“Teenage,” the new film from Matt Wolf (“Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell”), is a quietly hypnotizing portrait of a forgotten period with contemporary resonances buzzing through its every frame. The film uses Jon Savage’s massive tome of the same name, a pre-history of teenage rebellion and unrest, as its foundation, and from there it constructs — using a combination of archival footage and recreations, as well as multiple narrators, including actors Jena Malone and Ben Whishaw — a mosaic of the collective teenage experience, told through the lives of its earliest iconoclasts.
In a conversation with ARTINFO, Wolf discussed his discovery of the source material, how punk rock’s cut-and-paste aesthetic influenced the film, and the importance of making the past feel new again.
Let’s start with Jon Savage’s book, which is packed with historical information. When did you first discover it?
Well, I was a Jon Savage fan. I read, “England’s Dreaming” in college and I think one of my main interests is hidden histories and forgotten biographies. That’s one of the main things I make films about. So when I heard about Jon’s book “Teenage” I was intrigued by the notion of a pre-history. I never thought of that as a model for looking at culture. I think it’s interesting that there’s this thing that we’ve all experienced, that we all know, but there’s an entire unfamiliar or hidden pre-history. So that intrigued me, but then I found that his book was just littered with all these biographies of these fascinating, obscure teenage figures. I thought, wow, there’s like 25 movies in here. One major impression I had was I felt that his punk perspective was coloring his depiction of the early 20th-century history, and I thought, what if I try to make a historical documentary that’s also imbued with this punk perspective? What if I try to make a panoramic, multi-decade historical film?
When you ask yourself those questions and decide to embark on the project, where do you start? Are you pulling text from the book? Are you immediately looking for images, or building a structure?
It’s not a book you outline and make a film out of. For us, we created a rule, which was that any story we told had to have a strong basis in actual archival footage. So our whole process began with archival research. So instead of making an outline for the film, we made a list of topics that we thought could be included in the film and gave that to an archival researcher. We worked really closely with our lead archival researcher, Rosemary Rotondi, and she sourced an incredible body of footage for us and then enlisted researchers in Washington, D.C. at the National Archives, and in Germany and England. All this footage came in and I went over to Wales, where Jon is based, and we watched the footage together and identified different things within it — things we liked, things that were opportunities for storytelling, things we didn’t like. We would keep refining these lists of topics that would go to the researcher and we developed our outline based on what we could find.
In terms of writing the film, the idea originally would be that Jon would narrate it, that it would be more of a traditional essay film, from his voice. In Wales, I went to a recording studio and recorded voice over with him but it just didn’t work. Understandably, he speaks with authority of an expert, and he’s an older British person. It just felt like it was killing the spirit of the material a little bit. I started to realize I wanted to break down these conventions of expertise that you find in a historical documentary. We had the idea, what if we record some subjective quotes from the point of view of youth? Another director connected me with the actress Jena Malone and I did an experiment with her in a studio, and she brought the quotes to life. I thought, this is a different narration that I haven’t heard in a film before, and what if we create a script that’s entirely framed subjectively and jumps between these different regional perspectives and genders and creates this kind of global youth perspective.
I’m interested in this idea of a collective voice of youth.
A Greek chorus.
Exactly. And in other interviews, you’ve talked about this idea of the film as a “living collage,” which I think the polyphonic narration is an essential component of.
Yeah, early on I had I had this idea of the film being imbued with a punk aesthetic and I didn’t really know what that meant. But I was talking with Jon about that idea and he remembered in the 1970s in England, as he was first observing and participating in punk, he saw young kids taking thrift clothes from previous generations and youth cultures — rocker suits and zoot suits — and literally cut up those clothes and reassemble them with safety pins into something that felt contemporary and new. He called that living collage at the time, and that felt like a really beautiful premise to me, that you could pick and choose these aspects of the past and rescramble them into something that’s totally new and reflects on the present. In the formal sense, that’s literally what we did — in terms of the narration, sampling all these firsthand quotes from teenagers, from diaries and written testimonies, but also visually, combining all of these clips, images of youth from the past, and kind of remixing them into something that’s a contemporary work that’s meant to use the past as a means to reflect on these things today.
The form of the film slips between these different modes. There is archival footage, but it also has footage you shot to make look like archival footage; it has real diary entries, but read by actors. You use this Judy Garland song in the film, “In Between,” which speaks to the experience of youth, which the film also mirrors formally.
That’s interesting, nobody has thought of that. To me, I think of the quality of the film as being dreamlike, which feels true to the adolescent experience. That dreaminess is a mix of fantasy and reality, in a sense. In terms of using recreations in the film, I see it as something I did out of necessity. I wanted to telescope into the experiences of a few individuals, and there’s such a global panoramic cultural history happening [in the film] that I thought these beats of individual stories were really important. But like I said, I’m interested in hidden histories and forgotten youth, and these characters were not filmed or documented — there was maybe three photos of Brenda Dean Paul, otherwise nothing — so I needed to do unconventional portraiture to bring those characters to life. It’s my filmmaking style to shoot recreations that don’t look like “Unsolved Mysteries,” but are informed by the actual archival footage from the period.
It blends quite seamlessly. I’m curious how you view the film coexisting within the industry of nostalgia, especially for youth?
Have you read Simon Reynolds’s book “Retromania”?
I have.
I disagreed with the argument in that book.
Concerning the feedback loop of retro nostalgia preventing us from moving forward?
Yeah, it was a very hard-lined, Clement Greenberg-style argument that a fascination with the past and retro culture is completely destroying the possibility of innovation. I was on board for the first part of that book but then I started to strongly disagree and started to recognize, in my own work in other peoples’ works, it’s a combination of retro nostalgia and innovation that’s happening simultaneously, which feels really organic.
I think a lot of times things that deal with history are targeted for an adult, baby-boomer or older audience. This film is designed for a much younger, different kind of audience. A couple of journalists I’ve spoken to, and young people who have seen the film, have said this material feels so new. That’s an interesting and provocative experience. To take something that’s so old and to treat it in a way that makes the material feel new.
