◎ The secretary of the round head
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After the French writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature, it was no surprise that a wave of reading Elno's works was set off among literature lovers. What is less known, however, is that just this year, Elnaud and her son David Elnor-Brio completed an image memoir-style work "Over 8 Years", which was previously shortlisted for the "Director's Fortnight" section of this year's Cannes Film Festival and will be released in French theaters in mid-December. Although the work itself did not make much waves at the film festival, with Elnor's Nobel Prize, the 60-minute film is bound to reappear in the eyes of global film audiences and literary readers, and then become an important incision for understanding Anne Elnor's literary works.
The French title "Les années Super-8" is actually a combination of "Super 8" and "Years", which comes from the name of Elnor's masterpiece, Les années. It can be seen that in the eyes of the mother and son creators, especially the mother, there is an obvious similarity and even continuity between the film and her earlier literary creation, and "Super-8" clearly identifies the specific medium of this creation - video, film, home camera.
For the author, "Super 8 Years" is indeed a useful supplement to "Long Years" to some extent, and readers who are familiar with Elnor's literary works will find a lot of interesting correspondence in these family images. For example, the main structure of "Long Years" is erected on family or personal photos, while "Super 8 Years" is based on a large number of films, the so-called "moving images"; Some passages in "The Long Years" can also form intertextuality with "Super 8 Years", such as the book mentioned that "people have never yearned for the countryside as they do now, away from the monotonous life of 'pollution', 'taking the subway, working, sleeping', the suburbs like 'concentration camps' and their 'little hooligans'", which is very specifically presented in the film; Although "Long Years" mentions buying "a super eight-millimeter Bell camera", it rarely mentions the content of shooting, which is answered in "Super 8 Years": children, parents, family life... The overly personal and almost deliberately excluded parts of Elnor's literary narrative are accidentally filled in by images.
Of course, as Elnold herself notes in the film, these images rarely appear in her own literary works, in large part because they are mostly shot by her husband (later ex-husband). After the two divorced, the ex-husband took the video camera, but left behind all the film he had shot and the memories it carried. In the process of explaining and interpreting images through literary voice-over texts, Elno does not hesitate to exercise his "final interpretation" of the common past life: a certain deliberate distance between the picture and the sound is always maintained, and even constitutes a certain rebellion; The voiceover is not so much an explanation as a correction, a fierce struggle between two perspectives and perspectives. In this way, Elno reflects on those past years, on his relationship with his family, on his marriage, and on his gender identity, melancholy and dissatisfied with the past years to "fight back" or "take revenge", although the final effect is debatable.
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Compared with the radical, struggle, and at the same time quite self-consistent "The Long Years", "Super 8 Years" is a film full of internal struggles and rifts, which come partly from the subjective intentions of the creators themselves mentioned above, and partly from the unexpected failure of authorship that the voice-over creator Elno did not expect: in "The Long Years", Elno creatively uses the method of "no one is autobiographical", "she" and "we" replace "I", and the writer distances himself from the text , so that more collectivity, sociality can penetrate into it. "Super 8 Years" attempts to continue this approach, pulling away the image through a large number of voice-over sentences filled with "she" and "we", allowing the viewer to enter a collective memory. In practical terms, however, this approach did not work as well as Elnor's literature, because the picture itself was extremely concrete, and no matter how much distance was created through sound, the essence of privacy and family could not be erased.
Therefore, when the "we" in Elnor's mouth echoes again and again in "Super 8 Years", the mysterious, abstract collectivity, the ambiguity carefully constructed by Elnor, is inevitably replaced by the specific reference of "husband and wife". In this sense, it may be difficult for the audience to find a sense of resonance equal to or similar to its literary works in the film.
As the back cover of "The Long Years" says, "The novel spans sixty years, so readers of all ages can find their most familiar content and clearest memories." The book's ability to resonate with people largely comes from the creator's use of a large number of memory fragments and counter-plot details to extract the "French experience" that transcends eras, classes, and genders. "Super 8 Years" always gives people the opposite impression, the reason is that in addition to the above-mentioned "unpersonable" means of failure to a certain extent, the strong recording of the image itself is always opposed to the control of voiceover, and the picture always exposes itself extremely honestly, implying or exuding the interest of a specific class in a specific historical period.
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In fact, the film's most impressive passages are vacations and trips throughout the film: Chile, Morocco, West Germany, Albania, England, Spain, Portugal, Moscow, and we can even think of "Super 8 Years" as a dazzling series of leisure vacations. This is certainly related to the nature of the home video itself documenting family and married life, but also faithfully shows the viewer the class nature of Elnor. True, Elnaud knew that she was in a consumer society – "an indisputable fact, a conviction that we rejoice in or lament, which cannot be shaken off", but all she could do was accept it "helplessly" or "gladly", whether for her social status or for everything in front of her—"all the ideals of May are being transformed into goods and pastimes", and then, "we have a legitimate purpose... Bought a super eight mm Bell camera."
In this sense, "super 8 years" not only means the years filmed by super 8, but also the bourgeois years symbolized by the object "super 8", which is obviously fundamentally different from the "long years" of super class.
What is even more intriguing is that most of the trips recorded in the film are almost ignored in "The Long Years", even in the very small part mentioned, it is only some very brief impressions, such as the author's account of the trip to Spain: "The moments that this trip in Spain will leave are as follows..."; Elno certainly wouldn't mention the "ice sports" recorded by the camera in "The Long Years", because she knew that this kind of movement belonged only to the "upper middle class of France" in the 70s, and voting for left-wing candidate Mitterrand while ice and snow sports was somewhat schizophrenic (or inconsistent).
Perhaps in order to reconcile this contradiction, Elno tried his best to explain his expression and mentality through voiceover, trying to reveal his inner dissatisfaction with life, pointing out his past of being from the working class, and giving the picture "facts" that he did not have. But this approach is difficult, if not entirely futile, not to cast doubt on its narrative, after all, "seeing is believing", the picture of Elno is always quiet and beautiful, it is difficult to see signs of unease, often like curious alien visitors, with a rather than "left-wing" as "left-interested" perspective, peeking into the seductive corner of those third world countries outside France.
In the final analysis, the literary Elno is the queen of the empire she herself has built, with supreme power to tailor literary life and the literary world that conforms to her own imagination (which does not mean false or hypocritical, only fiction), while the film image rejects this imagination all the time, rejects the discipline of language, and moves in parallel, reverse, and polysemy on its own track.
This relationship between creators and their work is easily reminiscent of another film, Ustrem, which was shortlisted for the Director's Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. In the film, in order to obtain creative materials, the female writer transforms into a cleaning lady on the ferry in the port of Ustrem, experiencing a life at the bottom that is completely foreign to her. But at the end of the film, when the workers hope that she will board the ship again to work together after having completed her literary creation, the writer can only bitterly refuse, because she knows that she has completed her left-wing creative mission, and as for life itself, it is better not to be so "popular".