The Super 8 Years review – astonishing diary film knits together the personal and political

Annie Ernaux has earned worldwide acclaim and a Nobel Prize as an author excavating the inner recesses of her life via autofiction. With her books increasingly being adapted for the screen – such as the excellent Happening, directed by Audrey Diwan, released in the UK in 2022 – she now turns her razor-sharp self-reflection to celluloid, in collaboration with her son David Ernaux-Briot.

As you might guess from the title, The Super 8 Years is built out of footage shot on Super 8, much of it in the 70s when Ernaux was married to Philippe, and the two lived together with their sons, first in Annecy, then in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the outskirts of Paris. The couple bought a consumer-grade Super 8 camera in 1972, shooting home movies together until they divorced in 1981: Annie keeping the reels, Philippe keeping the camera.

As Annie makes clear in her narration, it was principally Philippe who did the shooting. In this record of her life, he is almost invisible, barely appearing in the footage, but dictating what does and doesn’t get recorded. After the initial early excitement of shooting almost everything, the camera – an expensive luxury item at the time – eventually ends up recording only major annual events like Christmas and birthdays, alongside yearly summer holidays. The film takes in a travelogue that includes Allende’s Chile, Morocco, Albania, post-Franco Spain and the USSR. Annie, emerging from a working-class background into the thoroughly middle-class and bourgeois lifestyle of being a school teacher married to a lecturer, talks frequently about her sense of alienation and ennui, deeply conscious of her place in the world. She expresses ambiguity over trips to monarchical, authoritarian Morocco, oppressive, totalitarian and Communist Albania, and a post-Franco Spain moving into democracy (“We could travel to Spain without guilt”), and a sense of hope and optimism of pre-Pinochet Chile.

The male gaze here is reappropriated and reclaimed by Annie, the shooting decisions of her ex-husband repurposed for Annie’s recollections and digressions. In the hands of a less observant writer, this would have been a painful exercise in navel-gazing, but Annie’s point-of-view and perspective is nuanced and self-aware, her touchpoints always refracted beyond her own life.

It makes for an engrossing and moving split between essay and diary film, delving into motherhood, domesticity, and romantic partnership, contextualised against the burgeoning French middle classes of the 70s. It is complex without being academic, personal without being self-indulgent, relevant without chasing the zeitgeist. At its best, it’s an astonishing piece of film work that knits together the personal and the political without making a meal of either, the feel of a writer utterly confident in her voice and conscientious of what she wants to say and how she wants to say it.

Diary films are often a niche interest amongst cinephiles, even despite the acclaim and love that a pioneer of the form such as Jonas Mekas seems to inspire. Part of the magic of The Super 8 Years is how utterly accessible it is without losing its incision. A wonderful documentary.

The Super 8 Years is released in UK cinemas on 23 June.