This Thursday, October 6, Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize for Literature for her treatment of “memory” and “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”. Empty cabinets (1974), La Place (1983), Les Années (2008) or Girl’s memory (2018): her work is the chronicle of an era as well as a powerful story of female emancipation. The French novelist Annie Ernaux receives the Nobel Prize for Literature48 years after its first publication and now 82 years old, Annie Ernaux is more than ever at the center of feminist debates and has even recently established herself as a model for a new generation of activists. In two years, three of her publications have been adapted for the cinema: Passion simple by Danielle Arbid, the documentary I liked living there by Régis Sauder and finally L’Événement by Audrey Diwan, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. About her recent return to fashion, the director explained to our microphone: “She has a pioneering thought, not only on feminism, but on the class defector. She is one of the first to have theorized, through the story or through a more romantic form, what it is to change social class and to be a defector, ideas which are popularized today and which exist in the collective unconscious. She sometimes shocked the era, sometimes the era wanted to keep quiet about what she was doing, but there is an encounter with the era today that is happening now because the ideas that it has long championed are the ideas of today.”The decisive years of his lifeUntil October 31, and before its theatrical release on December 14, Arte is broadcasting its documentary The Super 8 Years, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight during the Festival of Cannes 2022, of which here is the synopsis: “At the end of the winter of 1972, Annie Ernaux and her husband Philippe Ernaux bought a Super Eight Bell and Howell camera. First filmmaker, Philippe Ernaux kept this role from 1972 to 1981, Annie and their two sons Éric and David becoming the subjects filmed. The writer put her voice on snippets of silent images edited by the latter, from their family films of the 1970s. , its aspirations torn between the attractions of the nascent consumer society and more intellectual aspirations, its vacation destinations and the beginning of mass tourism, and above all its serenity far from all the ecological considerations that we know today. In images, we see Annie Ernaux in her role as a mother and manager of the home, but in voiceover, she recounts her most intimate thoughts, her inclinations to write and the novels she began to write in secret. This film therefore evokes decisive years of his life, those of his first manuscript accepted by Gallimard editions. But these archives also tell us of the disintegration of a couple and in 1977, there will be no more family moments. The film ends with the separation of the Ernaux spouses. It is Philippe who will keep the camera to document his new life, Annie and the children will inherit the nine years of archives from which they will draw this documentary to preserve the intimate trace of these carefree years and the universal testimony of an era.
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