Looking Up

A few months back, I first heard about an interesting documentary film series from the U.K. -- The Up Series. It had received fairly wide and enthusiastic praise, and had an intriguing premise that caught my interest.

It began in 1964 with the film Seven Up, and the saying: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." The filmmakers took 14 school children, all seven years of age, from a variety of financial and cultural backgrounds, and in a variety of different school environments at the time. It posited that the likely "successes" and opportunities of those children -- throughout their entire lives -- could be accurately surmised from their current, seven-year-old selves and states. With every seven years that passed, as these children turned 14, 21, 28, and so on, a new film was made to check back in on these same people, to see the actual courses their lives had taken, and how they compared to expectations.

As I said, I found this a very fascinating idea. Some critics have hailed it as one of the best uses of documentary filmmaking in the history of the medium. So perhaps the expectations were a little high.

In any case, it gets off to an incredibly rocky start. First of all, the original film is a short and superficial 35-minute piece. It's so steeped in 1964 documentary sensibilities, it feels like watching a "Duck and Cover" film on a reel-to-reel projector. It feels neither revolutionary nor revealing.

Yet the paradox, of course, is that it's required viewing for this whole experience. Sure, later films in the series are going to check back in on what was shown originally, but for the full context of it all, you pretty much have to see the original Seven Up to get things started.

Not only is the original film tough to parse thanks to the 45-year time difference, I also found it difficult to parse because of the literal ocean between us. The film is understandably made for a U.K. audience. It speaks without explanation about all sorts of geographical areas of the country, and the original intended audience is meant to instantly know what sort of person is expected to hail from there. For a U.S. viewer, it's no different than playing on the stereotypes one imagines of a person from "the South" compared to someone from "the Midwest" or "a New Yorker." In some cases, my knowledge of the U.K. was up to the task. But mostly, context had to fill in the blanks. And my brain just wasn't quite up to keeping straight 14 kids crammed into a grainy, 35-minute, black and white film.

If I had to grade this single film solely on its own merits, I really wouldn't be able to point to any. There's nothing to distinguish it from any other "school film" of its era. But the whole is presumably greater than the sum of the parts here, so I'll hold final judgment until I've seen more.