49 Up

This is the latest installment of a supreme masterwork of the documentary form. In 1963, Michael Apted was a 22-year old research assistant on a 20-minute segment for a news program on British television, which profiled a cross-section of 7-year-old English children to study the differences in class and expectation amongst them. Every 7 years since, he has gone back to offer an updated profile of each still willing to participate, now 13 of them. There is breadth in the range of personality and situation, and depth in the passage of time. Each episode recapitulates each biography, and the moving snapshots of individuals at regular intervals of their lives is sufficient to elicit fascination. But Apted is a canny filmmaker, with first-rate features such as Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist to his credit, and his innovation in this episode is to bring his presence if not his image into the picture. The subjects sometimes address him directly as “Mike” and allude to their shared history, and especially the toll that participation in the project has entailed. The slightly more relaxed approach probably has to do with shooting on digital video instead of film, allowing footage and subjects to unwind. The project itself is a widening gyre, and you can enter at any point. All episodes are now on DVD, and there’s certainly an advantage in living the subjects’ lives with them as they unfold, but don’t be put off by the prospect of coming in on the middle or even working backward from the latest. So if you don’t yet know Tony or Neil or Suzy or the rest, make their acquaintance however you can, and experience the archetypal flow of life from childhood to adulthood and beyond. (2006, dvd, n.) *8* (for this installment; *10* for whole series.) (MC-84.)

I should be embarassed to admit that my knowledge of Stephen Sondheim pretty much begins and ends with West Side Story, so I am certainly late to the party in acknowledging what an amazing lyricist he is. For my “Crossing Channels: Art and Music into Film” series at the Clark, I screened the television recording of his original cast Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985. Uncharacteristically I’d only seen a bit of it beforehand, but put it on the schedule since it fit the themes of the series so perfectly. Though frankly no fan of theater in any manifestation, I was blown away by this record of a performance. The staging was impressive, Bernadette Peters was outstanding and Mandy Patinkin was more tolerable than I expected, but the real revelation was in Sondheim’s lyrics, so sophisticated, so humorous, so profound.