Movies #6 - Up Series, Apted
1 Comments Published by Prasad Venkat on Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 3:37 PM.
The 'Up' is a series of documentaries that have been following a group of children who were seven years old (in 1964) for every seven years. It seems like wishful thinking for an average film enthusiast to be able to voyeur a handful of lives at periodic intervals. Micheal Apted has delivered it to us - and if you can do simple maths, you will know that the latest in the series is 49 Up. Haven't seen anyone of them and would love to see them all.
In a very good interview with Roger Ebert, Apted said:
In a very good interview with Roger Ebert, Apted said:
You could make a film of twelve people and show bad sides and laughter. I don’t think the films have ever been sycophantic. I think they kind of had a balance, but, nonetheless, underneath it all is an affection, which I think is important in any film. In any work of art there has to be a feeling. Out of feeling love comes, in any sort of art, I think.Ebert said:
.... there was a person on the internet who got the box set and started to watch the first film and over the next 24 hours, although not consecutively, had seen them all. And then posted this notice saying that it was a metaphysical experience for him, that in a way he had seen not their lives, but life itself. Life flashing across the screen. Because that’s what it is, that’s what life is like.TNR critic Stanley Kauffman writes:
The segments are so cleverly arranged--he includes past pictorial references for each of the people we revisit--that now there is something almost mystical involved. It is as if a wizard were giving us an overview of forty-two years that mortals were possibly not meant to see.
I don't think there is a better or more engaging series of movies around than this one .. I have seen them all more than once, and they just get better each time