Teenage Wildlife: Introduction

		Teenage Wildlife: Introduction Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald

Youth of course

is only lovable

graspable

livable

when it is gone.

– Marc Cholodenko

Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the ‘dreams of his youth’.

- Walter Benjamin

1. Robert Benayoun, ‘The King is Naked’, in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 157. A new and revised edition of this book, retitled The French New Wave and co-edited by Ginette Vincendeau, will appear from Palgrave Macmillian in March 2009.

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’. (1) Or who echo the bitter words of a very young Walter Benjamin in 1913, when he precociously wrote:

2. Walter Benjamin, ‘”Experience”’, in Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913-1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 3-4.

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. (2)

In the history of cinema and of pop culture, the image of Teenage Wildlife (the title of a classic 1980 David Bowie song from Scary Monsters [and Super Creeps]) began in the 1950s, with the frightening yet seductive figure of the JD or Juvenile Delinquent: Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), James Dean and his comrades in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) ... But films of today also evoke many more modern kinds of disconnected, alienated teens on a knife-edge of violent, sexual drives: lonely kids plugged into their computers and mobile phones; frustrated youth kicking against the repressive constraints of the school classroom; teenagers breaking away from family and society to form their own unstable ‘tribes’ ...

There has always been a special bond between cinema and wild teenagers – especially since the rise of the Punk movement in the 1970s. Cinema is the art of the present moment, everything that is intense and ephemeral; and cinema, too, has often nurtured an anti-social fantasy, escaping from and challenging the dominant values. Filmmakers who share the experience or the viewpoint of teenagers, and try to ‘get inside’ their minds and their lifestyles, celebrate the fragmented, sensational, often bleak nature of their sometimes brief life-stories.

The Teenage Wildlife program screening at the International Film Festival of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (March 6-14 2009) is devoted to the spectacle of teenagers who are confronting, troubling, lost, magnificent. It shows us teenagers who are murderers and victims, visionaries and fools, rebels and thugs, sensitive and callow, tender and blank ... Some of these characters are, as Philippe Arnaud once described them, ‘refractory’: psychologically opaque, carrying around inside them a hidden agenda that the film itself can only follow and wonder about. For some of them, a special, unsocialised quality comes not from any willed rebellion, but precisely from a resolute, not-yet-extinguished childishness, like for the kids in Wassup Rockers, Suburbia or A Swedish Love Story. The films cover many countries and many styles: narrative, experimental, documentary. For this on-line account, we have added an extra text on a key film we wished to include in the program, Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie. Many other films and texts could have been included, were there world enough and time, not to mention available prints: Pialat’s Passe ton bac d’abord (1978), Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge (1979), the Jeff Kreines-Joel DeMott documentary Seventeen (1983), Shinji Sômai’s Typhoon Club (1985), Patricia Mazuy’s Travolta et moi (1994) or Akerman’s short J’ai faim, j’ai froid (1984) ...

As we worked on the idea for this project, two texts kept insisting in our minds. The first inspired the programming choice of Skolimowski’s Le Départ (1967): Marcos Uzal’s brilliant essay on this director titled ‘Eternal Adolescence’. Even as he grew old (now in his early 70’s and triumphantly back on the Festival circuit with Four Nights with Anna, 2008), Skolimowski remained fixed, according to Uzal, on ‘awkward adolescents and immature adults, on the insolence of sons and the disillusionment of fathers. What do we gain and what do we lose in leaving our youth?’ There is an intensely physical struggle betrayed by each youthful body, as Skolimowki’s beloved author Gombrowicz put it: a fight between the ‘inconsolable boy’ and the ‘made man’. At stake, at all times, is the difficult – perhaps impossible – entry of youth into the larger ‘social body’, the certified world of maturity and ‘experience’ (as Benjamin mocked it). For many constituent members of the teenage wildlife, that passage will not be achieved at all; the bubble that defines their tumultuous eternal present will be burst only in the instant of death. Cinema has always had this mysterious power, in telling its tales of youth, both to raise and erase the disquieting question that attends the endings of all these films, whether whimsical or tragic: what comes next?

3. Marcos Uzal, ‘L’adolescence éternelle’, Trafic, no. 43 (Autumn 2002), p. 77-80.

Skolimowski himself appears to solve the disquieting problem of his own ‘growing up’ by splitting and multiplying his imaginary, ironic self-projections: by the time of Success is the Best Revenge (1984) – one of several Skolimowski tales of symbolic Oedipal murder of the father by the son – the artist dwells in an off-space which is assimilable neither to ‘the insolent adolescent that he longer is’ (now played by his own son, Michael Lyndon, who strikingly resembles him) nor ‘the established artist that he will never be’. This fuzzy autobiographical trajectory thus remains, in its shifting movements, ‘less tragic, more open’ than a simple, linear Bildungsroman would or could be. (3) And several of the films in the program aim for just this ‘opening’, as fragile as it invariably is: into intimacy, lyricism, a dreamlike world of apparitions or abstractions ...

Yet part of the brutal poetry of teenage wildlife is surely the temptation to think and feel in absolutes. Thinking about how, in these films, the youthful attitude stands as the horizon of the contemporary moment, banishing the past and galvanising the future – which is also a common assumption among virtually all avant-garde art movements – prompted a second literary recollection, the fed-up disapproval of a very old but very wise man, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In his essay ‘The Virtues of Patience’ – directed against fifty years worth of (in his view) ‘impatient’ thinkers inclined towards action, the glamour of violence, and a fundamental break with any ‘contemplative’ sense of the past and of the steady connections it sows – Levinas targeted this youth-oriented, philosophical avant-garde:

4. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 155.

The last life is the most lively and least reflective one, a life of youthful insolence, as though such youths had already resolved all the questions accumulated by successive generations by simple virtue of their wildness. The exception is worth more than the rule; conflict is greater than work. They glorify whatever is harsh and pitiless, adventurous and heroic, dangerous and intense. They flatter adolescents. (4)

Would it be too cheeky, at least for this occasion, to simply reverse the sense of Levinas’ assertion, and to celebrate such intractable, omniscient wildness, to find the radicality in all that is ‘harsh and pitiless, adventurous and heroic, dangerous and intense’? To serve the inexperienceable?

		© Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald and Rouge February 2009. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.