Annie Ernaux Discussing Her Work on the PBS Culture Series “Canvas”
Here’s a video featuring author and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature Annie Ernaux talking about her writing on the PBS culture series, “Canvas”. She discusses her particular style of writing, and the importance of writing. Her thoughts on images, memory and writing to “fight forgetting” is something we should all think about.
Jeffrey Brown: Soon after the announcement, Ernaux, now 82 and living outside Paris, came to New York. We spoke at the office of her longtime U.S. publisher, Seven Stories Press, and I asked about mining the past, and a line that begins "The Years," one of her best-known books. "All the images," she writes, "will disappear."
Annie Ernaux (translated from French): I do think that, in each of us, images disappear when we die. And perhaps that's what made me write, to think of this moment when all the images I have seen would disappear, this feeling of the loss of things. But I also think that the true reality of the world is forgetting. We forget a great deal, from a collective perspective. For instance, we're always surprised when war arises again, as we are seeing now. So, it's more a question of forgetting than of memory. And to write is to fight forgetting.
I’ve not read any of Ernaux’s books, but in September 2021 I watched L'Événement / Happening (dir. Audrey Diwan) at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion for best film that is based on her 2000 novel by the same name, and last November I watched The Super 8 Years at IDFA, made by her and her son David Ernaux-Briot.
“In re-viewing our super eight films, shot between 1972 and 1981, it occurred to me that they comprised not only a family archive but a testimony to the pastimes, lifestyle and aspirations of a social class in the decade after 1968. I wanted to incorporate these silent images into a story which combined the intimate with the social and with history, to convey the taste and colour of those years.” Annie Ernaux
You can watch Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize lecture here, it includes transcripts in English, Swedish and French.