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THE SUPER 8 YEARS

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At the end of the winter of 1972,

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we bought a Bell
& Howell Super 8 camera

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with all the projection equipment.

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My husband Philippe Ernaux
and I were in our very early thirties

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and had two
sons of seven and three,

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Eric and David.

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For 7 years we'd lived in Annecy,

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where Philippe Ernaux,
after studying at Sciences Po,

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had landed the post

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of Deputy
Secretary-General at city hall.

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I taught literature at high school.

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Arriving from Bordeaux,

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we didn't like the
mountains all around us,

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the endless winters,

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sudden fleeting springs

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and touristy summers.

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We got used to it

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and loved the city.

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Amid the flood of goods
one could acquire in the 70s,

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for us the camera
was the ultimate desired object,

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much more than a
dishwasher or a colour TV.

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Film truly captured life and people,

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even if the films were silent.

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What strikes me
about the very first images shot

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is the theatrical ''happening'' feel

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which the camera brought to family life,

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a ''happening'' conceived by my husband,

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who filmed the
moment I arrived with the kids

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from school and the supermarket.

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It is an extraordinary moment,

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happy but tinged
with a kind of violence.

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We don't know what to do with
this new sort of time torn from our life.

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At the end, the
camera pans across the decor,

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the objects we'd chosen
one by one from antique stores,

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the ornate and trendy wallpaper,

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all the things that marked
us as newcomers to the bourgeoisie.

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It's basically the homeowners'
tour but we didn't own the house,

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since it came with my husband's job.

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Head film-maker -

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Philippe Ernaux
retained with few exceptions

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this role I left to him without protest

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because I feared mishandling
the equipment, very costly at the time,

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and maybe too because
of a gender-based division of labour

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established at
the start of our life together.

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My mother had lived
with us since my father's death

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and the sale of her
café-grocery in Yvetot, Normandy.

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She was happy we'd asked her
but aware, as she said one day in anger,

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of ''clashing with the decor''.

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At home she almost
always wore a flowered blouse

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with pockets in which to put
a handkerchief and lumps of sugar,

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perhaps a reflex
from her early days of poverty,

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and memories of war restrictions.

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My mother, physically
robust from a life of work,

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was anxious to ''keep up her position''

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so always wore a
skirt suit outside the house.

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My mother, whom I
snap at and berate too often,

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while her tireless
loving devotion to the children

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gives me freedom.

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Behind the image of
the nondescript young mother,

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I can't help but remember
a woman secretly tormented

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by the need to write

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and, as I noted in my journal,

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''assemble all the
events of my life in a novel, violent

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and red.''

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In the scenes of Christmas 1972,

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beneath the feverish,
wonder-struck opening of toys,

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the festivity of a meal also celebrating

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the eighth birthday
of Eric, born on December 25,

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beneath all this,

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I now perceive a different reality,

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one of afternoons when
I don't teach and I secretly write

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a novel that describes how education,

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culture, separated me from
the working-class world of my birth.

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''Secretly'',

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because I can't tell my husband,

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my mother even less.

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Both are transparently
present in my novel,

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they who personify the
two milestones of my social journey,

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its point of origin
and its point of arrival.

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To leave home and travel far away

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was a growing desire in the '70s

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when the Guide du Routard
was born, a desire that we shared.

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We didn't just want
to lie on the beach like idiots.

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Le Nouvel Observateur,
the weekly magazine

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of the cultural avant-garde
of the non-communist left

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suggested a
Chilean socialist experience,

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via an organised
trip over Easter of 1972.

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Like everyone in left-wing
France, we were watching Chile

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and Salvador Allende's Popular Unity.

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And for us, filming represented

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not a way of taking action
in the world, but of being its reporter.

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I was dazzled to be there,

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up above the Andes mountain range.

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In Santiago, between
two pisco sours at the Sheraton,

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we saw pupils receive
smocks for the new school year

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in the presence of the
cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova,

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the first woman
to have gone into space.

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We visited nationalised factories

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and mingled with the
inhabitants of a self-managed población.

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We wanted to believe in
Venceremos, ''we shall overcome''.

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We set off for the Atacama
Desert and the Antofagasta salt mines

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near Chuquicamata,

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the world's largest
open-pit copper mine.

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We patiently
listened to production figures

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and the land reform mechanism.

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The moment of
the trip which made us feel

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we'd seen history in the making

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was during an authorised visit
to the presidential palace, La Moneda,

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when we saw
Allende come out of his office.

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With two ministers,
for an hour he enlarged

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upon his revolutionary measures,

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the return of land to the peasants,
the nationalisation of copper and coal,

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the distribution of
milk to malnourished children.

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We didn't feel we were filming misery

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because it had become the struggle

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of a president and his government.

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In Valparaiso, in the mist,

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I couldn't believe I
was there, at the end of the earth.

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I felt

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the Chilean trip was
changing something in my life,

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forcing me to recall the
promise I made myself at twenty,

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''I will write to avenge my people.''

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A year and a half later, hope
had died, La Moneda was bombed,

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Allende assassinated,

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Pinochet and a military junta
seized power, backed by Washington.

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Le Figaro and other
right-wing papers gloated.

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The images we'd brought back

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were of a country
that no longer existed.

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To keep a record

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of happy moments and
beautiful things is the natural desire

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that runs through the
images of spring and summer '72.

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To film what you will never see twice,

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a boat ride on Lake Annecy,

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a walk in the Gorges du Fier,

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on top of Semnoz with my in-laws,

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whose words and
the meaning of whose gestures

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vanished in the air of the summer's day.

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In those years,

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we were drawn to
the Ardèche, a short trip away,

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symbol of a lost life in nature,

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as in Jean Ferrat's song La Montagne,

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with no pollution
or hormone-fed chickens.

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A life we felt nostalgia
for, without having lived it,

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and which we never planned to adopt,

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except for the holidays.

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My sister-in-law Dominique Ernaux,

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in revolt against
society since her teens,

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had settled near Viviers,

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in Ardèche, long before '68.

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She shared her life
with a young woman, painted,

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raised hunting dogs, goats,

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chickens,

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and helped local
people in a system of fair trade.

