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THE SUPER 8 YEARS
At the end of the winter of 1972,
we bought a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera
with all the projection equipment.
My husband Philippe Ernaux and I were in our very early thirties
and had two sons of seven and three,
Eric and David.
For 7 years we'd lived in Annecy,
where Philippe Ernaux, after studying at Sciences Po,
had landed the post
of Deputy Secretary-General at city hall.
I taught literature at high school.
Arriving from Bordeaux,
we didn't like the mountains all around us,
the endless winters,
sudden fleeting springs
and touristy summers.
We got used to it
and loved the city.
Amid the flood of goods one could acquire in the 70s,
for us the camera was the ultimate desired object,
much more than a dishwasher or a colour TV.
Film truly captured life and people,
even if the films were silent.
What strikes me about the very first images shot
is the theatrical ''happening'' feel
which the camera brought to family life,
a ''happening'' conceived by my husband,
who filmed the moment I arrived with the kids
from school and the supermarket.
It is an extraordinary moment,
happy but tinged with a kind of violence.
We don't know what to do with this new sort of time torn from our life.
At the end, the camera pans across the decor,
the objects we'd chosen one by one from antique stores,
the ornate and trendy wallpaper,
all the things that marked us as newcomers to the bourgeoisie.
It's basically the homeowners' tour but we didn't own the house,
since it came with my husband's job.
Head film-maker -
Philippe Ernaux retained with few exceptions
this role I left to him without protest
because I feared mishandling the equipment, very costly at the time,
and maybe too because of a gender-based division of labour
established at the start of our life together.
My mother had lived with us since my father's death
and the sale of her café-grocery in Yvetot, Normandy.
She was happy we'd asked her but aware, as she said one day in anger,
of ''clashing with the decor''.
At home she almost always wore a flowered blouse
with pockets in which to put a handkerchief and lumps of sugar,
perhaps a reflex from her early days of poverty,
and memories of war restrictions.
My mother, physically robust from a life of work,
was anxious to ''keep up her position''
so always wore a skirt suit outside the house.
My mother, whom I snap at and berate too often,
while her tireless loving devotion to the children
gives me freedom.
Behind the image of the nondescript young mother,
I can't help but remember a woman secretly tormented
by the need to write
and, as I noted in my journal,
''assemble all the events of my life in a novel, violent
and red.''
In the scenes of Christmas 1972,
beneath the feverish, wonder-struck opening of toys,
the festivity of a meal also celebrating
the eighth birthday of Eric, born on December 25,
beneath all this,
I now perceive a different reality,
one of afternoons when I don't teach and I secretly write
a novel that describes how education,
culture, separated me from the working-class world of my birth.
''Secretly'',
because I can't tell my husband,
my mother even less.
Both are transparently present in my novel,
they who personify the two milestones of my social journey,
its point of origin and its point of arrival.
To leave home and travel far away
was a growing desire in the '70s
when the Guide du Routard was born, a desire that we shared.
We didn't just want to lie on the beach like idiots.
Le Nouvel Observateur, the weekly magazine
of the cultural avant-garde of the non-communist left
suggested a Chilean socialist experience,
via an organised trip over Easter of 1972.
Like everyone in left-wing France, we were watching Chile
and Salvador Allende's Popular Unity.
And for us, filming represented
not a way of taking action in the world, but of being its reporter.
I was dazzled to be there,
up above the Andes mountain range.
In Santiago, between two pisco sours at the Sheraton,
we saw pupils receive smocks for the new school year
in the presence of the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova,
the first woman to have gone into space.
We visited nationalised factories
and mingled with the inhabitants of a self-managed población.
We wanted to believe in Venceremos, ''we shall overcome''.
We set off for the Atacama Desert and the Antofagasta salt mines
near Chuquicamata,
the world's largest open-pit copper mine.
We patiently listened to production figures
and the land reform mechanism.
The moment of the trip which made us feel
we'd seen history in the making
was during an authorised visit to the presidential palace, La Moneda,
when we saw Allende come out of his office.
With two ministers, for an hour he enlarged
upon his revolutionary measures,
the return of land to the peasants, the nationalisation of copper and coal,
the distribution of milk to malnourished children.
