The "Up Series" part 2:

As I finished my Netflix marathon of the Up documentary series, I realized that I am the same age as this group. Well, slightly younger, but I also turned 7 in 1964, the year of the first film.  I decided to make my own timeline, parallel to the series: where was I in the year of the release of each part, or when I was the age given in each title: 7, 14, 21, 29, 35, 42, 49, and now 56? (although because I'm a year behind, I'll have to settle for just-turned-55).

Because my family moved frequently when I was young (dad was a doctor in the Army), to make my timeline I found that I had to do some work to nail down the exact dates for events that I vaguely remembered: when did we move? when were we in each housing situation? what grade was I in at school?

As I worked out this chronology, I also wondered what  I really remembered about those years, and how this somewhat arbitrary cycle relates to other milestones in my life, such as graduating from high school, or moving to Minnesota.  I wondered what I might have said if I had been interviewed like those children: what was my heart's desire (to be a horse. And if I couldn't be a horse, to be an archaeologist in Egypt). Where would I go to school in the future (absolutely no clue). Did I have a boyfriend (no, but I had an intense crush on Mike Fukushima, to whom I never said a word, a pattern that would be repeated each school year until I was in high school).

My life has been at once typically American middle class in many ways and rather unorthodox in others. I've previously counted the number of times we moved (4), the number of homes we lived in (7) while we were still in the Army. I've reckoned my life in boyfriends/relationships with men. And then there are the more traditional timelines of schooling, career, parenting. How does this 7+7 timeline intersect with these?

I started to write about what I remembered from age 7, from the year 1964. My family had just moved from El Paso, Texas, where my brother and sister were born, to an Sagamihara Dependent Housing Area, near Tokyo because my rather had been stationed in Camp Zama hospita. I realized that Apted's films almost never refer directly to national or world events, whereas my life was shaped, at this point especially, by my father's work as an Army doctor during the major escalation of the Viet Namwar. Yet I know almost nothing about what my father was doing, what he thought or felt about the extraordinary experiences he lived through as a surgeon at Camp Zama from 1963 to 1967.

The "Up series" Part 1

Having seen the POV blog's list of best documentaries, I was reminded of my desire to see the series of films by Michael Apted, now known as the "Up series" In 1964, Apted was brought in on a project that later he made his: a group of children from widely different backgrounds was selected and then interviewed, with the premise: who will they be in the year 2000? The assumption or question behind the films, made every seven years since then, had to do with ideas about class in British society. Were these children already who they would be, by the age of seven? Were their paths laid out for them and constrained in such a way that they would conform or be limited by class expectations or opportunities such as education? The first documentary ended with the sentence "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."
Here's the first part of the first film. You can watch the whole series on Netflix streaming. 



The films don't set out to be anthropology, sociology or psychology in an academic sense, but they do prompt reflection on  nature and nurture,  the work of marriage,  mental health, parenting, immigration, changing gender roles. The seven-year olds from the upper-class backgrounds are clearly parroting what they've heard from their parents when they list the schools they expect to attend, in contrast to the boy in the orphanage who asks, "What's university?" It is also not revealed that the boy who seems to be the most Tory in his statements, John, the most representative of a certain upper-class posture, lost his father at the age of 9, and was raised by his Hungarian mother, attending public schools on scholarship. Although he has privilege and wealth, his life was not as easy as the films imply.

One of my favorite moments in the 14-year old episode is when Suzy, also from a wealthy background, refusing to look directly at the camera and clearly uncomfortable about the whole deal, responds with a perfect teenager eye-roll to an earnest question by Apted, off camera.

The last of the series that I was able to see was 49 Up. Here's a clip:


The latest film, 56 Up, has already been screened in the UK, and will probably be released shown in the US in Jan 2013. Much has been said about the how this series of films has affected the lives of the participants, and how it continues to fascinate viewers, especially now that "reality TV" is present as a comparison. Apted has said that he regrets that there were not more girls in the bunch, or more middle-class children, but even if the group is not truly representative of their generation in that sense, the series is a fascinating longitudinal study of human beings, as well as compelling cinema.