Guest seminar: Fabien Arribert-Narce and Marion Schmid

This week's guest speakers are Fabien Arribert-Narce, Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and Marion Schmid, Professor of French Literature and Film at the University of Edinburgh

About the seminar

Fabien Arribert-Narce: ‘Intermedial Life (Re-)Writing: The Face as a Feminist Interface in Annie Ernaux’s The Super 8 Years (2022)’ 

This paper will examine intermedial rewriting and (self-)reappropriation processes between images, words and sounds in Annie Ernaux’s The Super 8 Years. Directed by her son David Ernaux-Briot and narrated by Ernaux herself, in a new voiceover text that she wrote for the occasion, this 2022 documentary film is made up of intimate, 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 at the age of more than 80 years old to accompany these silent home movies give back agency and existential density to the “frozen woman” who appears on screen, to use the title of the book she published in 1981 about this period of her life. By sharing with the viewers the thoughts, frustrations and hopes that animated her in her thirties behind her social mask as a wife and mother of two young sons (in particular her strong desire to write), Ernaux undertakes a feminist rewriting of these postcard-like images forced upon her to express domestic happiness, and she shows the symbolic violence that characterised her marriage years dominated by the male gaze of her ex-husband – a collective experience shared by generations of women and that she relates to the broader patriarchal and consumerist context of post-war Western societies. By doing so, she turns her frozen face of the 1970s alienated by a becoming-image (and object) process into a projection screen onto which she reflects the powerful figure she has become over the years, a feminist icon having inspired and empowered several generations of women across the world. Decisively, she (re)inscribes on this petrified (sur)face the key promise she made to herself in her youth and that she repeated in her 2022 Nobel Prize speech in Stockholm, proudly recalling her working-class background: “I will write to avenge my race.” While she had already initiated a (textual) reappropriation process of these 1970s images by describing in her autobiographical masterwork The Years (2008) extracts from the mute footage, she eventually reasserts in The Super 8 Years her independent, authoritative voice (literally and symbolically) as a writer and a woman, and reclaims the fragments of her past life through the intermedial interstices added to the recordings of her late husband. 

Marion Schmid: Chantal Akerman between film, writing and video art

Known above all as one of cinema’s most daring visionaries, Chantal Akerman was also a highly original writer and a pioneering video artist. In her polymorphous artistic practice spanning almost half a century, Akerman moved quasi seamlessly between media, extending her experiments from film to literature and, since the mid-1990s, to installation. Forging new pathways between the arts, she probes the interstices between text and image to give voice to what she considers impossible to express in a single medium, opening up new encounters between the self and the Other. This paper will examine the tensions, dialogues and circulations between the written and the cinematic, the verbal and the visual, through a selection of Akerman’s films, texts and video installations. Particular attention will be paid to her project ‘autobiography in progress’, to the transmission of memory, as well as to the new forms of narrating, seeing and experiencing opened up in her intermedial work at the intersection between writing and the moving image. 

About the speakers

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 "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 L’Autobiographie entre autres (Peter Lang, 2013), Réceptions de la culture japonaise en France depuis 1945 (Champion, 2016), The Pleasure in/of the Text (Peter Lang, 2021), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Champion, 2021), ‘Le quotidien au Japon et en Occident’ (Revue des Sciences Humaines, vol. 345, March 2022), ‘Writing the World with Michaël Ferrier’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, December 2023) and Intermedial Encounters between Image, Music and Text (Peter Lang, 2024).

Marion Schmid is Professor of French Literature and Film at the University of Edinburgh. Her authored books include Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts (2019), Chantal Akerman (2010), Proust dans la décadence (2008), Proust at the Movies (2005, with Martine Beugnet), and Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and Proust (1998). She co-directs the MSc and PhD Intermediality programmes at the University of Edinburgh together with Fabien Arribert-Narce, and co-edits the Peter Lang series 'European Connections: Studies in Comparative Literature, Intermediality and Aesthetics' with Hugues Azérad.