Teen Films

The teen film has been a fixture in American cinema since the mid-twentieth century, yet serious study of the genre did not begin until the 1980s. David Considine wrote the first exhaustive study, The Cinema of Adolescence , in 1985, illuminating many of the messages and trends contained in films about teenagers. Since then film scholars have pointed to the ways in which the Hollywood studios capitalized on youth trends and attitudes through movies that directly addressed the teenage audience—resulting, in Thomas Doherty's term, in the "juvenilization" of Hollywood. Others have traced the evolution of adolescence in American movies in relation to social and political trends, as Hollywood and independent studios systematically developed different youth subgenres to depict an increasingly diverse array of teen experiences, the teen film became a formally codified genre.