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Next, they moved to an isolated
house with no electricity or running water

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and an endless view of the
valley between Viviers and Saint-Montan.

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It pleased us that the kids,

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raised with the rules of
hygiene and advice of parenting experts,

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had a chance to live with animals,

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drink raw goat's milk,

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get dirty without fear,

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look out for scorpions hidden in shoes,

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make use of what was
not yet called a ''composting toilet''

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and discover
the sticky twist of flypaper

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hanging from the
ceiling, as when we were children.

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We felt we'd returned to
an ancestral pre-industrial France,

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a slowness we'd forgotten,

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far from the agitation of urban life.

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Tirelessly we filmed the
shady streets of Alba-la-Romaine,

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Labeaume, Mirabel, Balazuc,

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the basalt villages which
today I no longer recognise in images,

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places without humans,

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as if to capture a timeless purity,

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while it's the people we
are touched by in films of later years.

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We believed these landscapes immutable,

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never imagining
they'd be threatened one day

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by pollution, a
concept just emerging then,

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not to speak of global warming.

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Only the imminent
commissioning of a nuclear plant

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along the Rhône
aroused fear and anger.

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We didn't really believe
the ecologists' predictions.

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René Dumont will obtain

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less than 2% of the vote
in the presidential election of 1974

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and we'll vote for François Mitterrand.

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We wanted to
expand the children's horizons,

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have them take
a plane and travel abroad,

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things that hadn't been
possible for us until our thirties.

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The adventure this
time was to travel with them.

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It started at Orly
with the Caravelle that took us

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to Tangier, and from there
to the resort on the heights of M'Diq,

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a luxurious white replica
of a traditional Moroccan village,

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with its terraced
apartments and sea view.

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We had a western
lifestyle, away from the local people,

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represented only by the silent staff,

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gardeners and cleaning women
who rubbed salt on the copper trays.

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Everything inside was imitation,

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from the souk where
we bought embroidered shirts,

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djellabas and gandouras

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that we hastened to put on,

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to the meshwi night,

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with Boulaouane and cries of

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''He's one of us!
He drank like everyone else'',

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not to speak of the
welcome committee of musicians

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and a snake charmer.

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We didn't swim with the Moroccans

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in the neighbouring sea

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but stayed with
other tourists by the Club pool.

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The public beach was
only used to exercise the horses

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after their day at the riding school.

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Three weeks of profound dis-occupation,

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broken up by visits to royal palaces,

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a market and the
old blue city of Chefchaouen,

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with a 15-year-old guide

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whose services we bargained down,

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for a tourist's duty, we understood,
was never to pay the asking price.

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Politically there had to
be better choices than Morocco,

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whose King Hassan II
violently suppressed all opposition

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and was suspected
of having masterminded

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Ben Barka's abduction
and Oufkir's assassination.

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Three weeks,

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enough for us
parents to get a dream tan,

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for Eric to learn to swim

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and David to enrich his repertoire
of children's songs at the Club's daycare.

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Poolside, I thought
of the finished manuscript

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in my desk drawer,

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which I'd have to
type before school started.

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I hoped that it would save
me, but I didn't know how, or from what.

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I attribute the same thoughts,
at the end of the same summer,

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to the young woman with
her husband at the Wagner Festival,

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smiling amidst the officials of Annecy,

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twin city of Bayreuth,

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strolling around a beer festival,

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visiting a brewery.

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Doing so, she ponders
the vague image of a Germany

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the West one,
obviously, for the other you say GDR -

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a fairly quiet Germany,

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00:20:37,892 --> 00:20:40,826
last year's attacks are forgotten,

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00:20:40,850 --> 00:20:45,450
Andreas Baader and
Ulrike Meinhof behind bars.

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She is 33 and doesn't yet
know that the manuscript sent by mail

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will be accepted by Gallimard

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and published as Cleaned Out

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00:21:00,267 --> 00:21:03,237
in the spring of 1974.

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That year, Pompidou
dies, Giscard d'Estaing is elected

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00:21:18,558 --> 00:21:20,659
and Simone Veil defends abortion,

247
00:21:20,683 --> 00:21:23,576
braving the boos
of right-wing delegates.

248
00:21:23,600 --> 00:21:26,159
My husband resigned from his post,

249
00:21:26,183 --> 00:21:28,409
we left the big house and garden

250
00:21:28,433 --> 00:21:33,608
for a small apartment
on a noisy ring road in Annecy.

251
00:21:33,975 --> 00:21:35,534
I went to Paris once

252
00:21:35,558 --> 00:21:39,871
to talk about my book on
the TV show Aujourd'hui Madame.

253
00:21:47,892 --> 00:21:51,284
Filming is poorly
suited to times of upheaval.

254
00:21:51,308 --> 00:21:53,201
We had to wait over a year,

255
00:21:53,225 --> 00:21:55,451
until Christmas 1974,

256
00:21:55,475 --> 00:21:59,576
to again feel moved
to seize that fragile moment,

257
00:21:59,600 --> 00:22:03,076
only big enough to
hold the pure joy of children

258
00:22:03,100 --> 00:22:05,544
and our joy at seeing theirs,

259
00:22:05,599 --> 00:22:07,284
more precious

260
00:22:07,308 --> 00:22:09,701
than this fur-lined lambskin coat,

261
00:22:09,725 --> 00:22:15,044
an upmarket version of hippie
chic, which I wore for many winters.

262
00:22:23,517 --> 00:22:28,451
Watching Eric blow out
his candles with dreamy excitement,

263
00:22:28,475 --> 00:22:31,284
we are probably
thinking, my mother and I,

264
00:22:31,308 --> 00:22:34,243
we the women on the front lines of time:

265
00:22:34,267 --> 00:22:36,280
he's already ten years old.

266
00:22:51,850 --> 00:22:53,243
Once again

267
00:22:53,267 --> 00:22:57,701
it was to the Ardèche we
went, in the holidays of February 1975,

268
00:22:57,725 --> 00:23:00,743
for a time-out in nature and silence,

269
00:23:00,767 --> 00:23:04,695
away from our hectic crowded life.

270
00:23:12,225 --> 00:23:18,263
The release of my first
novel seems distant, almost unreal.