We didn't feel we were filming misery
because it had become the struggle
of a president and his government.
In Valparaiso, in the mist,
I couldn't believe I was there, at the end of the earth.
I felt
the Chilean trip was changing something in my life,
forcing me to recall the promise I made myself at twenty,
''I will write to avenge my people.''
A year and a half later, hope had died, La Moneda was bombed,
Allende assassinated,
Pinochet and a military junta seized power, backed by Washington.
Le Figaro and other right-wing papers gloated.
The images we'd brought back
were of a country that no longer existed.
To keep a record
of happy moments and beautiful things is the natural desire
that runs through the images of spring and summer '72.
To film what you will never see twice,
a boat ride on Lake Annecy,
a walk in the Gorges du Fier,
on top of Semnoz with my in-laws,
whose words and the meaning of whose gestures
vanished in the air of the summer's day.
In those years,
we were drawn to the Ardèche, a short trip away,
symbol of a lost life in nature,
as in Jean Ferrat's song La Montagne,
with no pollution or hormone-fed chickens.
A life we felt nostalgia for, without having lived it,
and which we never planned to adopt,
except for the holidays.
My sister-in-law Dominique Ernaux,
in revolt against society since her teens,
had settled near Viviers,
in Ardèche, long before '68.
She shared her life with a young woman, painted,
raised hunting dogs, goats,
chickens,
and helped local people in a system of fair trade.
Next, they moved to an isolated house with no electricity or running water
and an endless view of the valley between Viviers and Saint-Montan.
It pleased us that the kids,
raised with the rules of hygiene and advice of parenting experts,
had a chance to live with animals,
drink raw goat's milk,
get dirty without fear,
look out for scorpions hidden in shoes,
make use of what was not yet called a ''composting toilet''
and discover the sticky twist of flypaper
hanging from the ceiling, as when we were children.
We felt we'd returned to an ancestral pre-industrial France,
a slowness we'd forgotten,
far from the agitation of urban life.
Tirelessly we filmed the shady streets of Alba-la-Romaine,
Labeaume, Mirabel, Balazuc,
the basalt villages which today I no longer recognise in images,
places without humans,
as if to capture a timeless purity,
while it's the people we are touched by in films of later years.
We believed these landscapes immutable,
never imagining they'd be threatened one day
by pollution, a concept just emerging then,
not to speak of global warming.
Only the imminent commissioning of a nuclear plant
along the Rhône aroused fear and anger.
We didn't really believe the ecologists' predictions.
René Dumont will obtain
less than 2% of the vote in the presidential election of 1974
and we'll vote for François Mitterrand.
We wanted to expand the children's horizons,
have them take a plane and travel abroad,
things that hadn't been possible for us until our thirties.
The adventure this time was to travel with them.
It started at Orly with the Caravelle that took us
to Tangier, and from there to the resort on the heights of M'Diq,
a luxurious white replica of a traditional Moroccan village,
with its terraced apartments and sea view.
We had a western lifestyle, away from the local people,
represented only by the silent staff,
gardeners and cleaning women who rubbed salt on the copper trays.
Everything inside was imitation,
from the souk where we bought embroidered shirts,
djellabas and gandouras
that we hastened to put on,
to the meshwi night,
with Boulaouane and cries of
''He's one of us! He drank like everyone else'',
not to speak of the welcome committee of musicians
and a snake charmer.
We didn't swim with the Moroccans
in the neighbouring sea
but stayed with other tourists by the Club pool.
The public beach was only used to exercise the horses
after their day at the riding school.
Three weeks of profound dis-occupation,
broken up by visits to royal palaces,
a market and the old blue city of Chefchaouen,
with a 15-year-old guide
whose services we bargained down,
for a tourist's duty, we understood, was never to pay the asking price.
Politically there had to be better choices than Morocco,
whose King Hassan II violently suppressed all opposition
and was suspected of having masterminded
Ben Barka's abduction and Oufkir's assassination.
Three weeks,
enough for us parents to get a dream tan,
for Eric to learn to swim
and David to enrich his repertoire of children's songs at the Club's daycare.
Poolside, I thought of the finished manuscript
in my desk drawer,
which I'd have to type before school started.
I hoped that it would save me, but I didn't know how, or from what.
