Tearing up the screen: BFI’s Rip It Up season rebels against tired teen stereotypes

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Young people have chosen this six-month season, and though rebel classics such as Quadrophenia and If … are here, the picks show youth culture in flux Seventy-five years ago, the Festival of Britain offered a vision of a modern, forward-looking nation emerging from the austerity of the second world war. It also coincided with the emergence of a new cultural figure in the US: the teenager. For the first time, young people were beginning to be recognised as a distinct social group with their own tastes, fashions, anxieties and aspirations. That evolution forms the basis of Rip It Up, a new nationwide season from the BFI Film Audience Network running from May to October, exploring how British film and television have captured youth culture across seven decades. Bringing together screenings, archive material, talks, live events and youth-led programming, the season traces a journey from postwar rebellion and working-class aspiration to contemporary questions of identity, belonging and self...
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The King of Comedy at 40: Martin Scorsese’s painful ode to the wannabe

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In the dark, dry comedy, Robert De Niro plays a scheming comedian whose mediocrity doesn’t dampen his ambition

There’s a sequence in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, where Jerry Langford, the host of a popular late-night talk show, slips out of his New York office and goes for a walk down the street. Everyone knows who he is, but how they interact with him varies. He’s charmed by a middle-aged taxi driver who greets him and tells him how much he enjoys the show. He’s happy to get an ovation from construction workers overhead. Then he’s stopped by a woman at a payphone who wants him to sign her magazine. He obliges. Then she wants him to say something to her nephew on the phone. He politely declines. As he walks away, she shouts after him: “You should only get cancer. I hope you get cancer.”

Nothing about this is out of the ordinary. It’s surely not the first time a fan has wished cancer on Jerry for not obliging a request, and he’s probably forgotten about this woman the moment he crosses the street. His chief expression is one of annoyance, because this is the price of being a celebrity and he’s going to be paying for it the rest of his life. People invite him into their homes every night on television and he becomes part of their lives, but it’s a one-sided relationship that he couldn’t reciprocate if he wanted to. As played by Jerry Lewis, who surely knows the feeling, he looks like a man who often regrets fame, but can’t do anything about it.

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