271
00:23:19,142 --> 00:23:24,268
A book doesn't change
your life, as you hope or believe it will.

272
00:23:35,776 --> 00:23:39,419
The summer of Nino Ferrer's Sud,

273
00:23:39,443 --> 00:23:42,086
Joe Dassin's L'été indien,

274
00:23:42,110 --> 00:23:43,586
Annie Cordy's La bonne du curé,

275
00:23:43,610 --> 00:23:46,794
which the kids
listened to on a slot-in turntable,

276
00:23:46,818 --> 00:23:50,124
we joined the Ernaux family in Charente.

277
00:23:50,610 --> 00:23:53,502
My parents-in-law
had finally settled there

278
00:23:53,526 --> 00:23:57,502
after many tribulations,
which took these ruined bourgeois

279
00:23:57,526 --> 00:24:00,086
to Africa, where my father-in-law

280
00:24:00,110 --> 00:24:02,218
had changed
profession at over 55,

281
00:24:02,693 --> 00:24:06,128
and taught physics
at the girls' lycée in Bamako,

282
00:24:06,152 --> 00:24:10,919
and then to Haute-Savoie,
where they'd stayed just one year.

283
00:24:10,943 --> 00:24:14,794
In Charente, they inhabited
a small farmhouse in a hamlet

284
00:24:14,818 --> 00:24:16,752
near La Rochefoucauld,

285
00:24:16,776 --> 00:24:19,211
lived from breeding rabbits

286
00:24:19,235 --> 00:24:21,170
and grew their own produce

287
00:24:21,194 --> 00:24:24,794
in a garden of which
my father-in-law was rightly proud,

288
00:24:24,818 --> 00:24:28,748
as was my mother-in-law of her petunias.

289
00:24:41,610 --> 00:24:46,502
My brother-in-law Maurice, his
wife and their three kids lived close by,

290
00:24:46,526 --> 00:24:48,108
near Angoulême.

291
00:24:51,276 --> 00:24:54,878
That summer Sunday, 3/4
of the way through the 20th century,

292
00:24:54,902 --> 00:24:57,377
in the shade of an amusement park

293
00:24:57,401 --> 00:24:59,463
on a miniature golf course,

294
00:25:00,068 --> 00:25:02,836
time stands still before a rolling ball

295
00:25:02,860 --> 00:25:05,637
that you needed to position just-so.

296
00:25:06,401 --> 00:25:10,523
In these silent images,
bodies speak for themselves.

297
00:25:22,235 --> 00:25:24,044
The young woman with long hair,

298
00:25:24,068 --> 00:25:28,188
sandals, a seventies
dress and abrupt gestures,

299
00:25:28,735 --> 00:25:30,294
may, at this moment, forget

300
00:25:30,318 --> 00:25:34,461
to feel out of
place in a family of in-laws

301
00:25:34,485 --> 00:25:38,270
where all the wives are homemakers.

302
00:25:46,776 --> 00:25:48,502
We left the boys

303
00:25:48,526 --> 00:25:53,079
with their grandparents
and set off for an unusual destination.

304
00:26:24,027 --> 00:26:25,961
Who knew anything about Albania,

305
00:26:25,985 --> 00:26:30,919
its 500 years of Ottoman
Empire engulfed by communism?

306
00:26:30,943 --> 00:26:35,128
Who had heard
of its leader, Enver Hoxha?

307
00:26:35,152 --> 00:26:36,752
Of all the Eastern European countries

308
00:26:36,776 --> 00:26:41,137
to which we were driven by a
tropism of mingled awe and repulsion,

309
00:26:41,985 --> 00:26:48,069
this one offered the highest
coefficient of strangeness and mystery.

310
00:26:54,152 --> 00:26:56,170
At the airport, we had to shed

311
00:26:56,194 --> 00:26:59,878
every sign of
decadent bourgeois civilisation,

312
00:26:59,902 --> 00:27:05,377
the men to exchange tight-fitting
flares for Chinese worker's trousers

313
00:27:05,401 --> 00:27:07,544
and get bowl haircuts,

314
00:27:07,568 --> 00:27:12,504
the women to repack
their trousers and put on dresses.

315
00:27:12,943 --> 00:27:15,586
We soon understood
nothing could be filmed

316
00:27:15,610 --> 00:27:18,294
without permission from the interpreter,

317
00:27:18,318 --> 00:27:20,461
a young woman who, in her words,

318
00:27:20,485 --> 00:27:24,627
''thought she'd
die'' on a trip to Paris in 1970

319
00:27:24,651 --> 00:27:28,101
on seeing
long-haired men and hippies.

320
00:27:30,068 --> 00:27:32,502
We couldn't circulate freely,

321
00:27:32,526 --> 00:27:36,073
let alone mingle with the Albanians.

322
00:27:39,275 --> 00:27:41,669
On the magnificent beach of Durrës,

323
00:27:41,693 --> 00:27:44,836
our little group of eight was ordered

324
00:27:44,860 --> 00:27:49,294
to stay within a well-defined
zone in front of the Hotel Adriatik,

325
00:27:49,318 --> 00:27:51,570
reserved for foreigners.

326
00:27:55,526 --> 00:28:00,894
The Sigurimi, equivalent to
the KGB and the Stasi, was watching.

327
00:28:08,568 --> 00:28:11,752
We were considered
vectors of Western corruption

328
00:28:11,776 --> 00:28:14,173
and would stay in our bubble.

329
00:28:14,485 --> 00:28:19,324
The real country was on
another stage to which we had no access.

330
00:28:32,359 --> 00:28:36,878
Some images show me
standing silent and apart from the group.

331
00:28:36,902 --> 00:28:41,252
I didn't go on all the
excursions but stayed at the hotel,

332
00:28:41,276 --> 00:28:44,752
half-heartedly writing,
reading the only Albanian book

333
00:28:44,776 --> 00:28:47,251
I could find in French,

334
00:28:47,275 --> 00:28:50,104
The White Southern Wind, by Jakov Xoxa.

