Teenage review

Documenting teenage diaries and poetry

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Subject A’s ambition in life is to party all the time; Subject B has joined a murderous London gang; and Subject C wants to be famous for being famous.

Not dispatches from today’s Broken Britain, but the authentic voices of youngsters from the 1900s, 1920s and 1940s, as resurrected in Jon Savage and Matt Wolf’s documentary: a haunting, hypnotic collage of archive footage and period recreations charting the pre-history of the teenager.

As shown here, ‘teenagers’ didn’t just spring from nowhere circa 1945 – which is when this film very pointedly ends too. Mesmerising.

Ali Catterall
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