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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American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

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George Lucas’s 60s-set tale of California teens offers some freewheeling fun but also a lingering sadness

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’ dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

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