335
00:28:53,693 --> 00:28:57,627
What was most moving
and paradoxical about the trip

336
00:28:57,651 --> 00:29:01,502
were the things that took
us furthest from the ''New Man''

337
00:29:01,526 --> 00:29:04,258
and back to the days of our childhoods,

338
00:29:04,735 --> 00:29:08,586
the silence of cities
without cars, people on foot or bicycle

339
00:29:08,610 --> 00:29:10,574
Chinese bicycles, of course -

340
00:29:10,693 --> 00:29:14,431
fields manually worked by men and women,

341
00:29:14,735 --> 00:29:19,382
landscapes not yet disfigured by cement.

342
00:29:25,693 --> 00:29:28,088
We could question nothing,

343
00:29:28,276 --> 00:29:32,044
constantly subjected to speeches

344
00:29:32,068 --> 00:29:34,799
castigating Tito's revisionism,

345
00:29:35,275 --> 00:29:38,199
the Moscow regime
and Western decadence,

346
00:29:39,610 --> 00:29:43,878
praising the benefits of
Mao-inspired cultural revolution,

347
00:29:43,902 --> 00:29:47,781
called ''revolutionarisation''.

348
00:30:01,276 --> 00:30:02,919
Between the remnants

349
00:30:02,943 --> 00:30:06,729
of ancient civilisations
and crude propaganda,

350
00:30:07,068 --> 00:30:10,461
there was a contrast,
a troubling disconnect,

351
00:30:10,485 --> 00:30:12,794
an incompatibility of values

352
00:30:12,818 --> 00:30:14,419
which was, perhaps,

353
00:30:14,443 --> 00:30:18,421
the basis of
Albania's identity at that time.

354
00:30:19,943 --> 00:30:23,627
We could not have
imagined that 20 years later,

355
00:30:23,651 --> 00:30:27,461
of all the monuments to the
glory of the Stalinist-Maoist regime,

356
00:30:27,485 --> 00:30:29,354
nothing would remain.

357
00:30:29,568 --> 00:30:31,752
All that was left to see

358
00:30:31,776 --> 00:30:34,711
were ancient ruins
from over 2000 years before,

359
00:30:34,735 --> 00:30:36,413
which do not age.

360
00:30:52,318 --> 00:30:55,335
We saw nothing of the Albania of 1975

361
00:30:55,359 --> 00:30:59,003
but perhaps no more or
less than summer visitors today,

362
00:30:59,027 --> 00:31:02,188
thousands who flock
to the beaches on the Adriatic.

363
00:31:02,275 --> 00:31:06,044
The country is now a
top holiday spot in the Balkans,

364
00:31:06,068 --> 00:31:10,878
while since 1989 its
inhabitants have fled in droves,

365
00:31:10,902 --> 00:31:13,919
migrants shunted from
one end of Europe to another,

366
00:31:13,943 --> 00:31:18,586
drawn by the image of a
happiness that we, at some past time,

367
00:31:18,610 --> 00:31:22,502
despite our distance from the people,

368
00:31:22,526 --> 00:31:26,648
or maybe because
of it, made them want.

369
00:31:56,275 --> 00:32:02,003
Winter sports were a growing
craze amongst the middle and upper classes.

370
00:32:02,027 --> 00:32:05,752
Resorts were being
built from scratch, as in Flaine.

371
00:32:05,776 --> 00:32:07,961
The new concept

372
00:32:07,985 --> 00:32:10,836
of buying timeshare
weeks caught on quickly,

373
00:32:10,860 --> 00:32:15,627
a phenomenon only slightly
parodied in the film French Fried Vacation.

374
00:32:15,651 --> 00:32:19,170
With a loan made
advantageous by two-digit inflation,

375
00:32:19,194 --> 00:32:22,020
we bought a studio

376
00:32:22,235 --> 00:32:27,313
in a new building in the
upper part of the old village of La Clusaz.

377
00:32:33,985 --> 00:32:36,961
By capturing and
making a record of beginnings,

378
00:32:36,985 --> 00:32:40,669
the camera recovered
its original justification.

379
00:32:40,693 --> 00:32:44,627
We filmed David's first
times skiing downhill at La Clusaz,

380
00:32:44,651 --> 00:32:47,718
as we had Eric's at Le Grand-Bornand.

381
00:33:14,902 --> 00:33:17,461
And as usual, to
take possession of the place,

382
00:33:17,485 --> 00:33:20,251
we filmed elements of the decor,

383
00:33:20,275 --> 00:33:21,335
an act of magic

384
00:33:21,359 --> 00:33:24,878
or the premonition of a
day when they'd be moved or gone

385
00:33:24,902 --> 00:33:28,304
and we could no longer say where or why.

386
00:33:30,275 --> 00:33:33,294
In this living
space reduced to one room,

387
00:33:33,318 --> 00:33:37,823
family ties were
reasserted more than strengthened.

388
00:33:38,152 --> 00:33:41,586
It's a time of fatherly
pranks and mises-en-scene,

389
00:33:41,610 --> 00:33:43,794
Mille Bornes and Monopoly,

390
00:33:43,818 --> 00:33:47,170
and the nickname ''fish
mama'' which my husband gave me,

391
00:33:47,194 --> 00:33:50,260
based on the song by Boby Lapointe.

392
00:33:53,110 --> 00:33:56,657
It was no place
to stir up old conflicts.

393
00:34:08,818 --> 00:34:13,211
The woman in the image
always seems to wonder why she's there.

394
00:34:13,235 --> 00:34:20,135
I write in my journal that winter sports
and Savoyard fondue are no joking matter.

395
00:34:20,276 --> 00:34:24,752
I felt a spectator to
what would be for years to come

396
00:34:24,776 --> 00:34:26,549
a winter ritual

397
00:34:26,776 --> 00:34:29,412
and for me a duty to enjoy myself.

398
00:34:34,735 --> 00:34:36,961
I was the only one who didn't ski.

399
00:34:36,985 --> 00:34:39,141
I read, marked essays,

400
00:34:39,526 --> 00:34:42,881
wrote a little,
looking out on the Aravis,

401
00:34:42,985 --> 00:34:45,086
where the sun rose in the morning

402
00:34:45,110 --> 00:34:49,135
and in the evening lit
the mountain face with rays of pink.

403
00:34:49,276 --> 00:34:53,541
I understood why the sun
had once been worshipped like a god.

