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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.
series, Winfried and Barbara Junge’s The Children of Golzow (1961–2008) can also lay some claim to being an historically significant chronicle of the times. The series traces the lives of a group of (former) citizens of the GDR who were born in the 1950s and grew up in the small town of Golzow. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the series accompanies the Golzow subjects as each of them attempts to negotiate the difficult transition from life in a one-party state to one lived in a multi-party democracy. There are certain resemblances here with Born in the USSR and Born in
subjects. In the case of Winfried and Barbara Junge, as we have already discovered, the conditions under which the Golzow series of films were produced from 1961 till 1989 meant that the filmmakers had to be very circumspect in airing views on problems encountered during the filming and editing process. However, as they entered what was to be the final phase of the Golzow series, the Junges took every opportunity to review the development of the project. Just as with other filmmakers, the Junges concede that their work on the Golzow long doc has been a constant learning
that there will quite often be differences of opinion between Gaining and maintaining momentum 71 filmmakers and sponsoring agents as to just how long individual episodes should be. Filmmakers like Winfried and Barbara Junge were certainly of the opinion, for instance, that, as the Golzow chronicle developed, their films would need to get progressively longer. Broadcasters and other sponsoring agencies, on the other hand, will almost always take the view that excessive length can prove to be counter-productive and that certain narrative economies should be observed
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.
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.
‘competitors’ were the German series The Children of Golzow2 and the Swedish series The Children of Jordbrö. Both series had already been in production for several decades. The Children of Golzow had been running since 1961 (though there were some reports that the directors Winfried and Barbara Junge were thinking of calling it a day soon).3 I also learned that the Swedish director Rainer Hartleb, having worked on The Children of Jordbrö for more than three decades, was also planning to bring the curtain down on the project in 2006. As I pursued my research into how these