I attribute the same thoughts, at the end of the same summer,
to the young woman with her husband at the Wagner Festival,
smiling amidst the officials of Annecy,
twin city of Bayreuth,
strolling around a beer festival,
visiting a brewery.
Doing so, she ponders the vague image of a Germany
the West one, obviously, for the other you say GDR -
a fairly quiet Germany,
last year's attacks are forgotten,
Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof behind bars.
She is 33 and doesn't yet know that the manuscript sent by mail
will be accepted by Gallimard
and published as Cleaned Out
in the spring of 1974.
That year, Pompidou dies, Giscard d'Estaing is elected
and Simone Veil defends abortion,
braving the boos of right-wing delegates.
My husband resigned from his post,
we left the big house and garden
for a small apartment on a noisy ring road in Annecy.
I went to Paris once
to talk about my book on the TV show Aujourd'hui Madame.
Filming is poorly suited to times of upheaval.
We had to wait over a year,
until Christmas 1974,
to again feel moved to seize that fragile moment,
only big enough to hold the pure joy of children
and our joy at seeing theirs,
more precious
than this fur-lined lambskin coat,
an upmarket version of hippie chic, which I wore for many winters.
Watching Eric blow out his candles with dreamy excitement,
we are probably thinking, my mother and I,
we the women on the front lines of time:
he's already ten years old.
Once again
it was to the Ardèche we went, in the holidays of February 1975,
for a time-out in nature and silence,
away from our hectic crowded life.
The release of my first novel seems distant, almost unreal.
A book doesn't change your life, as you hope or believe it will.
The summer of Nino Ferrer's Sud,
Joe Dassin's L'été indien,
Annie Cordy's La bonne du curé,
which the kids listened to on a slot-in turntable,
we joined the Ernaux family in Charente.
My parents-in-law had finally settled there
after many tribulations, which took these ruined bourgeois
to Africa, where my father-in-law
had changed profession at over 55,
and taught physics at the girls' lycée in Bamako,
and then to Haute-Savoie, where they'd stayed just one year.
In Charente, they inhabited a small farmhouse in a hamlet
near La Rochefoucauld,
lived from breeding rabbits
and grew their own produce
in a garden of which my father-in-law was rightly proud,
as was my mother-in-law of her petunias.
My brother-in-law Maurice, his wife and their three kids lived close by,
near Angoulême.
That summer Sunday, 3/4 of the way through the 20th century,
in the shade of an amusement park
on a miniature golf course,
time stands still before a rolling ball
that you needed to position just-so.
In these silent images, bodies speak for themselves.
The young woman with long hair,
sandals, a seventies dress and abrupt gestures,
may, at this moment, forget
to feel out of place in a family of in-laws
where all the wives are homemakers.
We left the boys
with their grandparents and set off for an unusual destination.
Who knew anything about Albania,
its 500 years of Ottoman Empire engulfed by communism?
Who had heard of its leader, Enver Hoxha?
Of all the Eastern European countries
to which we were driven by a tropism of mingled awe and repulsion,
this one offered the highest coefficient of strangeness and mystery.
At the airport, we had to shed
every sign of decadent bourgeois civilisation,
the men to exchange tight-fitting flares for Chinese worker's trousers
and get bowl haircuts,
the women to repack their trousers and put on dresses.
We soon understood nothing could be filmed
without permission from the interpreter,
a young woman who, in her words,
''thought she'd die'' on a trip to Paris in 1970
on seeing long-haired men and hippies.
We couldn't circulate freely,
let alone mingle with the Albanians.
On the magnificent beach of Durrës,
our little group of eight was ordered
to stay within a well-defined zone in front of the Hotel Adriatik,
reserved for foreigners.
The Sigurimi, equivalent to the KGB and the Stasi, was watching.
We were considered vectors of Western corruption
and would stay in our bubble.
The real country was on another stage to which we had no access.
Some images show me standing silent and apart from the group.
I didn't go on all the excursions but stayed at the hotel,
half-heartedly writing, reading the only Albanian book
I could find in French,
The White Southern Wind, by Jakov Xoxa.