404
00:35:34,194 --> 00:35:37,170
Towns were built
in the country near Paris,

405
00:35:37,194 --> 00:35:39,541
called ''new towns''.

406
00:35:39,776 --> 00:35:44,281
We landed in one
of these, Cergy-Pontoise.

407
00:36:07,985 --> 00:36:11,170
When I wonder about
Philippe Ernaux's odd desire

408
00:36:11,194 --> 00:36:15,252
to film objects transplanted
from one house to another,

409
00:36:15,276 --> 00:36:18,294
it seems to me a
sign of hidden insecurity,

410
00:36:18,318 --> 00:36:21,752
that of a child sent to
Jesuit boarding school at eight,

411
00:36:21,776 --> 00:36:24,939
a child whose parents constantly moved.

412
00:36:25,027 --> 00:36:27,128
These paintings and furniture

413
00:36:27,152 --> 00:36:30,985
reveal today their
futility as lifeless objects.

414
00:36:38,902 --> 00:36:43,502
We unconsciously sought to
give the present a future and create,

415
00:36:43,526 --> 00:36:46,335
image by image, scene by scene,

416
00:36:46,359 --> 00:36:48,919
something like a family fiction

417
00:36:48,943 --> 00:36:52,106
to which each would later add a subtext.

418
00:37:05,693 --> 00:37:09,878
There is nothing in the
smiles around this festive table

419
00:37:09,902 --> 00:37:12,252
to suggest that the family order

420
00:37:12,276 --> 00:37:17,170
will be overturned two
days later when my mother decides

421
00:37:17,194 --> 00:37:21,419
to return to
Yvetot, leaving me at a loss.

422
00:37:21,443 --> 00:37:26,086
My mother, whose keen,
attentive gaze makes me ill-at-ease.

423
00:37:26,110 --> 00:37:29,669
There may be no
greater humiliation for a daughter

424
00:37:29,693 --> 00:37:35,128
than to be unable to hide the
signs of marital discord from her mother,

425
00:37:35,152 --> 00:37:39,608
a silent, disapproving witness.

426
00:37:40,651 --> 00:37:42,664
I wrote in my diary,

427
00:37:42,860 --> 00:37:46,836
''You mustn't think about
these things, old age and death,

428
00:37:46,860 --> 00:37:49,063
or you'll lose all hope.''

429
00:38:10,235 --> 00:38:15,128
In the summer of 1976,
more remembered for the great drought

430
00:38:15,152 --> 00:38:19,251
than for the death
sentence of Christian Ranucci,

431
00:38:19,275 --> 00:38:21,919
refused pardon by Giscard d'Estaing,

432
00:38:21,943 --> 00:38:26,752
the four of us, en route
for London, boarded the hovercraft

433
00:38:26,776 --> 00:38:30,179
that crossed the Channel in 25 minutes.

434
00:38:30,275 --> 00:38:33,419
We were drawn
by hopes for cooler weather

435
00:38:33,443 --> 00:38:36,941
but it was as hot
as in France, the grass burnt -

436
00:38:37,735 --> 00:38:39,752
and the educational desire

437
00:38:39,776 --> 00:38:43,502
to immerse the kids in
English, which Eric had studied for a year

438
00:38:43,526 --> 00:38:47,024
with a purely audiovisual method

439
00:38:47,068 --> 00:38:48,410
that baffled us.

440
00:38:51,610 --> 00:38:54,377
Also a desire to
introduce them to breakfast

441
00:38:54,401 --> 00:38:57,335
with bacon and eggs, double-decker buses

442
00:38:57,359 --> 00:39:00,294
and everything that
made England at the time,

443
00:39:00,318 --> 00:39:02,043
as it is today,

444
00:39:02,275 --> 00:39:04,817
the most exotic of nearby countries.

445
00:39:08,526 --> 00:39:12,312
We preferred the
freedom of the parks to museums,

446
00:39:12,359 --> 00:39:15,252
the coolness of
boating on the Serpentine,

447
00:39:15,276 --> 00:39:18,296
the surprise of
an old-time merry-go-round,

448
00:39:19,194 --> 00:39:23,251
the slow boat trip
along the banks of the Thames

449
00:39:23,275 --> 00:39:24,425
past the docks

450
00:39:25,110 --> 00:39:28,251
not yet transformed into Silicon Valley,

451
00:39:28,275 --> 00:39:30,529
as they'd be under Thatcher.

452
00:39:52,902 --> 00:39:54,836
We'd chosen a hotel

453
00:39:54,860 --> 00:39:58,251
with a central location, Soho,

454
00:39:58,275 --> 00:40:02,252
which had become a
bustling district with a fevered nightlife,

455
00:40:02,276 --> 00:40:03,794
a mixture of pubs,

456
00:40:03,818 --> 00:40:06,598
sex shops and porn cinemas,

457
00:40:06,693 --> 00:40:08,335
and only went back there

458
00:40:08,359 --> 00:40:11,809
to sleep in rooms
luckily facing the courtyard.

459
00:40:18,359 --> 00:40:20,544
Those days left me with memories

460
00:40:20,568 --> 00:40:23,348
of a long and peaceful flânerie.

461
00:40:23,943 --> 00:40:26,669
I'd just finished my second book

462
00:40:26,693 --> 00:40:30,957
and not yet started to
worry about the publisher's verdict.

463
00:40:36,401 --> 00:40:40,211
There was a certain
sweetness to revisiting London,

464
00:40:40,235 --> 00:40:41,432
where at 19

465
00:40:42,027 --> 00:40:44,294
I'd worked as an au pair,

466
00:40:44,318 --> 00:40:46,187
been very unhappy,

467
00:40:47,068 --> 00:40:51,141
become bulimic and shoplifted.

468
00:40:51,818 --> 00:40:54,377
The idea of returning to Finchley,

469
00:40:54,401 --> 00:40:59,577
the chic suburb where I'd spent
six months in 1960, didn't occur to me,

470
00:40:59,943 --> 00:41:01,752
or I rejected it

471
00:41:01,776 --> 00:41:05,945
as inappropriate to
the family situation now mine.

