Ordinary people. When I think of it, the ordinary people of Robert Redford's film weren't ordinary at all; they were well-off, lived a rather privileged life and had to cope with the kind of problems most 'ordinary' families don't, (the death of a child, the attempted suicide of another). We seldom saw them at work or at play. Redford chose to stick to the 'extraordinary' events in their lives. The people we meet in Nikolaus Geyrhalter's epic documentary "Over the Years" are real and their lives, the lives Geyhalter permits us to see, are very ordinary indeed. Great documentary filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman simply let their characters get on with it though Geyhalter helps things along by sitting them down in front of the camera and asking them questions about their lives and sometimes the very ordinary answers they give might surprise us.
The subject of this extraordinary film is the closure of a textiles factory in Austria's Waldviertel region and he filmed it over a period of 10 years. Consequently it is the employees who have lost their jobs and are 'coping' with the realities of unemployment, illness, ageing etc. who become the films true subjects. The danger, of course, for the kind of audience this film is aimed at is, if you think you lead a more productive or exciting life, you will look on it rather smugly and think 'there but for the grace of God', but are any of us really that much different from the characters in Geyhalter's film? The Jarretts in Redford's film didn't strike me as particularly ordinary but were the day-to-day occurrences in their lives, were the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune they encountered, that much different from the people here. Life, you see, the world over is different for all of us and it is the same. You may live the privileged life of a movie star but you still put the hours in and you are still left alone. Turn the camera on anyone, be they Tom Cruise or the ex-bookkeeper of the factory in Waldviertel and we will still see very much the same thing; only the personalities will be different. So if you think a 3 hour documentary about 'ordinary people' is going to be boring, think again; there is much here than it riveting.
