Long before Millennials were Snapchatting and Tweeting and showing off their pierced belly buttons in crop tops, and even before punks impaled their ears with safety pins, teenagers were making bold statements through style and music. But what you probably didn’t know was that the concept of the teenager didn't even exist before WWI. (The Oxford English Dictionary pegs the word's first ever written use as recently as 1921.) Back in the day, you went straight from being a child to an adult laborer with no prom or spin-the-bottle in between.
OC friend and director Matt Wolf’s new documentary Teenage, inspired by author Jon Savage's novel of the same name (and produced by Jason Schwartzman), brings to life the struggle that broke out between adults and adolescents in the early twentieth century. Narrated by actors Jena Malone, Ben Whishaw, Julia Hummer, and Jessie Usher, the film tells its story via the diary entries of four emblematic teenagers from this period—Brenda Dean Paul, the first tabloid heroin addict; Melita Maschmann, a zealous Hitler Youth; Tommie Scheel, a non-conformist German swing kid; and Warren Wall, an African American Boy Scout.
This is not a movie about teenybopper trends. It's about politics. Highlighting early youth movements from the Flappers and Jitterbugs to the Nazi Youth, the documentary dives into the socio-economic factors that formed the modern teenager. "The film focuses on exceptional teenagers from the past, rather than the conformists, or kids who were bored in their bedrooms. Kids like the Jitterbugs aren't so different from today's teenagers, who are starting a band, writing a blog, or getting involved in activism and politics," Matt told us last week. "All the youth in my film were imagining a different kind of future, even if they got sucked into terrible things like the Hitler Youth. Regardless of their circumstances, they saw the problems that the adults were passing down to them and they stood up for what they believed in.”
In the late 1990s, Matt himself was a teenage activist fighting for gay rights, an experience which informed the film. He thinks teens are still just as radical and important as they were a hundred years ago. “I think it’s really hard to identify the most meaningful strands of youth culture as they’re happening in real time," he said. "Sometimes it takes a long time to really understand their impact. But I’m certain that teenagers are doing amazing and important things right now—we just might not understand it yet.”
The film, which took four years to produce, tells its story through beautiful and evocative documentary footage. Together with Jon Savage, Matt watched over 90 hours of footage and combed through 4,000 archival images that the director and his team of researchers spent hours restoring. Teenage also uses reenactments. “I thought it was important to bring to life these characters because their stories have been forgotten. There were no pictures or films of these fascinating kids, so I had to create my own," he said.
The most in-depth footage that the director and his team found ranged from 1904 to 1945, which ultimately became the film’s timeline. A personal highlight for Matt was the footage that they discovered at Framepool's historical archives in Germany of German swing kids on a summer day. “They were doing what kids do—listening to records and dressing in cool clot
OC friend and director Matt Wolf’s new documentary Teenage, inspired by author Jon Savage's novel of the same name (and produced by Jason Schwartzman), brings to life the struggle that broke out between adults and adolescents in the early twentieth century. Narrated by actors Jena Malone, Ben Whishaw, Julia Hummer, and Jessie Usher, the film tells its story via the diary entries of four emblematic teenagers from this period—Brenda Dean Paul, the first tabloid heroin addict; Melita Maschmann, a zealous Hitler Youth; Tommie Scheel, a non-conformist German swing kid; and Warren Wall, an African American Boy Scout.
This is not a movie about teenybopper trends. It's about politics. Highlighting early youth movements from the Flappers and Jitterbugs to the Nazi Youth, the documentary dives into the socio-economic factors that formed the modern teenager. "The film focuses on exceptional teenagers from the past, rather than the conformists, or kids who were bored in their bedrooms. Kids like the Jitterbugs aren't so different from today's teenagers, who are starting a band, writing a blog, or getting involved in activism and politics," Matt told us last week. "All the youth in my film were imagining a different kind of future, even if they got sucked into terrible things like the Hitler Youth. Regardless of their circumstances, they saw the problems that the adults were passing down to them and they stood up for what they believed in.”
In the late 1990s, Matt himself was a teenage activist fighting for gay rights, an experience which informed the film. He thinks teens are still just as radical and important as they were a hundred years ago. “I think it’s really hard to identify the most meaningful strands of youth culture as they’re happening in real time," he said. "Sometimes it takes a long time to really understand their impact. But I’m certain that teenagers are doing amazing and important things right now—we just might not understand it yet.”
The film, which took four years to produce, tells its story through beautiful and evocative documentary footage. Together with Jon Savage, Matt watched over 90 hours of footage and combed through 4,000 archival images that the director and his team of researchers spent hours restoring. Teenage also uses reenactments. “I thought it was important to bring to life these characters because their stories have been forgotten. There were no pictures or films of these fascinating kids, so I had to create my own," he said.
The most in-depth footage that the director and his team found ranged from 1904 to 1945, which ultimately became the film’s timeline. A personal highlight for Matt was the footage that they discovered at Framepool's historical archives in Germany of German swing kids on a summer day. “They were doing what kids do—listening to records and dressing in cool clot