472
00:41:06,276 --> 00:41:10,461
Nor did I insist on
a stroll through Whitechapel,

473
00:41:10,485 --> 00:41:12,785
which I'd wanted to see at 19

474
00:41:13,275 --> 00:41:15,624
because of Dickens and Oliver Twist

475
00:41:15,985 --> 00:41:18,128
and Piaf's song that goes

476
00:41:18,152 --> 00:41:23,566
''C'est à Hambourg, à
Santiago à Whitechapel, ou Borneo''.

477
00:41:52,975 --> 00:41:54,993
In the summer of 1977,

478
00:41:55,017 --> 00:41:59,410
we moved to a
house on the heights of Cergy,

479
00:41:59,434 --> 00:42:02,285
bordering fields where very quickly,

480
00:42:02,309 --> 00:42:05,950
new housing estates would spring up.

481
00:42:08,309 --> 00:42:09,827
A curious house,

482
00:42:09,851 --> 00:42:13,828
massive and
convoluted, dating from the fifties.

483
00:42:16,851 --> 00:42:17,809
From the windows

484
00:42:17,851 --> 00:42:22,410
we could see the
voluptuous curves of the river Oise

485
00:42:22,434 --> 00:42:24,243
and on the far horizon,

486
00:42:24,267 --> 00:42:28,160
the Eiffel Tower
and the hulk of La Défense.

487
00:42:28,184 --> 00:42:30,785
We will not think of filming a landscape

488
00:42:30,809 --> 00:42:33,869
no less ephemeral than childhood,

489
00:42:33,893 --> 00:42:38,034
one of cranes,
trenches, disparate constructions

490
00:42:38,058 --> 00:42:41,743
offered to the eye by
the new town of Cergy-Pontoise,

491
00:42:41,767 --> 00:42:44,160
a muddy no man's land

492
00:42:44,184 --> 00:42:45,950
which ten years later

493
00:42:45,974 --> 00:42:47,535
will have been erased,

494
00:42:47,559 --> 00:42:52,111
undetectable in Rohmer's
film Boyfriends and Girlfriends.

495
00:42:56,559 --> 00:43:00,535
It was an abstract, imaginary city,

496
00:43:00,559 --> 00:43:02,428
still in the making.

497
00:43:08,392 --> 00:43:12,368
We never tired of filming this
landscape over the months and seasons,

498
00:43:12,392 --> 00:43:16,511
this overgrown garden
where wild rabbits prospered.

499
00:43:22,642 --> 00:43:26,381
There will,
however, be very few interiors,

500
00:43:27,392 --> 00:43:31,075
no more birthday meals at all,

501
00:43:31,100 --> 00:43:33,162
no more family moments filmed.

502
00:43:33,974 --> 00:43:38,951
Today I see in that
absence a sign unnoticed then,

503
00:43:38,975 --> 00:43:42,520
as we watched the latest reel together,

504
00:43:42,601 --> 00:43:45,954
a sign of bonds unravelling.

505
00:43:50,559 --> 00:43:52,577
Our reluctance to film ourselves

506
00:43:52,601 --> 00:43:56,326
expressed the general
lassitude of a couple near forty

507
00:43:56,350 --> 00:43:59,897
whose way of life
weighed equally on both.

508
00:44:10,559 --> 00:44:12,702
In the fall of 1978,

509
00:44:12,726 --> 00:44:16,654
I accompanied Philippe
Ernaux to a conference in Ajaccio.

510
00:44:19,517 --> 00:44:24,069
I was often alone while
Philippe Ernaux was in meetings.

511
00:44:24,934 --> 00:44:26,951
I walked around, looked in windows

512
00:44:26,975 --> 00:44:28,910
along rue du Cardinal Fesch,

513
00:44:28,934 --> 00:44:32,240
I felt like a
Frenchwoman from the mainland.

514
00:44:33,225 --> 00:44:36,285
It was our first time in Corsica

515
00:44:36,309 --> 00:44:38,451
and inadmissibly

516
00:44:38,475 --> 00:44:41,951
we expected to feel
uprooted, as much as, or even more

517
00:44:41,975 --> 00:44:44,370
than if we were in a foreign country.

518
00:44:52,974 --> 00:44:56,993
Sometimes I stayed at
the hotel, far from the city centre

519
00:44:57,017 --> 00:45:00,228
and close to the
beach, deserted in October.

520
00:45:01,642 --> 00:45:04,951
I read Paul
Nizan, I wrote in my journal,

521
00:45:04,975 --> 00:45:09,951
''The water falls on the terrace,
forming fleeting moons on the puddles.

522
00:45:09,975 --> 00:45:15,820
From here I see palm trees,
an ochre statue, the bougainvillea.''

523
00:45:17,729 --> 00:45:24,081
I recall the mornings when I walked
up a sandy little path to the bus stop,

524
00:45:24,434 --> 00:45:27,979
past the closed beach bars,

525
00:45:28,225 --> 00:45:30,243
a moment of pure pleasure

526
00:45:30,267 --> 00:45:36,353
which counterbalanced the
boredom and loneliness of the formal meals.

527
00:45:36,975 --> 00:45:38,285
On the beach,

528
00:45:38,309 --> 00:45:41,660
I was buoyed by the
certainty of finishing the book

529
00:45:41,684 --> 00:45:43,827
I'd only just begun to write

530
00:45:43,851 --> 00:45:46,034
my story of a woman

531
00:45:46,058 --> 00:45:49,368
assigned since
marriage to the role of nurturer,

532
00:45:49,392 --> 00:45:52,937
silent manager and steward,

533
00:45:53,559 --> 00:45:59,357
whereas I'd been raised to
believe in freedom and equality with men.

534
00:46:26,225 --> 00:46:28,669
That book, A Frozen Woman,

535
00:46:28,851 --> 00:46:31,910
had just been
finished and sent to my editor

536
00:46:31,934 --> 00:46:34,904
when we left for Spain the summer of '80

537
00:46:35,809 --> 00:46:40,618
with the boys in their
early teens, in Iron Maiden t-shirts,

538
00:46:40,642 --> 00:46:42,993
asking for their heavy metal

539
00:46:43,017 --> 00:46:45,797
and Queen tapes
to be played in the car.

