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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.
longitudinally (as was the case with Rainer Hartleb ’s Jordbrö series), there can still be reluctance on the part of the broadcaster or funding body to enter into a long-term contract with the film or programme maker until the series has proved its worth in audience Getting started 49 ratings’ terms.3 All the more reason, therefore, to pay especially close attention to the precise genesis of the chosen works to consider in what ways the circumstances of the works’ origination may have influenced the course of their further development.4 Seven Up Whatever the conditions under
allegedly defining moments in a subject’s life that have already been captured on film.7 Knowing that each film or programme they produce is part of a larger unfolding narrative, long doc filmmakers are always aware they will need to gather, assemble and present material in such a way that it allows some kind of dialogic relationship to be established between material relating to the more distant and the more recent events in a subject’s life. Long doc filmmakers have devised different strategies for achieving this goal. In conversations with his subjects, Rainer Hartleb, for
where individuals or groups are forced, out of political or economic necessity, to distance themselves – physically or emotionally – from the place they regarded as their ‘Heimat’. The future resonance of these films may well lie in the recognition that these Golzower stories have much wider applicability. The Children of Jordbrö The beginnings of The Children of Jordbrö (1972–2006) go back to the early 1970s when Rainer Hartleb was working as a television journalist for Swedish Television. His original idea was to produce Short histories 43 a documentary that
far to claim that the picture projected evidence of a society in the first stages of disintegration. The mood seems more one of resigned acceptance that this is simply the way things are, with no real prospect of change. What Biographies does us alert us to, however, is that at the beginning of the last decade of the GDR’s existence there was an ever-widening gulf between the inflated rhetoric of Party officials and the actual lived experience of most East Germans. The Children of Jordbrö Having had his first film From a Child’s World screened in 1973, Rainer Hartleb
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.
‘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
not mournful, tone. This note of melancholy is clearly discernible in Rainer Hartleb’s work, though in it viewers are made equally aware that the Jordbrö films are also giving expression to a philosophy of life in which the inevitability of decline is made the more bearable Concluding remarks 193 by accompanying reminders about the forces of renewal. Hartleb is clearly concerned that his films should bear testimony to this idea of counterbalancing forces in human life, but there are certain moments within the films where this idea of balance is expressed in
worth commenting on. Most of these long docs had relatively inauspicious beginnings and in some instances were not even planned as long doc projects. Apted’s Seven Up series began life as a stand-alone World in Action special. Winfried Junge’s Children of Golzow started as a single short (13-minute) documentary with no guarantee of having its life extended, whilst Rainer Hartleb’s Children of Jordbrö could easily have been restricted to being a one-off current affairs programme reporting on schoolchildren’s first day at school in a Jordbrö primary. Reflections on