What was most moving and paradoxical about the trip
were the things that took us furthest from the ''New Man''
and back to the days of our childhoods,
the silence of cities without cars, people on foot or bicycle
Chinese bicycles, of course -
fields manually worked by men and women,
landscapes not yet disfigured by cement.
We could question nothing,
constantly subjected to speeches
castigating Tito's revisionism,
the Moscow regime and Western decadence,
praising the benefits of Mao-inspired cultural revolution,
called ''revolutionarisation''.
Between the remnants
of ancient civilisations and crude propaganda,
there was a contrast, a troubling disconnect,
an incompatibility of values
which was, perhaps,
the basis of Albania's identity at that time.
We could not have imagined that 20 years later,
of all the monuments to the glory of the Stalinist-Maoist regime,
nothing would remain.
All that was left to see
were ancient ruins from over 2000 years before,
which do not age.
We saw nothing of the Albania of 1975
but perhaps no more or less than summer visitors today,
thousands who flock to the beaches on the Adriatic.
The country is now a top holiday spot in the Balkans,
while since 1989 its inhabitants have fled in droves,
migrants shunted from one end of Europe to another,
drawn by the image of a happiness that we, at some past time,
despite our distance from the people,
or maybe because of it, made them want.
Winter sports were a growing craze amongst the middle and upper classes.
Resorts were being built from scratch, as in Flaine.
The new concept
of buying timeshare weeks caught on quickly,
a phenomenon only slightly parodied in the film French Fried Vacation.
With a loan made advantageous by two-digit inflation,
we bought a studio
in a new building in the upper part of the old village of La Clusaz.
By capturing and making a record of beginnings,
the camera recovered its original justification.
We filmed David's first times skiing downhill at La Clusaz,
as we had Eric's at Le Grand-Bornand.
And as usual, to take possession of the place,
we filmed elements of the decor,
an act of magic
or the premonition of a day when they'd be moved or gone
and we could no longer say where or why.
In this living space reduced to one room,
family ties were reasserted more than strengthened.
It's a time of fatherly pranks and mises-en-scene,
Mille Bornes and Monopoly,
and the nickname ''fish mama'' which my husband gave me,
based on the song by Boby Lapointe.
It was no place to stir up old conflicts.
The woman in the image always seems to wonder why she's there.
I write in my journal that winter sports and Savoyard fondue are no joking matter.
I felt a spectator to what would be for years to come
a winter ritual
and for me a duty to enjoy myself.
I was the only one who didn't ski.
I read, marked essays,
wrote a little, looking out on the Aravis,
where the sun rose in the morning
and in the evening lit the mountain face with rays of pink.
I understood why the sun had once been worshipped like a god.
Towns were built in the country near Paris,
called ''new towns''.
We landed in one of these, Cergy-Pontoise.
When I wonder about Philippe Ernaux's odd desire
to film objects transplanted from one house to another,
it seems to me a sign of hidden insecurity,
that of a child sent to Jesuit boarding school at eight,
a child whose parents constantly moved.
These paintings and furniture
reveal today their futility as lifeless objects.
We unconsciously sought to give the present a future and create,
image by image, scene by scene,
something like a family fiction
to which each would later add a subtext.
There is nothing in the smiles around this festive table
to suggest that the family order
will be overturned two days later when my mother decides
to return to Yvetot, leaving me at a loss.
My mother, whose keen, attentive gaze makes me ill-at-ease.
There may be no greater humiliation for a daughter
than to be unable to hide the signs of marital discord from her mother,
a silent, disapproving witness.
I wrote in my diary,
''You mustn't think about these things, old age and death,
or you'll lose all hope.''
In the summer of 1976, more remembered for the great drought
than for the death sentence of Christian Ranucci,
refused pardon by Giscard d'Estaing,
the four of us, en route for London, boarded the hovercraft
that crossed the Channel in 25 minutes.
We were drawn by hopes for cooler weather
but it was as hot as in France, the grass burnt -
and the educational desire
to immerse the kids in English, which Eric had studied for a year
with a purely audiovisual method
that baffled us.
Also a desire to introduce them to breakfast
with bacon and eggs, double-decker buses
and everything that made England at the time,
as it is today,
the most exotic of nearby countries.