540
00:46:46,934 --> 00:46:51,822
Giscard's haughty presidency
was ending in a slow, heavy climate,

541
00:46:51,934 --> 00:46:54,451
scarcely brightened by farcical tales

542
00:46:54,475 --> 00:46:59,315
of diamonds from
Bokassa and sniffer planes.

543
00:46:59,975 --> 00:47:02,618
We doubted François
Mitterrand had a chance,

544
00:47:02,642 --> 00:47:04,606
allied with Georges Marchais.

545
00:47:05,142 --> 00:47:06,798
We'd have preferred Rocard.

546
00:47:07,559 --> 00:47:12,254
One could go to Spain without
bad conscience since Franco's death

547
00:47:12,601 --> 00:47:15,993
but paradoxically,
not without a shiver of fear

548
00:47:16,017 --> 00:47:18,827
due to the attacks of the ETA,

549
00:47:18,851 --> 00:47:22,204
who were said
to puncture tourists' tires,

550
00:47:23,142 --> 00:47:27,359
a fear forgotten as of
Pamplona and the San Fermin festival.

551
00:47:27,392 --> 00:47:31,160
We were immersed in dizzying jubilation,

552
00:47:31,184 --> 00:47:33,579
bullfights, non-stop music,

553
00:47:33,684 --> 00:47:37,243
the Bigheads
swaying between narrow walls,

554
00:47:37,267 --> 00:47:42,155
everything I'd just read in
The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway.

555
00:48:10,309 --> 00:48:11,743
In Pamplona,

556
00:48:11,767 --> 00:48:17,255
I'd no idea that in my memory, this
trip would signify a rite of initiation

557
00:48:17,280 --> 00:48:19,450
into another life,

558
00:48:19,475 --> 00:48:24,649
its stages marked by the cities
travelled through in the Peugeot 504.

559
00:48:24,674 --> 00:48:29,034
Valladolid, where David
came down with food poisoning,

560
00:48:29,851 --> 00:48:30,993
Toledo,

561
00:48:31,017 --> 00:48:34,324
the Tagus and the sinister Alcázar.

562
00:48:34,349 --> 00:48:38,622
Soria, Alba de Tormes, Almazán.

563
00:48:40,601 --> 00:48:41,942
Salamanca,

564
00:48:42,309 --> 00:48:45,827
especially Salamanca,
and the Plaza Mayor,

565
00:48:45,851 --> 00:48:50,950
where after a heated argument, I
remained one evening alone with my sons

566
00:48:50,974 --> 00:48:53,368
until the sun went down,

567
00:48:53,392 --> 00:48:55,500
a perfect moment.

568
00:49:11,184 --> 00:49:14,285
In the permanent
familial and conjugal one-on-one

569
00:49:14,309 --> 00:49:15,951
of a family trip,

570
00:49:15,975 --> 00:49:20,285
things that stay hidden
on ordinary days suddenly explode,

571
00:49:20,309 --> 00:49:27,017
conflicts are aggravated, usually
dissolved in people's daily occupations.

572
00:49:27,684 --> 00:49:30,285
With a lucidity made more painful

573
00:49:30,309 --> 00:49:34,076
by the memory of another
summer, the one when we met

574
00:49:34,100 --> 00:49:36,209
seventeen years earlier,

575
00:49:37,225 --> 00:49:39,368
I wrote in my journal,

576
00:49:39,392 --> 00:49:41,787
''I'm superfluous in his life.''

577
00:51:43,017 --> 00:51:46,910
A year later, in the
summer of '81, in Portugal,

578
00:51:46,934 --> 00:51:49,329
our personal history had taken

579
00:51:49,974 --> 00:51:53,493
a turn for the worse
with the publication of my book

580
00:51:53,517 --> 00:51:54,910
A Frozen Woman,

581
00:51:54,934 --> 00:51:59,951
while political history
billowed with great expectations

582
00:51:59,975 --> 00:52:03,425
since François
Mitterrand's May 10th victory.

583
00:52:06,017 --> 00:52:09,850
The camera that summer
no longer sought happy moments.

584
00:52:10,684 --> 00:52:14,451
The scarcity of faces
and bodies in the images,

585
00:52:14,475 --> 00:52:17,869
which struck me
when we watched the reels,

586
00:52:17,893 --> 00:52:20,336
signified growing distance in a couple.

587
00:52:23,434 --> 00:52:26,785
Of the towns we
travelled through, I remember

588
00:52:26,809 --> 00:52:30,834
only the unfinished
chapels of Batalha, with sky for roofs,

589
00:52:31,017 --> 00:52:34,611
a monster traffic
jam on our way out of Setúbal,

590
00:52:34,642 --> 00:52:38,667
the alleys of Obidos,
where I bought an embroidered dress,

591
00:52:38,934 --> 00:52:42,815
trams in the steep
and narrow streets of old Lisbon,

592
00:52:43,267 --> 00:52:47,326
which today for me
have merged with Alain Tanner's

593
00:52:47,350 --> 00:52:48,836
In the White City,

594
00:52:49,017 --> 00:52:51,950
streets destroyed by the great fire

595
00:52:51,974 --> 00:52:53,413
of 1988.

596
00:53:19,559 --> 00:53:22,577
On that trip, Philippe
Ernaux was miles away

597
00:53:22,601 --> 00:53:24,996
and I was dramatically absent.

598
00:53:26,017 --> 00:53:27,167
In a sense,

599
00:53:27,350 --> 00:53:32,190
the wind of freedom
from the spring had caught us up.

600
00:53:48,601 --> 00:53:50,618
In the fall of '81,

601
00:53:50,642 --> 00:53:52,451
silencing our grievances,

602
00:53:52,475 --> 00:53:55,827
we seized the chance to go to Moscow,

603
00:53:55,851 --> 00:53:59,410
courtesy of Philippe
Ernaux's work council,

604
00:53:59,434 --> 00:54:01,350
a four-day trip.

605
00:54:01,934 --> 00:54:03,410
It was too short

606
00:54:03,434 --> 00:54:06,076
and we didn't expect much from a visit

607
00:54:06,100 --> 00:54:09,493
organised by the
Soviet agency Intourist.

