Watching this movie just one day after spending nearly five hours watching Jonas MekasThe 2000 film "As I Step Forward Occasionally Brief Glimpses of Beauty" provided an interesting contrast. Both films pull off home movies for their beauty and intimacy. However, where Mekas largely lets the visuals speak for themselves, Ernaux's film draws heavily on her biblical narrative. Not content with describing each image, as in her novels, Erno adds a layer of self-reflection that can only come from a distance. Where Mekas intentionally focuses his films on moments of happiness, Ernaux insists on breaking the spell that images cast, describing the pain beneath poetic surfaces.
Both films talk about the nature of the artists who made them. But while it's admirable that Erno delivers the same raw honesty in her writing, the experience of such heavy-handed narrative often undermines the documentary as a whole, making what could have been cinematic transcendentalism a mere intellectual exercise.
Much of the imagery in "The Super 8 Years" is portrayed by Philip rather than Ernaux or David, whose lives are at this time the subjects of his view, which become a staple of Ernaux's narrative. For David, this project allows him to revisit his childhood with the eyes—and reflection—of an adult, while for Ernaux it can bring agency and depth to her images of herself. During these years, Philippe's studies and jobs brought them to Annecy, where Ernaud worked as a teacher, hiding her craving for writing and her actual writing from everyone in the family unit.
As an intellectual left-wing nonconformist in post-May 1968 France, Ernaud and her husband aimed to give their children a life of more adventure and greater awareness than their childhood could afford them. Captured alongside everyday family life, Christmas and birthdays, there is footage of family trips, including a bourgeois stay at a resort in Morocco, a trip to Soviet Chile before the US-backed coup, Stalinist-Maoist Albania, pre-Thatcher England and even Moscow Soviet. On each trip, Erno describes their intentions at the time, as well as the historical and cultural contexts they may have understood only long after their visits had ended. The context and reflections are interesting but sometimes veer toward a claim uniquely rooted in well-intentioned white liberalism.
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