It seems to me that director Apted's brilliant 'Up' film series appeals deeply because they're the first in-depth film biographies of ordinary people. After all, each of us has seen innumerable film biographies of the rich, the famous, and the notorious (as well, in recent years, we've seen phony "reality" programs about supposedly "ordinary" people posed into artificial situations). It's purely fascinating to see, to follow every seven years, your contemporaries, to feel a curious kinship with some and a distance from others of them, and to compare your own life's fortunes and the choices you've made in it with theirs.
It's not difficult to appreciate the resentment or dissatisfaction of some of the 'Up' series' participants with their having been chosen in the first place, and with being asked to participate serially every seven years, in the films. Yet I suggest that the participants might ponder this: before the advent of film, especially of home video, diary-keeping was widespread - especially among the educated and upper classes, and diary-keeping demands a lot more daily thought and toil from a diarist than being filmed every seven years requires from the 'Up' series' participants. The only advantage that viewers of the 'Up' series have over reading the journals of deceased diarists is in the immediacy, unique to motion pictures, of the Up films: these are, in their cinematic way, quite like diaries only more timely than diaries in that the 'Up' series' participants are living contemporaneously with the sharing of their motion picture diary with a vast public. It's doubtful that today's busy individuals would take the time to daily compose diary entries, and so in the 'Up' series the film medium enters, it substitutes for and improves in some ways upon, the ancient art of diary-keeping. Granted that diarists carefully chose - edited on the fly, if you will - the words of their writings, but so too have the 'Up' series' participants always had a measure of editorial control over what director Apted will or will not include in each of the series' installments.
Have any of the participants grasped that all of them will be watched, studied, analyzed, enjoyed, and vicariously bonded with by viewers for decades, centuries, and perhaps even for millennia? - that they're the first ordinary people to have the significant events and their own experience of their lives recorded for posterity? This series, whether Apted or its participants, and whether we viewers or film critics have yet grasped this fact, is not yet the anthropological gold mine it will in the near and distant future surely become: in viewing these films we're not archaeologists looking for clues to be construed - or misconstrued! - from cave paintings, potsherds, art works, and common artifacts, we're seeing actual ordinary people of our time speaking and acting (i.e., behaving) in their actual lives. Do any of the participants perhaps find it a bit eerie to know in advance that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years on utter strangers (as well as their own ever-reproducing descendents) will be viewing, hearing, studying their twentieth to twenty-first century lives?
All that said, the 'Up' films, as they've evolved to be to date, spur me to moot the notion, based on the knowledge that 'Up' series' participants' relatives and co-workers, friends and acquaintances, children and grandchildren have all been affected by the films, that a much larger film series of monumental proportions - gaining in size and scope as the original participants' children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren reproduce - could, theoretically, be produced and filmed. Such would be a vast opus, requiring increasingly many more film crews, interviewers to film ever-burgeoning numbers of participants. It could spawn among viewers factions of fans who might like and support one branch of the growing families and dislike and detract its other branches, and thus perhaps teach us much about the whole of the human condition - about the development among disparate groups of respect, disrespect, suspicion, envy, competition, enmity, etc. Such a vast series would amount to the Story Of Our Species, begun albeit, much later than the latter-in-our-species-evolution debut of motion picture technology allowed for having begun the series with Adam and Eve. No, it was impracticable then - with Adam and Eve - as it is now...but then as camcorders and webcams have only just come on the scene, there will one day exist gazillions of miles - or digits! - of footage of the lives of ordinary people: and who would ever, say, even ten years from now, endeavor to try to sort through all of these film records to try to discern, let alone to try to tell, the story of our species members?! - especially since camcorders have inspired legions of amateur filmmakers who are already producing gazillions of miles and digits of amateur motion picture fiction. (One can get really carried away with imagining endless extrapolation from the 'Up' series, can't one? I just did!)
It can only be dimly anticipated how future viewers of the 'Up' series - viewers who will see it long after Apted, the series' participants, and its contemporary viewers will have long been dead - will relate to the 'Up' films, and especially how they will relate, or not, to their participants (no doubt it will be easier, because of the immediacy of motion pictures, for future viewers to relate to the 'Up' participants than it is for us early third millennium people to relate to, say, pre-Norman Conquest Britons, or to the people who constructed Stonehenge). But it would be lovely to know how those future viewers will feel about the 'Up' films - perhaps lovelier than it would be for me to know how I'll feel about it if I should live long enough to enjoy '56-Up'!
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