Teaser

TEENAGE teaser from Teenage on Vimeo.

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Synopsis

Based on a groundbreaking book by the punk author Jon Savage, Teenage is an unconventional historical film about the invention of teenagers. Bringing to life fascinating youth from the early 20th century—from party-crazed Flappers and hipster Swing Kids to brainwashed Nazi Youth and frenzied Sub-Debs—the film reveals the pre-history of modern teenagers and the struggle between adults and adolescents to define youth.

Incredible archival material mixes seamlessly with 16mm recreations featuring actors. Based on actual teenage diaries, the footage resembles period home movies made by kids themselves. Stylized narration dramatizes this turbulent story and a contemporary soundtrack heightens emotions. The result is a visually explosive, pop meditation on how teenagers were born.

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Director’s Notes

When I read Jon Savage’s book Teenage, I was captivated by the intensity of his writing—biographies mixed with hidden histories about one of my obsessions: youth culture. Today society is infatuated with youth. Teenagers pioneer new styles and ideas that influence a global marketplace. Adults try to stay young forever. It’s no wonder because adolescence is the most formative and experimental period in our lives. Teenagers always represent the future.

But the role of youth wasn’t always so clear. For decades, adults were desperately trying to control youth. They were seen as a problem, a source of political influence, or an opportunity for marketing. Adolescents just wanted to be free. Jon Savage has uncovered a fascinating pre-history of the teenager. In this living collage of different groups, from different periods and countries are the seeds of today’s youth culture.

I wanted to bring this explosive history to life and to create a historical film like none that I’ve seen before. In Teenage archival footage will reveal fascinating youth movements from the early 20th century. Narration performed by actors will dramatize the broader history from which these groups emerged. Unconventional 16mm recreations will integrate seamlessly. Like visual diaries or vintage home movies, they’ll be filmed explicitly from the point of view of youth.

Actors in period-blurring locations and costumes will convey what archival footage cannot—heightened emotions and subjective experience. In voice over they’ll read from the actual diaries of teenagers. All this material will be scored with an innovative soundtrack, infused with universal sentiments of teenage angst and hope.

The story focuses on a period before teenagers were understood: between the first and second World Wars in America, England, and Germany. After World War I, teenagers rejected adults who sent them to war, where they died in unprecedented masses. The seeds of generational conflict were planted for the next tumultuous eras.

In recreations, we zoom in closer on significant adolescent characters, using their stories to understand larger events and phenomena. We experience a 1920s freak party through the fictionalized home movies of “Bright Young Thing” Brenda Dean Paul. We discover Tommie Scheel and his friends, the Hamburg Swings, who used American subculture to resist the Nazis. Young American, British, and German narrators show the connections between these disparate groups and the competing forces struggling to define youth. By 1945, the year the A-Bomb dropped and World War II ended, the term “Teenager” was finally coined.

Jon Savage’s unique entry point to this material is his incredible experience with punk rock. As a young journalist in 1970s London, he saw young punks buying thrift clothes from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. These teenage pioneers used safety pins to reassemble relics from previous youth cultures into something startlingly new. He termed this impulse “living collage” in his now legendary and definitive book England’s Dreaming.

Jon and I share this impulse to collage elements of the past in order to reveal something about the present. By collecting stories and imagery of historic teenagers, and examining the origins of youth culture, we believe there’s much to be learned about our youth-obsessed society today.

Recently after a long night of work I was walking down the street past a large group of kids. As I passed by, one of the boys ran up to me, and with a burst of fury and humor he screamed, “I’M SEVENTEEN!” At that startling moment I recognized the universality of these themes. Regardless of time or place, adolescence is a period of intense anger, frustration, excitement, and passion. The boy on the street just needed me to understand one thing: he’s a teenager.

At the end of World War II, teenagers resolved the question posed by the war: what kind of mass society will we live in? In contrast to fascism, the future would be organized around pleasure and acquisition. The teenager born in wartime America became the model and ideal of youth that still exists today. This is a history of the future.

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Bios

MATT WOLF (Director) was recently named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine and he is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow. His critically acclaimed and award-winning feature documentary Wild Combination, about the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and played in over 60 international film festivals, museums, and cinemas (Edinburgh, AFI Silverdocs, IFC Center, MoMA, ICA London) and was included on a number of “Top 10” lists of 2008. The film was released theatrically in the US and UK, distributed worldwide by Plexifilm, and was broadcast on the Sundance Channel.

Matt has produced and directed short documentaries for The New York Times, the series “High Line Stories” for the Sundance Channel, and he recently co-directed documentary components of NY Export: Opus Jazz, a feature length dance film in collaboration with New York City Ballet dancers and PBS Great Performances.

JON SAVAGE (Writer) is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. He is the author of Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945, which was published and critically acclaimed in the UK, North America, and Germany in 2007. His film and television writing credits include the BAFTA winning BBC Arena documentary, The Brian Epstein Story, and most recently the acclaimed Joy Division, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, is distributed by the Weinstein Company and The Works, and was awarded the UK Film Council’s Best Documentary Award at the 2008 Griersons.  After graduating from Cambridge he published a fanzine called London’s Outrage, and worked for Sounds, Melody Maker, and The Face. His first book, The Kinks: The Official Biography was followed by England’s Dreaming, the award-winning history of the Sex Pistols, punk, and Britain in the late seventies. It was the basis for the BBC Arena documentary Punk and Pistols and is widely considered the definitive record of punk.

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Funding & Progress

Teenage is in-progress and will be completed in the coming year.

The project has generously been supported by BritDoc + Puma Creative, Cinereach, the Guggenheim Foundation, Jerome Foundation, LEF Foundation, Tribeca Film Institute, MacDowell Colony, IDFA Forum, Sheffield MeetMarket, and Dox:Forum. Tax-deductible donations can be made via Center for Independent Documentary.

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Blog

The Teenage blog is a daily publication edited by Kelly Rakowski that looks broadly at youth culture online. Expanding beyond the early 20th century focus of the film, the blog takes the form of a youth culture magazine or punk fanzine, and will include numerous guest collaborations. Recurring features include Freak Party mixes—personal soundtracks inspired by youth; Tube Time online video clips; Youth Happenings that spotlight contemporary teen phenomena; and Flickr Fave photo essays, culled from a vast archive of vintage teen photos from the Teenage Flickr pool. The blog celebrates the culture that inspires Teenage, and will build a community of readers and contributors through the release of the film.

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