I recently became a bit obsessed by a movie, a series of professional home movies actually. In black and white 1964 in Britain, the director Michael Apted (before he was well known) and a group called World in Action selected a group of kids from different social classes (this was still at a time when social class more or less determined how well a person did or did not do in life) then age 7 and filmed them, and interviewed them. It then followed them from 7 UP, that is, every seven years, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, and the latest 49, using the same basic procedure of filming a piece of their lives, in snapshot, and interviewing them, with flashbacks to the individual as once he/she was. All are still alive, two or three at one time declined to appear in 42 UP, but one of those was back in the 49 UP.
The effect of watching the child switch to the adult and trying to hold the image of the child in mind while listening to the adult is mesmerizing. I have two of them, 42 UP and 49 UP. I keep trying to decide which of these some 10 plus people I like the best, I like them all so very much. Maybe it's Tony, who as a boy dreamed of being a jockey, but wasn't good enough, and ended up as a cabbie with two homes, one in England and one in Spain. But there is something about Neil, who admits himself to being eccentric, a long suffering soul who has struggled through life, either homeless in a rather untraditional way or in local politics with the odd job that keeps him going. Surprisingly, at 49, he seems like he has come through the worst and is even vaguely happy.
If you think that the most beautiful or handsome of us don't age in what seems like the short period of seven years, watching this film will disabuse you.
The rich boys dreaming of Oxford and being barristers or solicitors become pudgy white haired or balding men. Some of the scrappers are scrappers still, figuring the odds of getting as much as they can out of their opportunities in life. Almost all have done surprisingly well. The sullen girls mostly marry, several divorce, their children sprouting on camera, color mirror images of the black and white grammar school selectees for this project.
Those of us who have reached a certain age already know that it all passes so quickly, this life that seemed a bottomless well of time when we were babes on summer vacations. But this series slugs the chin of our souls with that transient reality because we watch their lives pass in about and hour and a half.
Neil hits on that when he is riding his bicycle through the countryside, where he feels closest to whatever is God in nature. He finds that he is happier now because of the realization that this is HIS one time through and now, though relatively late at 49 UP, he is making the most of it as best as he knows how.
I hope I am around for 56 UP and that I have fully and joyfully and purposefully acted on making the most of MY one time as best as I know how.
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