LIVING A NEW CONCEPT?

We know youth is wasted on the young. But is it a modern phenomenon?

Teenage, a film jammed with archival movie footage backed up by youths of the past voiced by present-day actors, is a documentary about at least two things. It's the history of an idea, but also a survey of the accompanying social phenomenon. The wonder of it but also the trouble with it is that to follow this history we must also tour the entire first half of the twentieth century from a youthful viewpoint, sometimes without the particularly youthful angle very clear. It's a complicated game Matt Wolf is playing. This is fun, and thought-provoking, and packed with rare archival footage, but it's a bit too breezy, and it really would work better as a mini-series, supplemented by a lecture series, and readings.

Wolf's inspiration, he has said, was punk historian Jon Savage's book of the same name, which is filled with the emerging voices of youths in the decades leading up the1960's. What you get here is a welcome avoidance of "talking heads" and the liveliness of having some -- only some -- of the voices dramatized by Jena Malone, Ben Whishaw (who's actually 33), Julia Hummer, Jessie Usher, and others, plus a lot of very specific and various looks at how kids dressed and acted back then. It's Studs Terkel crossed with a movie epic, and it's absolutely charming, and very interesting. But it's still a bit superficial, and a lot of it is already quite familiar.

Most of us may know adolescence was once less focused upon, if not altogether unknown, but that it's basically a whole new phenomenon (and concept) is the whole reason for this documentary. In the early twentieth century, one practically got shoved straight from childhood into marriage and work. According to this film, it's the industrial revolution that led to teenagers, by accident. Factories so enslaved child labor that there was a revolt. This led to mobs of idle youths. (Most of this movie focuses only on England, then America, and for some important moments, on Germany. The whole rest of the youth and teenage world goes unseen.) The industrial revolution didn't invent child labor, of course, nor has it vanished. But that's for another episode. Those idle youths roamed English city streets making trouble. To describe them word "hooligan" was born; whereupon (presto!) Lord Baden-Powell created the Boy Scouts in England to get them out of trouble. Mods and the Rockers came later. The film stops before that.

Baden-Powell's organization seems to have been -- though the movie doesn't exactly say so, a model for future establishment exploitation of the young. Hitler's "Jungend" bypassed parental authority to create an army of young Nazi converts. But youth besides being WWI and WWII canon fodder, is always on the front lines of any revolution. Some German kids dressed in tweeds and listened to swing in opposition the Hitler's lock-step scheme, but they met a sad end; we get to see even more of them, in film footage, than the obedient Nazis.

Pop culture was quite another thing, organized around the widespread desire -- strongly opposed by the Nazis -- to dance and listen to swing or Boogie-woogie; the freedom to waste time and just have fun and shock one's elders. Thus we got the Bright Young Things, Flappers, black jitterbugers, Swing Kids, and Sub Debs. Maybe the Sub Debs came in the 1950's: it all whirls by so fast. Anyway, all this dancing to a beat adults didn't get was a harbinger of new lifestyles. And, the word "lifestyle" itself is a coinage linked to youth, and other minorities.

According to Teenage, the pivotal moment was World War II. Since this is a youth history of 1900-1950, WWI is covered too. War was always a youth thing: every time, boys of 17 went off to it to die in great numbers. After WWII, it all came together. Pop music exploded, Teen Centers popped up in America (which influenced Britain a lot when the Yanks came at the end of the War), and the newspapers started to talk about 'Teen-agers.

Teenage only glimpses some of the "contrived corridors/And issues" T.S. Eliot speaks of in "Gerontion." Some of its aspects are political, others social and cultural. They're not necessarily separate. But then they are: this is what the hip, swishy Bright Young Things and British-imitating young Germans under Hitler were about, coolness, hipness, style -- getting away from politics of various sorts (which itself is political, of course). The economic aspects are only hinted at here. But for sure it's teenage market clout that's chiefly responsible for the group's massive visibility in our times. And now the stage seems inevitable, if not, for some, perpetual. Suppose you don't want to be a teenager? If you're between 12 and 20 good luck with that project.

If Teenage us unconventional with its focus wholly on archival footage (some of it quite rare), narration, and dramatized voices, that's fine. It just leaves one hungry for more.


Teenage, 78 mins., was shown at the London Film Festival in 2013 and released n the UK 24 Jan. 2014; at 2014's Tribeca Film Festival, also Hot Docs and AFI Docs; it will be released on all platforms. It is having a theatrical release in Landmark theaters in Berkeley (Shattuck Cinemas) and San Francisco (Opera Plaza) 25 April 2014. Also Chicago and Ft. Wayne. See film website for nationwide rolling release dates and places.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.