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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.
classroom exchanges. The film thus presents what might be termed a dramatically enhanced account of events. At the same time, Junge and his team also made limited use of secret filming techniques. They concealed their camera in a hide-like contraption located outside the classroom and attempted to film events from this outside perspective. The results of these endeavours bore no relation to the effort that had to be invested and they soon abandoned such practices. Just like Rainer Hartleb in The Children of Jordbrö, Junge soon Getting started 59 realised that, as a non
‘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
thematic focus of the work. Just as in The Children of Jordbrö, an earlier preoccupation with group-centred activities – life in the classroom, gatherings in the youth club, family get-togethers and the like – gives way to a greater concern with individual life-journeys. The spotlight is no longer on the children of Golzow; it now falls on the children from Golzow. A major turning point in the history of the Golzow long doc came in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the production of two much longer films, the rather curiously titled Spare No Charm and Spare No Passion
amount of speculation about the impact of significant political change. They may, as illustrated by The Children of Jordbrö, be concerned – initially at least – to show the impact of a new government housing policy. They may indeed, as is the case with the Seven Up series of films, attempt to reveal how particular structures and practices within a social system give certain members of that society a head and shoulders advantage over less fortunate individuals. In the course of their development over the longer term, however, long docs seem much more at home when
portfolio that this broadcaster was developing,4 it is not all that surprising that someone in the organisation (the then Head of Programming, Denis Forman) should have approached Apted to ask whether he would be interested in making a follow-up programme to the original Seven Up.5 With The Children of Jordbrö the relationship between filmmaker and sponsoring institution is of a slightly different order insofar as the original idea for the series came from Hartleb himself rather than the broadcaster. Even here, however, the institution (Swedish Television) exercised a
interminable begin to emerge.4 Speaking of the termination in 1981 of the American drama serial Love of Life, for instance, a soap that had been running for three decades, Allen suggests that it ‘did not so much end as it expired defiantly in medias res’ (ibid.). As we shall see when we consider the respective endings of The Children of Golzow and The Children of Jordbrö, the filmmakers concerned have resorted to similar ‘expirational’ strategies when seeking to conclude their own Towards an ending 141 long doc works. Both have sought to emphasise the idea of leavetaking
example of such mask dropping early on in Everyone’s Fine, the final film of the Children of Jordbrö cycle. Thérèse, one of the central female protagonists, is responding to the filmmakers’ enquiry as to how she goes about balancing work and family commitments. She continues her reflections for quite some time before pausing to gather her thoughts. Here, in a normal conversational exchange, one would expect some kind of rejoinder from the other party, but Hartleb is clearly intent to coax some more confessional utterances out of Thérèse and remains silent, in the hope that