608
00:54:09,517 --> 00:54:14,076
However, when we
landed at Sheremetyevo airport,

609
00:54:14,100 --> 00:54:19,660
greeted by Red Army
soldiers with oddly childlike faces,

610
00:54:19,684 --> 00:54:22,224
I was gripped by a sudden emotion,

611
00:54:22,601 --> 00:54:26,702
as if the weight of 20th
century History had converged

612
00:54:26,726 --> 00:54:29,660
and unfurled in the space of a second

613
00:54:29,684 --> 00:54:33,229
all images of Russia
accumulated since childhood.

614
00:54:42,684 --> 00:54:47,702
The USSR was the
Beyond, immense, unrepresentable,

615
00:54:47,726 --> 00:54:51,660
containing both Siberia
and the beaches of the Black Sea,

616
00:54:51,684 --> 00:54:52,869
Tolstoy,

617
00:54:52,893 --> 00:54:55,336
Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Eisenstein,

618
00:54:56,184 --> 00:54:58,326
Lenin, Stalin,

619
00:54:58,350 --> 00:55:00,160
the muzhik Khrushchev

620
00:55:00,184 --> 00:55:01,951
to Leonid Brezhnev,

621
00:55:01,975 --> 00:55:04,410
in office from time immemorial,

622
00:55:04,434 --> 00:55:06,159
grim and massive,

623
00:55:06,601 --> 00:55:10,721
''not quite sinister but
almost'', to paraphrase Coluche.

624
00:55:15,726 --> 00:55:20,660
On the marked route that took
us by Intourist coach from Red Square,

625
00:55:20,684 --> 00:55:23,160
with St. Basil's Cathedral

626
00:55:23,184 --> 00:55:25,368
and the endless queue

627
00:55:25,392 --> 00:55:27,243
at Lenin's mausoleum,

628
00:55:27,267 --> 00:55:29,910
to Lomonosov University,

629
00:55:29,934 --> 00:55:33,959
a symbol of
glorious Stalinist architecture,

630
00:55:34,100 --> 00:55:36,368
we vaguely searched for signs

631
00:55:36,392 --> 00:55:39,747
of the joy or misery of being a Soviet.

632
00:55:42,225 --> 00:55:45,869
What did it mean to live in
an order magnified by the grandeur

633
00:55:45,893 --> 00:55:48,243
of the Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman,

634
00:55:48,267 --> 00:55:54,689
with hieratic profiles of
workers on the walls, extolling production?

635
00:56:07,100 --> 00:56:11,285
The trip to Moscow
is the last we made together,

636
00:56:11,309 --> 00:56:13,285
and the last film shot.

637
00:56:13,309 --> 00:56:16,785
The family unit
collapsed the following year.

638
00:56:16,809 --> 00:56:20,307
It was agreed the
boys would stay with me.

639
00:56:20,434 --> 00:56:24,827
Their father took the
camera, which he'd use in his new life,

640
00:56:24,851 --> 00:56:29,451
and left me the projector,
the screen and all the reels of film.

641
00:56:29,475 --> 00:56:32,410
He resolutely entered another existence

642
00:56:32,434 --> 00:56:35,743
and abandoned the
memory of the old one with us.

643
00:56:35,767 --> 00:56:39,456
In short, he made me its guardian.

644
00:56:42,642 --> 00:56:48,034
It was a new form of family life
that developed with my teenaged sons

645
00:56:48,058 --> 00:56:50,647
and we let the films sleep a long time.

646
00:56:52,517 --> 00:56:55,118
To set up the screen in the dining room,

647
00:56:55,142 --> 00:56:59,410
raise the projector with
books on the table, gather chairs,

648
00:56:59,434 --> 00:57:03,172
wait for everyone to be seated

649
00:57:03,392 --> 00:57:05,410
and then watch the images roll

650
00:57:05,434 --> 00:57:08,022
as each added his or her remark,

651
00:57:08,475 --> 00:57:12,076
all the ceremony once eagerly awaited

652
00:57:12,100 --> 00:57:14,497
was part of a bygone era.

653
00:57:22,601 --> 00:57:25,330
My sons had to become fathers themselves

654
00:57:25,434 --> 00:57:30,076
for us to rediscover
together these traces of their childhood

655
00:57:30,100 --> 00:57:33,934
and the dead, alive again.

656
00:57:35,058 --> 00:57:36,353
My mother,

657
00:57:40,267 --> 00:57:42,327
the Ernaux grandparents,

658
00:57:46,350 --> 00:57:48,267
Dominique the rebel

659
00:57:50,017 --> 00:57:53,285
and the one who'd
filmed it all, Philippe Ernaux,

660
00:57:53,309 --> 00:57:56,136
who died of a smoker's cancer.

661
00:58:02,809 --> 00:58:05,923
It was both joyful and melancholy.

662
00:58:06,726 --> 00:58:09,840
Each of us thought in disbelief

663
00:58:09,934 --> 00:58:12,761
''that was me, that was us'',

664
00:58:13,434 --> 00:58:16,910
knowing nothing,
then, of a mysterious future

665
00:58:16,934 --> 00:58:20,719
in which the year
2000 was a horizon too remote

666
00:58:20,893 --> 00:58:22,521
for us to care about.

667
00:58:28,241 --> 00:58:32,075
But what story was
told in this parade of images

668
00:58:32,100 --> 00:58:35,647
with no sound but
the crackle of the projector?

669
00:58:36,767 --> 00:58:39,869
Words were needed to
give meaning to this silent time,

670
00:58:39,893 --> 00:58:41,411
snippets of family life

671
00:58:41,726 --> 00:58:44,984
invisibly recorded
inside the history of the era.

672
00:58:57,225 --> 00:59:00,618
It would be a fragment
of family autobiography,

673
00:59:00,642 --> 00:59:02,174
and a chance for me

674
00:59:03,267 --> 00:59:06,326
to recall decisive years of my life,

675
00:59:06,350 --> 00:59:11,535
and for all of us to revisit
that light shone upon the past,

676
00:59:11,559 --> 00:59:14,076
the golden light of ''Indian summer''

677
00:59:14,100 --> 00:59:18,173
which Joe Dassin
sang about in those years.

678
01:00:16,309 --> 01:00:18,945
Subtitles: Alison Strayer

679
01:00:19,142 --> 01:00:21,011
Subtitling: HIVENTY