The Teen Screen Cinematheque

What We Are

Teen Screen Cinematheque is a curated online project, presented by Cause a Cine, which aims to explore the intersection between teen screen (film and television), and classic and art cinema. This project is inspired by Tabloid Art History, which publishes visual comparisons between popular culture and art history. This combination of high and low culture is something which can also occur in film, with the duelling dichotomies of high and low art. The Cinematheque will find visual references, comparisons, mentions and intersections of classic and art cinema in teen film and television, to not only bridge the gap between high and low art, but also introduce teens to classic cinema, and vice versa.

Definitions

As we embark on this journey, it is important to define what exactly we mean when we refer to teen screen.

If we are to look at “teen film and television” as anything which features an ensemble of teen characters as the protagonists, this would be an easy distinction to make. However, in terms of genre, this can propose some challenges. For example, what about coming of age?

Hadley Freeman describes the difference between teen film and the coming of age story thus: “The teen movie is a celebration of teen-ness: the tribes, the slang, the annoying parents. The coming-of-ager is a more soulful phenomenon: yes, it looks at teen life, but something deeper about the human spirit is revealed.”

It is in this way that Clueless and Mean Girls, both films about navigating high school and introducing new lingo into our everyday vernacular, count as teen film, whereas Lady Bird, a story about a young girl and her relationship with her mother during her senior year of high school, is a coming of age film.

Due to its deeper meaning, coming of age films are generally more critically acclaimed and taken seriously than that of teen films. Examples include Stand By Me, The Breakfast Club, Boyhood and Lady Bird. Teen films are predominantly all surface (even the best ones).

However, for some films, this distinction is not so clearly cut. The films of John Hughes, for example, are herald as iconic teen films, yet Freeman describes Pretty in Pink as coming of age due to the emotional journey and exploration of class differences. The same can be said for contemporary films. Love, Simon, the latest addition to the teen film cannon, is both a major studio production which celebrates teen culture, but also counts as a coming of age narrative, as the film’s titular character, Simon, navigates coming out and the courage to be true to yourself and those around you.

It seems fitting then to look at a different definition of teen film, such as John Lewis, the author of the Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture, who defines teen films as any film about teenagers, not films targeted at them. While some films about teens are more serious in tone, they are still lacking in representation at institutions such as the Oscars or many Top 100 Movies lists.

High vs Low

This project takes inspiration from the writings of Susan Sontag, particularly, her essays Notes on Camp and On Culture and the New Sensibility, which are seminal texts in the distinction between high and low culture.

When a film which is defined as “classic” or “art” cinema, it is described in terms of poetic or pure cinema, as intellectual, as a masterpiece. In today’s culture, these films are black and white films from early and Golden Age cinema, and other critically influential films from the 20th and early 21st century. In contrast, major studio films such as romantic comedies and teen film, genres traditionally and predominantly enjoyed by young women, are looked over as tacky, commercial, and low culture. This critique forgets that these films are the same art form, and that cinema does not exist in a vacuum. As filmmaking develops, cinematic history informs each new film.

This dismissal as low culture also removes value from the tastes of young women and come across as elitist. As Sontag wrote in On Culture, “If art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes.” In relation to film, the Cinematheque believes the emotions and sensations given off by an Alfred Hitchcock film could be comparable to that of watching I Know What You Did Last Summer.

While I tend to agree that not all commercial films are a masterpiece, not everyone was first introduced to film via the French New Wave or the works of Andrei Tarkovsky. A romantic comedy screened during your Saturday night sleepover or going to the cinema to see the latest comedy with your parents: these experiences are most young people’s gateway into film.

Continuing to appreciate these films as one delves more into film appreciation and film history shouldn’t negate one’s legitimacy as a cinephile, nor exist remotely as a guilty pleasure.

This mode of thinking updates that of early Cahiers du Cinema, whose founding writers started the influential film journal in response to the old regime of cinephilia, which idolised early silent film and sneered at new Hollywood. With an intense love of cinema, these men such as Andre Bazin, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard believed in the importance of reframing film spectatorship and bringing attention to the films they cared about. The Cinematheque is doing the same.

In an article for Film School Rejects, Emily Kubincanek writes “Millennials do care about classic movies, but need more exposure to them.” This post was written in response to an article published by the New York Post, which contended millennials do not care about classic cinema. Based on research which found that 30% of millennials surveyed admitted to not having seen a black and white film, this seems like a drastic number when placed next to a number like 85%, the number of people over 50 who have seen a black and white film. These two numbers are drastic but ignore the 70% of millennials who have seen a black and white film, only a 15% difference with those who are over 50.

While the Cinematheque wants to allow teen screen to be discussed in the same way alongside classic film, it also aims to make classic cinema more accessible. By comparing the two, and reframing in regard to their similarities, not only will the Cinematheque close the gap between high and low culture, but also celebrate that these films are not so different after all.

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“My wish for film criticism is that it free itself at last from the ideas dictated to it by its elders, and be able to consider, with fresh eyes and mind, the works that, in my opinion, count far more in the history of our age than the pale survivors of an art that is no more.”

– Eric Rohmer, Cahiers du Cinema 26, 1953.

“If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.” 

– Susan Sontag, The Decay of Cinema, 1996