Annie Ernaux’s "The Super 8 Years (2022)"

Reclaiming a Woman’s Life Story Intermedially

Fabien Arribert-Narce (University of Edinburgh) 

December 15th, 2025, 17:30-19:00 

Room 301. 3F. building 10, Sophia University 

No registration required / In person only 

This talk will analyse intermedial (self-)reappropriation processes between images, words and sounds in Annie Ernaux’s The Super 8 Years. Directed by her son David and narrated by Ernaux herself, this 2022 documentary film is made up of archival family footage shot between 1972 and 1981 by the Nobel Prize author’s ex-husband, Philippe Ernaux. The film’s soundtrack and the commentary she wrote to accompany these silent home movies give back agency and existential density to the “frozen woman” who appears on screen. By sharing with the viewers the thoughts, frustrations and hopes that animated her in her thirties, Ernaux undertakes a feminist rewriting of these postcard-like images forced upon her to express domestic happiness, and dominated by the male gaze of her ex-husband. She thereby reasserts in the film her independent, authoritative voice as a writer and a woman, she reclaims the fragments of her past life and remediates them to show their relevance for several generations of women across the world. 

Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he is co-director of the MSc and PhD programmes on ‘Intermediality: Literature, Film & the Arts in Dialogue’. Founding editor of the EUP book series ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in World Literature and Intermediality’, he is the author of Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Champion, 2014), and editor of The Pleasure in/of the Text (Peter Lang, 2021), ‘Writing the World with Michaël Ferrier’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, December 2023), Intermedial Encounters between Image, Music and Text (Peter Lang, 2024) and Annie Ernaux: A Global Perspective (1974-2024), forthcoming in 2026 with Brill. 

This talk was organized by Hannah Holtzman (Assistant Professor, Sophia University).