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This book is a study of documentary series such as Michael Apted's world-famous Seven Up films that set out to trace the life-journeys of individuals from their earliest schooldays till they are fully grown adults. In addition to Seven Up, the book provides extended accounts of the two other best known longitudinal series to have been produced in the last three or four decades. It includes Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbro. The book first examines some of the principal generic features of long docs and considers the highly significant role that particular institutions have had on their production, promotion and dissemination. It then explores a study of how the individual works originated, with a special emphasis on the nurturing role of particular institutions. The book also explores the affinities that long docs have with soap opera texts, which have similar aspirations to neverendingness. Both long docs and soaps rely on an episodic mode of delivery and both seek to persuade their audience that they are attempting to chronicle real-time developments. Finally, the book explores the variety of ways in which long doc filmmakers contrive to bring their work to a satisfactory conclusion.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines some of the principal generic features of longitudinal documentary and considers the highly significant role that particular broadcasting institutions have had on their production, promotion and dissemination. It presents the examples of long doc works which resulted in the discovery of Seven Up's two best-known international 'competitors', the German series The Children of Golzow and the Swedish series The Children of Jordbrö. The book explores how the individual works originated, with a special emphasis on the nurturing role of particular institutions. It also explores the affinities that long docs have with soap opera texts, which have similar aspirations to never-endingness. The book concerns to explore the variety of ways in which long doc filmmakers contrive to bring their work to a satisfactory conclusion.
Making a longitudinal documentary has certain points in common with ethnographic filmmaking. Producers of long docs are more concerned with quietly tracing and chronicling the lives of others in a way calculated to elicit a more reflective and even at times philosophical response from the audience. Viewed in its entirety, The Children of Golzowhas has stronger claim than any of its counterparts to have performed a chronicling function. Operating in the longitudinal mode allows for several different approaches to filming, dependent on the medium in which the filmmaker is working, on the wishes or policies of the funding agent and on particular design features incorporated into the original project. Any discussion about the rival merits of fixed interval and arrhythmic approaches also has to take into account the role of the respective sponsoring institution.
This chapter provides short overviews of the longitudinal documentary works that will be the subject of more extensive analysis. The long doc work includes Michael Apted's Seven Up films, Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbrö. The Seven Up series had its origins in May 1964 when Granada Television transmitted a one-off 'special' in their World in Action series. Just like Apted's Seven Up series, Winfried and Junge's The Children of Golzow can also lay some claim to being a historically significant chronicle of the times. The series traces the lives of a group of citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who were born in the 1950s and grew up in the small town of Golzow.
This chapter explores the conditions under which the longitudinal documentary under review came to be produced. It considers the role played by particular organisations and institutions in the nurturing of these works. The long doc work includes Michael Apted's Seven Up films, Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbrö. The World in Action tone is immediately detectable in the original Seven Up programme, which certainly does not pull any punches when setting out its agenda. Just like Junge and Apted with their long doc projects, Hartleb was still at an early stage in his filmmaking career when he began working on The Children of Jordbrö. Like his two fellow long doc filmmakers Apted and Hartleb, Junge was still relatively inexperienced when he started out on the Golzow project.
This chapter explores how longitudinal documentary develop after they have achieved initial lift-off. The long doc work includes Michael Apted's Seven Up films, Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbrö. In 21 Up, almost half the film is given over to extended accounts of just four of the Seven Up subjects (Tony, Bruce, Nick and Neil). The chapter focuses on the role played by various institutions in the origination and nurturing of these projects. It discusses the developments in the working relationship of Junge with two of his subjects, Marieluise and Elke, who are the two leading female participants in The Children of Golzow. The Jordbrö Children and Living in Jordbrö put a clear marker down for all the Jordbrö films that follow in that they introduce us to the characteristic features of Hartleb's filmmaking style.
Several critics have noted that longitudinal documentary kinship with soap opera is usually in the form of a general reference to their status as 'never ending stories' rather than to any deeper structural affinity. The long doc work includes Michael Apted's Seven Up films, Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbrö. Both long docs and soaps rely on viewers being able to form relatively strong empathic bonds with a number of central characters. Just like producers of television soaps, long doc filmmakers become sensitively attuned to the potential that lies in long docs' serial mode of presentation. Both long docs and soaps are classic examples of an open form of narrative that addresses its audience in a markedly different manner from 'closed' narrative forms.
This chapter focuses on longitudinal documentary works, including Michael Apted's Seven Up films, Winifred and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow and Swedish director Rainer Hartleb's The Children of Jordbrö. It addresses that in what ways do filmmakers begin to contemplate the prospect of terminating these works. The chapter also addresses role of the sponsoring agency or broadcasting institution in deciding how and when a long doc should be terminated. It explores the ways in which viewers are actively prepared for being separated from subjects with whom they may have developed especially close relationships over the years. For students of longitudinal documentary, doubtless the most significant of the post-Wende films and possibly of the whole Golzow cycle is Screenplay: The Times. With the possible exception of Screenplay, all the Golzow films the Junges produced in the post-Wende period are biographical in their approach.
The longitudinal documentary, as objects of study and investigation, teach us a good deal about documentary representation in a wider sense. Barbara and Winfried Junge in their comprehensive survey of the Children of Golzow project provide one of the more detailed accounts of the reception of a long doc by reproducing a number of letters and emails sent in by viewers. Likewise with Seven Up, most observers agreed that much of the series' enduring appeal lies in the way it succeeds in combining the attributes of a compelling social history and the more homespun qualities of a soap-like drama of everyday life. As long docs develop, so each of them seems to veer away from an earlier preoccupation with society-oriented issues such as the formative influence of particular social environments and becomes far more concerned with tracking the twists and turns of individual lives.