Teenage

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Teenage

Studio: Oscilloscope
Directed by Matt Wolf

Mar 11, 2014 By Austin Trunick Web Exclusive

While adolescents have technically existed as long as humans have been tracking their ages, the teenager as we know it is a relatively recent invention. When the advent of child labor laws kept kids out of the factories at the tail end of the industrial revolution, it gave rise to a new social set of in-betweeners, who were too old for childish coddling, but weren’t yet permitted to pursue most adult endeavors. Filmmaker Matt Wolf’s Teenage—based on Jon Savage’s book of the same title—tracks the origins of modern youth culture through the early 20^th Century, to intriguing but inconclusive results.

The way the documentary unfolds is certainly compelling. Spectacularly culled from archival footage and intersected by occasional reenactments, the genesis of the teenager is tracked primarily through vintage diary entries—read by recognizable voices, such as Jena Malone and Ben Whishaw. This material is wonderfully scored by Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, and spotlighting a small handful of individual, captivating portraits: tragic tales of addiction-addled Flappers and wrongfully-accused Swing Kids, and a (quite scary) firsthand account of a proud Hitler Youth, among others. Unfortunately, Teenage never feels focused, and the leaps in time and location are difficult to follow without any clear narrative or visual breaks to separate them. It ends without a sense of the subject matter tying together; this is a case of a well-crafted documentary perhaps not understanding exactly what it wanted to say.

www.teenagefilm.com