One of the things that reflects something from an artist’s career is which work one chooses to mark next to his name when the headline announcing his death is published. Michael Afted, who died at the weekend at the age of 79, has signed dozens of films and TV series, some of which are award-winning hits, but only one of his works, the one that put him in the Pantheon, accompanied all the obituaries: the documentary series “Seven Up” followed a group Children who became middle-aged boys and men, every seven years.
Most of Aftad’s work, which began his career in the UK, has been in feature film. He first had success in Hollywood 40 years ago with “The Daughter of a Coal Miner,” the cinematic biography of country singer Loretta Lynn. The film was nominated for an Oscar and won the lead actress, Sisi Spacek, an Oscar. The British aptad came to the Appalachian towns of Kentucky for the first time in his life and filmed the singer’s story at the location itself, as an outside observer learning to know the lifestyles of blue-collar people, who are not well known in the United States.
From there he went on to direct Sigourney Weaver as Diane Pussy, the gorilla researcher in “Gorillas in the Mist,” and Judy Foster in “Nell.” He reached his peak as a commercial film director in 1999 when he was invited to direct “The World Is Not Enough” in the James Bond film series.
Aptad was what the British call a Journeyman, an efficient and professional workman, but not one who leaves a significant personal mark. No one waited with bated breath for his film. When you saw his name on a film, it was impossible to know if the film would be good or bad, but you could have known in advance that he would be a director who would try to get the most out of even the most absurd scripted ideas. And so, films like “Gorky Park,” “In the Name of the Prosecution, In the Name of the Defense,” “Dangerous Move” and “Up to Here” were not particularly good films, but Aptad knew how to make them reasonably reasonable and visually interesting.
In this respect, it is worth mentioning the favorite Ifted film, which was dropped from most of the eulogies written about it over the weekend: “Agatha” from 1979, in which Vanessa Redgrave plays Agatha Christie, the week she suddenly disappeared in 1926, and her life was feared. Dustin Hoffman played the journalist who set out to trace her, in a film that is a kind of story of Agatha Christie, about Christie herself.
So, in the end, he is remembered as a documentary filmmaker, for example as the director of Sting’s 1985 film Bring On The Night, which accompanied the singer’s successful double album. But his legacy will eventually be the brilliant idea he had in 1970 to turn a one-time documentary into a series. In 1964, Aptad was a researcher on the documentary “Seven Up” directed by Paul Almond. Aptad was involved in the casting of 14 7-year-old boys, in what was to be a portrait of childhood in Britain, and an exposure of the British class system, and how it affects childhood and education.
In 1970, he suggested that the ITV channel return to the children and see how they were doing. And so he continued to do every seven years, until last year when “63 Up” came out (Apted hoped to continue documenting them until they reached the age of 70), in a series that became sad from movie to movie, when it turns out that cute and clever kids have turned gray and lost adults.
In an interview with the New York Times, with the release of one of the episodes of the series, Afted said that his great regret was that he did not ensure that there was gender equality between the participants in the series, which contained ten boys and four girls. He so wanted to talk about class and economic inequality, that he did not pay attention to the gender inequality that the series perpetuates. “I think the feature films I made later: ‘Daughter of a Coal Miner’, ‘Nell’ and ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ – focused on women because I wanted to make up for it.”