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The Seven Up! films

Connecting the personal and the sociological

University of California, Berkeley, USA, bthorne{at}berkeley.edu

A B S T R A C T Michael Apted’s documentary film series, which tracks 14 British children as they move from ages seven to 49, connects the personal with the sociological. Organized around the phenomenology of ‘growing older together’ (Schutz, 1976), the films invite emotional identification as they go about exploring unique, shared, and fluctuating experiences of the self. The documentaries resonate with the work of ethnographers who revisit the field, who seek to craft coherent narratives from a surplus of material, and who confront ethical problems as they investigate the private lives of subjects. The Seven Up! linear narrative of social class determination loosened in subsequent films as contingency, variation, and the dynamics of gender, generation, and parenting came more fully into view. The films embed tensions between linear and contingent, open-ended forms of temporality, juxtaposing varied forms of time: subjective (with fluctuating orientations of consciousness), physical aging, personal maturation, life course, biographical, historical, and generational.

Key Words: documentary film • ethnography • age • social class • gender • generation • family • time

Ethnography, Vol. 10, No. 3, 327-340 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138109342830


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