![]() ![]() Doherty claims that the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s, and related threats to the profitability of cinema, produced a flood of films in which teenagers were central in order to cater to a market newly identified as “teenagers”. Jon Savage puts the argument this way: after the War, “the spread of American-style consumerism, the rise of sociology as an academic discipline and market research as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and sheer demographics turned adolescents into Teenagers.” Thomas Doherty’s Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s is a highly influential example of this argument, analysing an extensive archive of films and the media circulating around them. The idea that teen film is an invention of the 1950s-part of the Western emergence of youth culture after the Second World War-is a popular one. But a sense at what is at stake in these competing claims will serve as a useful starting point. In this essay I want to problematise both approaches and contribute to the history they jointly sketch by thinking about what adolescence meant in cinema before the 1950s. These stories are in some respects compatible, so that the story about the ’50s focuses on the emergence of the teenager about whom teen film could be made, and to whom it could be sold, and the story about the ’80s focuses instead on the consolidation of “teen film” as a tight singular generic form. One begins in the 1950s and the other in the 1980s. In film buff histories, the retrospective compilations produced for awards shows, and in commentary on youth culture, there are two commonly cited histories for teen film.
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