlessness that comes from being caught in the gears of history. Ernaux and her contemporaries find themselves adrift in a world where nothing seems fixed, nothing seems permanent. Fate is less a choice and more a matter of chance, and the collective identity is constantly in flux. Everything is evolving, but it feels like no one’s really in control.
What Ernaux captures in *The Super 8 Years* is not just the personal loss of her own family life, but the collective loss of time itself. As she states, "We could question nothing, and nothing would remain." The past is both irretrievable and unreachable. The future seems uncertain, and the present feels like it’s slipping away faster than anyone can grasp. In a world of perpetual change, all you have left are memories — and even those fade.
The film ends with a trip to Moscow, and Ernaux’s narration never breaks from its detached tone. But by now, the images have become something else entirely — relics of a distant past, frozen in time. The memories are vivid but fading. Ernaux’s words echo from her Nobel-winning novel, The Years: "One was ready to endure the heartbreak of divorce, the threats, insults, pettiness and living with half the money, ready for anything that would help us discover the desire for a future."
.webp)
评论
发表评论