5 Major Influences From Matt Wolf

Teenage, a TFI Documentary Fund grantee, premieres tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Teenage is about the birth of youth culture in the early 20th century. Instead of punks, skaters, and hippies, my film looks back further at Flappers, Jitterbugs, Hilter Youth, Sub-Debs, and many other forgotten youth movements. The film is about an idea of youth, and that idea finding a form: the Teenager.

I wanted to make a historical film like none that I’ve seen before. Instead of explaining this cultural history with experts, the story is told from the point of view of youth. My collaborator Jon Savage and I sourced hundreds of quotes from teenage diaries that are performed by young actors. The film is brought to life with a huge array of archival footage and original portraits of teenage characters, filmed in the style of period home movies.

The following filmmakers, musicians, and ideas inspire me, and they helped me conceptualize the unique style of Teenage:

Punk

Teenage is based on a book by the author Jon Savage, who is also the co-writer of the film. He is perhaps best known for his book England’s Dreaming, which is the definitive story of punk in the 1970s. When I read Jon’s Teenage I was inspired by the way punk colored his depiction of history. Jon told me about the early punks in London, who wore thrift clothes from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. They’d tear up those relics from previous youth cultures, and reassemble them with safety pins into something startling and new. He called this “living collage,” and it became a kind of philosophy for the filmmaking in Teenage. I wanted to treat history in a punk way. By reassembling images, voices, and experiences from early 20th century youth culture, I hope to compel viewers to think differently about teenagers today.

Woody Allen’s Zelig

I knew that I wanted to telescope into the experiences of individual characters. But most of these teenage figures from the early 20th century weren’t photographed or filmed. I needed to creatively bring these obscure characters to life, so I filmed silent, 16mm recreations in the style of period home movies.  While conceiving this device, I always had Woody Allen’s amazing pseudo-documentary Zelig in mind. Gordon Willis was the cinematographer, and he perfectly created footage featuring Woody Allen and Mia Farrow that resembled 1920s newsreels. That narrative material combines seamlessly with actual archival footage, allowing Woody to literally insert himself into history. I was incredibly impressed that this effect was achieved with virtually no digital tools in the early 1980s.

My cinematographer Nick Bentgen and I found an interview with Willis from American Cinematographer that provided some clues about his techniques. Nick ended up doing extensive research and testing to achieve period-accurate looks in 16mm from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Zelig set the bar high, and it inspired us to achieve our looks organically, and to not rely on digital tools.

Adam Curtis’ films and blog

Teenage is an essay film, and I’m very inspired by the British film essayist Adam Curtis. Curtis is well known for epic BBC documentaries, such as The Power of Nightmares, Century of the Self, and my favorite It Felt Like a Kiss. But since his work is made exclusively for the BBC and draws on their vast archive, it is difficult to find copies in the US, and international screenings are rare.

Curtis uses archival footage in provocative ways to support thrilling and dizzying explorations of power and conspiracy in contemporary society. His films are stylish, seductive, and multi-layered, and they have the persuasive impact of propaganda. But Curtis isn’t just conveying ideas and information, he has the visual sensitivity of an artist, and I’ve heard that he edits his own work.  Curtis’ film essays inspired the intellectual ambition and the style of archival collage in Teenage.

I highly recommend his BBC blog, especially a recent post that compiles hundreds of archival shots of people dancing.

Bradford Cox

I met the musician Bradford Cox when we were both teenagers. We reconnected many years later, and I became a fan of his band Deerhunter, and also his solo project Atlas Sound. His music is probably best described as art-punk, and I admire Bradford’s intense emotional range and at times ethereal aesthetic. From the get go, I knew that Teenage would have almost wall-to-wall music because most of the archival footage we sourced is silent. I immediately knew that I wanted to collaborate with Bradford to combine these old archival images with a contemporary music experience. Swing and the spread of American popular culture is a huge subject in the film. But Bradford’s music is also a character, and it provides a glue that ties all of these disparate histories and biographies together.

Rick Prelinger and the Virtues of Preexisting Material

Rick Prelinger is a filmmaker and archivist based in San Francisco, who has been collecting “ephemeral films” for decades. His collection of 60,000 films, which includes educational, propaganda, amateur films, and newsreels was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. 2,100 of those films are available for free viewing, downloading, and reuse on the website archive.org, and soon that number will grow to 5000. Teenage appropriates a number of films from Rick’s collection, including my favorite archival clip in the film—a boy from the 1930s with question marks covering his face.

Rick wrote an essay, which is a kind of manifesto about archival filmmaking called “The Virtues of Preexisting Material.” The essay was recently republishing online by Contents Magazine, and when I read it, it felt like a blueprint for Teenage. Working with archival footage isn’t just a stylistic choice, it’s also an ideological position. Some of my favorite points that Rick makes in his essay include:

“Don’t presume that new work improves on old… Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom… leftovers were spared for a reason… We approach the future by typically roundabout means… What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future.”

While the stories of Teenage occur in the past, it’s themes and ideas are about the future. Teenagers always represent the future because they’ll quite literally live in it. They force society to ask, What kind of world are we going to live in?  Is there any thing we can do about it? Rick’s essay, and his entire archiving project, seems to be about that.

[Photo: Matt Wolf]