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Please watch this film until you see the scenes with the teenagers. They are really amazing to watch. Don't be fooled into thinking it's scripted. It's not.
In 1956 this ran on National Educational Television. Using "psychiatrists" they hoped to help parents who were struggling with for teenagers and their behavior. Overuse of telephones. Dating rituals. Ignoring adults. Sexual behavior. Gender behavior. Overemotional.
The program attempts to look at teenage behavior from an adult point of view as "rational" - using science. But looked at from today, at least for me, it appears to be using scientific data to prove emotional points without looking deeply into what these 1950 teenagers were expressing or dealing with.
Some of you commentators are stating that this is scripted. There was a style at that time, an early documentary style that I and others adopted. Script outlines were written. Non-actors were used and the dialogue was a mix of scripted (very little) and chat that the non-actors felt matched with the script and with their own experiences. Within 10 years, filmmakers like me were making documentaries that were not just following people around (cinéma vérité), but were planned in advance and worked on with the non-actors- the people in front of the camera. Exact words were not written. But documentary scenes were by classical definition, staged.
Regarding the film, I see a clear relationship between how some parents, teachers, and thought leaders today view teenage overuse of social media. Snapchat etc. It reminds me of how the telephone was looked at back when I grew up in the ‘50s. Girls seemed to spend hours talking to each other on the phone - as my sister did. And as a teenage boy of 16 when this educational film was aired on TV, I found girls enormously appealing and yet an alien species to me. I didn't understand anything about them and my mom, who was a good mom as best she could be, never told me anything about girls. I had to learn all of it on my own.
One fascinating thing about this film is that you can hear when these teenagers talk, are different accents and "teenage speech."
You may be asking yourself if this is a "documentary" or scripted. It is a style that was developing at that time. It is neither scripted nor a cinéma vérité style documentary. The actors were real teenagers. They were told the scene but not with specific narrative language they were to learn. They would do just play the scene they were told to do as though it was real. In some ways, I think it is although some of what appears to be staged today, is just "social speech" from that time.
Remember that this film was made in 1956. 12 years later, in 1968, teenagers were in some ways, radically different, certainly in terms of sexual behavior.
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David Hoffman