We preferred the freedom of the parks to museums,
the coolness of boating on the Serpentine,
the surprise of an old-time merry-go-round,
the slow boat trip along the banks of the Thames
past the docks
not yet transformed into Silicon Valley,
as they'd be under Thatcher.
We'd chosen a hotel
with a central location, Soho,
which had become a bustling district with a fevered nightlife,
a mixture of pubs,
sex shops and porn cinemas,
and only went back there
to sleep in rooms luckily facing the courtyard.
Those days left me with memories
of a long and peaceful flânerie.
I'd just finished my second book
and not yet started to worry about the publisher's verdict.
There was a certain sweetness to revisiting London,
where at 19
I'd worked as an au pair,
been very unhappy,
become bulimic and shoplifted.
The idea of returning to Finchley,
the chic suburb where I'd spent six months in 1960, didn't occur to me,
or I rejected it
as inappropriate to the family situation now mine.
Nor did I insist on a stroll through Whitechapel,
which I'd wanted to see at 19
because of Dickens and Oliver Twist
and Piaf's song that goes
''C'est à Hambourg, à Santiago à Whitechapel, ou Borneo''.
In the summer of 1977,
we moved to a house on the heights of Cergy,
bordering fields where very quickly,
new housing estates would spring up.
A curious house,
massive and convoluted, dating from the fifties.
From the windows
we could see the voluptuous curves of the river Oise
and on the far horizon,
the Eiffel Tower and the hulk of La Défense.
We will not think of filming a landscape
no less ephemeral than childhood,
one of cranes, trenches, disparate constructions
offered to the eye by the new town of Cergy-Pontoise,
a muddy no man's land
which ten years later
will have been erased,
undetectable in Rohmer's film Boyfriends and Girlfriends.
It was an abstract, imaginary city,
still in the making.
We never tired of filming this landscape over the months and seasons,
this overgrown garden where wild rabbits prospered.
There will, however, be very few interiors,
no more birthday meals at all,
no more family moments filmed.
Today I see in that absence a sign unnoticed then,
as we watched the latest reel together,
a sign of bonds unravelling.
Our reluctance to film ourselves
expressed the general lassitude of a couple near forty
whose way of life weighed equally on both.
In the fall of 1978,
I accompanied Philippe Ernaux to a conference in Ajaccio.
I was often alone while Philippe Ernaux was in meetings.
I walked around, looked in windows
along rue du Cardinal Fesch,
I felt like a Frenchwoman from the mainland.
It was our first time in Corsica
and inadmissibly
we expected to feel uprooted, as much as, or even more
than if we were in a foreign country.
Sometimes I stayed at the hotel, far from the city centre
and close to the beach, deserted in October.
I read Paul Nizan, I wrote in my journal,
''The water falls on the terrace, forming fleeting moons on the puddles.
From here I see palm trees, an ochre statue, the bougainvillea.''
I recall the mornings when I walked up a sandy little path to the bus stop,
past the closed beach bars,
a moment of pure pleasure
which counterbalanced the boredom and loneliness of the formal meals.
On the beach,
I was buoyed by the certainty of finishing the book
I'd only just begun to write
my story of a woman
assigned since marriage to the role of nurturer,
silent manager and steward,
whereas I'd been raised to believe in freedom and equality with men.
That book, A Frozen Woman,
had just been finished and sent to my editor
when we left for Spain the summer of '80
with the boys in their early teens, in Iron Maiden t-shirts,
asking for their heavy metal
and Queen tapes to be played in the car.
Giscard's haughty presidency was ending in a slow, heavy climate,
scarcely brightened by farcical tales
of diamonds from Bokassa and sniffer planes.
We doubted François Mitterrand had a chance,
allied with Georges Marchais.
We'd have preferred Rocard.
One could go to Spain without bad conscience since Franco's death
but paradoxically, not without a shiver of fear
due to the attacks of the ETA,
who were said to puncture tourists' tires,
a fear forgotten as of Pamplona and the San Fermin festival.
We were immersed in dizzying jubilation,
bullfights, non-stop music,
the Bigheads swaying between narrow walls,
everything I'd just read in The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway.
In Pamplona,
I'd no idea that in my memory, this trip would signify a rite of initiation
into another life,
its stages marked by the cities travelled through in the Peugeot 504.
