From Watching to Turning Away: A Journey from the Violence of Happiness to Breakup and Death.

Annie Ernaux’s 8mm family images are reproduced fifty years later (1972), with the family travelling in Chile under the People’s Solidarity movement, staying in North African hotels with a taste for kitschy middle class, and accompanying the in-laws in Switzerland and Ansie. Sixty-eight years later, material life in France is sugar-coated, everyone is for himself, the bankrupt middle-class in-laws, Albania follows the myth of China establishing itself in Eastern Europe… From the Albanian beaches in her home movies, and from the People’s Republic of China bicycles everywhere, she comments on the great rupture that has arisen between Maoism and the Byzantine faith, and laughs at herself for the fashion of her bathing suits and the sun! She comments on the great break between Maoism and Byzantine beliefs, and laughs at her fashionable swimsuit and sunglasses as a Western degenerate woman criticised by the Socialist Workers’ State.

This silent Super 8 colour film, which omits too much of the meaning and vulgarity of reality, runs counter to today’s 8K video, which is beyond the capabilities of the naked eye. Because of its particles, the shaking image becomes a state of soul. Home movies with inaccurate focus, mouldy film, arbitrary split-screens, and exorbitant fees are a constant reminder of the sacrifices one must make. But it’s on the screen today, and without the clichés of the Cinema Salon Society, the ghost of home cinema has triumphed over the track and the stabiliser.

The kinetic energy generated by the Zoom allows the camera not so much to focus on the individual and the collective as to participate in the revolution and the restoration of the cinema’s eye, led by the free zoom parts.

When the break-up comes and Annie, who is no longer gazing at the camera, stands in the distance, the composition of happiness turns into a drought of consciousness sweeping across the horizon, and finally turns his back on the remote camera, shifting from participation to spectatorship.

After four days of travelling to Moscow on a united front, her voice, 40 years later, recalls the eyes of a young Red Army soldier at the Moscow airport. And his images are wandering around Moscow’s distant and immense Stalin legacy…

The first sight of the eyes of the Red Army soldier in 1981, followed by the thought that it was a secret hint of the rekindling of carnal love, reveals, in two light sentences, her book ‘Shen Degeneration’ outside of the film: the last Soviet diplomat S., who made love to her in his socks, he and Russia are huge entities that she rejects and desires, she is a female professor of literature, she is also the West, S. is a Soviet diplomat in Paris, and the Russian Empire, S is Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and the Soviet Brznev.

When he divorced, he gave Annie the film and the projector, which meant that she was able to act as heir to his memories, and he took the camera with him to his new life. The ghost of the Super 8mm film calls forth the blonde, bright-eyed and basically kind civil servant. Anne practices class revenge, and after half a century… Mercy and compassion leak from her mouth, both unwillingly and sincerely.

The spectre with the camera in his hand is Philippe. He is Annie’s ex-husband, he is the civil servant who loved her, he is the cream of the crop of political science graduates, he dies.

The individual is collective.

Happiness is legal.

Eroticism is political.

SU CHE HSIEN 2023.May