Annie Ernaux ascended to a new plane of international prominence with last year’s Nobel prize for literature and the 2021 Venice Golden Lion for Audrey Diwan’s movie version of her novel Happening. Now here is a diverting, if minor footnote to her life; with her grownup son David Ernaux-Briot she has curated this presentation of her family’s Super 8 home movies from the early 70s to the early 80s. In this period she was raising two young children and semi-secretly embarking on a literary career whose growing success would put strain on her marriage, although this is one of many things she does not discuss in detail.
The 1970s were a boom time for 8mm home movies, encouraging a whole generation to think of their childhoods as having really existed in that soft Super 8 focus with its vividly primitivist colour, and meanwhile encouraging generations of film-makers to use Super 8 as shorthand for bygone childhood innocence. Ernaux’s own home movies are as poignant and sweet and boring as anyone else’s, and I was reminded of Gilbert Adair’s dictum that home movies all look like the work of the same eccentric auteur, with the same fetish for clumsy closeups, laborious slow pans and interminable, pointlessly dull establishing shots of scenery or tourist landmarks.