Valladolid, where David came down with food poisoning,
Toledo,
the Tagus and the sinister Alcázar.
Soria, Alba de Tormes, Almazán.
Salamanca,
especially Salamanca, and the Plaza Mayor,
where after a heated argument, I remained one evening alone with my sons
until the sun went down,
a perfect moment.
In the permanent familial and conjugal one-on-one
of a family trip,
things that stay hidden on ordinary days suddenly explode,
conflicts are aggravated, usually dissolved in people's daily occupations.
With a lucidity made more painful
by the memory of another summer, the one when we met
seventeen years earlier,
I wrote in my journal,
''I'm superfluous in his life.''
A year later, in the summer of '81, in Portugal,
our personal history had taken
a turn for the worse with the publication of my book
A Frozen Woman,
while political history billowed with great expectations
since François Mitterrand's May 10th victory.
The camera that summer no longer sought happy moments.
The scarcity of faces and bodies in the images,
which struck me when we watched the reels,
signified growing distance in a couple.
Of the towns we travelled through, I remember
only the unfinished chapels of Batalha, with sky for roofs,
a monster traffic jam on our way out of Setúbal,
the alleys of Obidos, where I bought an embroidered dress,
trams in the steep and narrow streets of old Lisbon,
which today for me have merged with Alain Tanner's
In the White City,
streets destroyed by the great fire
of 1988.
On that trip, Philippe Ernaux was miles away
and I was dramatically absent.
In a sense,
the wind of freedom from the spring had caught us up.
In the fall of '81,
silencing our grievances,
we seized the chance to go to Moscow,
courtesy of Philippe Ernaux's work council,
a four-day trip.
It was too short
and we didn't expect much from a visit
organised by the Soviet agency Intourist.
However, when we landed at Sheremetyevo airport,
greeted by Red Army soldiers with oddly childlike faces,
I was gripped by a sudden emotion,
as if the weight of 20th century History had converged
and unfurled in the space of a second
all images of Russia accumulated since childhood.
The USSR was the Beyond, immense, unrepresentable,
containing both Siberia and the beaches of the Black Sea,
Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Eisenstein,
Lenin, Stalin,
the muzhik Khrushchev
to Leonid Brezhnev,
in office from time immemorial,
grim and massive,
''not quite sinister but almost'', to paraphrase Coluche.
On the marked route that took us by Intourist coach from Red Square,
with St. Basil's Cathedral
and the endless queue
at Lenin's mausoleum,
to Lomonosov University,
a symbol of glorious Stalinist architecture,
we vaguely searched for signs
of the joy or misery of being a Soviet.
What did it mean to live in an order magnified by the grandeur
of the Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman,
with hieratic profiles of workers on the walls, extolling production?
The trip to Moscow is the last we made together,
and the last film shot.
The family unit collapsed the following year.
It was agreed the boys would stay with me.
Their father took the camera, which he'd use in his new life,
and left me the projector, the screen and all the reels of film.
He resolutely entered another existence
and abandoned the memory of the old one with us.
In short, he made me its guardian.
It was a new form of family life that developed with my teenaged sons
and we let the films sleep a long time.
To set up the screen in the dining room,
raise the projector with books on the table, gather chairs,
wait for everyone to be seated
and then watch the images roll
as each added his or her remark,
all the ceremony once eagerly awaited
was part of a bygone era.
My sons had to become fathers themselves
for us to rediscover together these traces of their childhood
and the dead, alive again.
My mother,
the Ernaux grandparents,
Dominique the rebel
and the one who'd filmed it all, Philippe Ernaux,
who died of a smoker's cancer.
It was both joyful and melancholy.
Each of us thought in disbelief
''that was me, that was us'',
knowing nothing, then, of a mysterious future
in which the year 2000 was a horizon too remote
for us to care about.
But what story was told in this parade of images
with no sound but the crackle of the projector?
Words were needed to give meaning to this silent time,
snippets of family life
invisibly recorded inside the history of the era.
It would be a fragment of family autobiography,
and a chance for me
to recall decisive years of my life,
and for all of us to revisit that light shone upon the past,
the golden light of ''Indian summer''
which Joe Dassin sang about in those years.
Subtitles: Alison Strayer
Subtitling: HIVENTY