Teenage Wildlife

rouge.com compiled a wonderful collection of texts around youth und cinema.

»There are many ways, in cinema, to tell the story of youth. One can tell it as a reassuring ‘rite of passage’ that takes us safely (with a few thrills and tears along the way) from childhood innocence to adult maturity. One can tell it nostalgically, as an adult reminiscence of the ‘days gone by’, the world as a simpler place back then ... One can show teenagers slowly integrating themselves, becoming part of a family, a community, a nation, a world.

Or we can tell another story: the story of Teenage Wildlife. The story of teenagers living in an eternal present moment, like a savage, roaming pack of animals. Living violently, impulsively, on their wits and instincts. Without ties to family, to adults, to any kind of civilised society. Teenagers in a world apart, their own, separate universe which is incomprehensible to the concerned adults (parents, police, social workers, politicians) who look on, aghast. Teenagers who (in the immortal words of the Surrealist Robert Benayoun) exhibit all the ‘normal qualities of youth: naiveté, idealism, humour, hatred of tradition, erotomania, and a sense of injustice’. Or who echo the bitter words of a very young Walter Benjamin in 1913, when he precociously wrote:

More and more we are assailed by the feeling: our youth is but a brief night (fill it with rapture!); it will be followed by grand ‘experience’, the years of compromise, impoverishment of ideas, and lack of energy. Such is life. That is what adults tell us, and it is what they experienced (...) But [the philistine] has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, and that there are values – inexperienceable – which we serve.«

Introduction
Emptiness Forever: Le Départ (1967)
Summer with Annika: A Swedish Love Story (1970)
The Rejected: Suburbia (1984)
Explosions: Sound and Fury (1988)
Headlong: We Children of the Twentieth Century (1994)
Plasticity and Precarity: Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie (1998)
The Four Tricks of the Hooker: Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakno (2000)
World of Grey: All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)
Last Holiday: À tout de suite (Right Now, 2004)
Ordinary Kids: Wassup Rockers (2005)
Yesterday Girls: Prinzessin (2006)
Unfinished Diary Las Palmas ‘09
‘Sorry About All the Gravity!’ - Anna Faris, Serious Respect for the Unserious
For Anthony Stern, For Life
A Thousand and One Smithereens
Horror in Brasilia
The Way of the Vampire
‘You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This on Television!’ CNN’s Election Night Hologram
The Secret Life of Objects