[1] The film follows broadly the structure of Jaques' monologue All the World's a Stage in William Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It and show six scenes of couples kissing each other at different ages: Infancy, Playmates, Schoolmates, Lovers (in some versions: The Soldier), The Judge, and Second Childhood.
Sitting by a fireplace, an old man helps an old woman make a ball of wool while a cat laps milk from a saucer.
[4] Three of the tableaux-scenes were actually sold to distributors as separate subjects, Engagement Ring, Old Sweethearts, and Old Maid and Pet Cat.
(...) The succession of shots does not privilege the unexpected or defy any kind of logical succession of scenes and images, but is rather based on what David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson call categorical editing.
"[6] The film has been noted by various authors as probably the first example of the use of directional lighting in cinema to produce a specific effect.
Barry Salt remarks that " It was around 1905 that the major film producing companies, Edison, Vitagraph.
and Biograph, began to use artificial lighting in their studios (and that) there was also from this time some extremely rare use of theatrical type arc floodlights".
He mentions as "one striking instance (and) possibly the first appearance of such a usage", the last scene of The Seven Ages where "the light from a fire falling on two old people sitting in front of a fireplace is simulated by an arc floodlight in the position of the fire and out of shot to the side (and) is the sole source of light in this scene.
"[7] Tom Gunning mentions that Porter used this technique "to indicate a fireplace's glow, with pictorially striking profile and back lighting.
Porter's firelit shot is a gem from pre-Griffith cinema and certainly creates connotations of warmth and security in this tableau of love in old age.
"[8] Vicky Lebeau remarks that the second scene, with a close-up of two children kissing each other, is "explicitly troping the very popular Edison short The Mary Irwin Kiss (1896), (and) also draws on an established iconography of the child as one who likes to mime the worlds of adults, playing at being 'grown-up' (...).
Evoking as they do not only the children's libidinal pleasure in one another (if that is what it is) but also the child's sexual interest in the adult world, such images bring into focus the difficult relation between adult and child on the issue of sexuality".