The Juvenile Jungle
"J. Edgar Hoover ranked 'the juvenile jungle' right up there with communism as a threat to American freedom."
- Thomas Doherty, Teenagers & Teenpics
The collapse of the studio system in the 1950s and ‘60s has been discussed under many rubrics. One of those rubrics is the rise of youth culture. Exploitation producers like Samuel Katzman and Roger Corman paved the way by making movies that were marketed exclusively towards kids. As films like Rock Around the Clock and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein became surprise hits, the studios followed suit. Suddenly, middle class baby boomer kids, who had Mom and Dad’s allowance to spend, became the prime movie-going audience. The entire cinema industry was revitalized based on the energy of youth, fueled by the simultaneous emergence of Rock ‘N Roll. The initial string of Exploitation “teenpics” influenced the studios to make films like Rebel without a Cause, but they also influenced the emerging European and Asian New Wave filmmakers who shifted the international art cinema’s attention from bourgeois adults to troubled adolescents. Running through all of these youth films was a political undercurrent; a sense that a new world was on the horizon, and that its leaders would be of a new, decidely more progressive generation. By the 1980s, "teenpics" were ciphoned into the Hollywood mainstream, but teens continued to be represented as outsiders in American independent film and international art cinema. This series aims to capture some of the best films that have been made about teen outsiders for teen outsiders, and occasionally, by teen outsiders.
FILMS TO BE SHOWN
1. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - dir. Nicholas Ray 
2. Rock Around the Clock (1956) - dir. Fred F. Sears
3. Cruel Story of Youth (1960) - dir. Nagisa Oshima
4. Band of Outsiders (1964) - dir. Jean-Luc Godard
5. Wild in the Streets (1968) - dir. Barry Shear
6. If... (1968) - dir. Lindsay Anderson
7. The Last Picture Show (1971) - dir. Peter Bogdanovich
8. American Graffiti (1973) - dir. George Lucas
9. Cooley High (1975) - dir. Michael Schultz
10. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) - dir. Amy Heckerling
11. River's Edge (1986) - dir. Tim Hunter
12. Rebels of the Neon God (1988) - dir. Tsai Ming-liang
13. Heathers (1989) - dir. Michael Lehmann
14. The Unbelievable Truth (1989) - dir. Hal Hartley
15. Pump Up the Volume (1990) - dir. Allan Moyle
16. Dazed & Confused (1993) - dir. Richard Linklater
17. Kids (1995) - dir. Larry Clark
18. Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) - dir. Todd Solondz
19. Elephant (2003) - dir. Gus Van Sant
20. Unknown Pleasures (2004) - dir. Zhang Ke Jia