Exclusive web offer for individuals. Print titles only. Terms & Conditions may apply.
Before the advent of the teenager in the 1940s and the teenpic in the 1950s, The Freshman (Taylor and Newmeyer, 1925) represented 1920s college youth culture as an exclusive world of leisure to a mass audience. Starring popular slapstick comedian Harold Lloyd, The Freshman was a hit with audiences for its parody of contemporary conceptions of university life as an orgy of proms and football games, becoming the second-highest grossing comedy feature of the silent era. This book examines The Freshman from a number of perspectives, with a focus on the social, economic, and political context that led to the rise of campus culture as a distinct subculture and popular mass culture in 1920s America; Lloyd’s use of slapstick to represent an embodied, youthful middle-class masculinity; and the film’s self-reflexive exploration of the conflict between individuality and conformity as an early entry in the youth film genre.
Introduction
1. ‘A Large Football Stadium with a College Attached’: Campus Youth Culture in the 1920s
2. ‘Just a Regular Fellow’: Harold Lloyd’s Slapstick Comedy and Middle-Class Masculinity
3. ‘The College Hero’: The Freshman’s Individual Conformist
4. ‘Laugh and Live Longer’: The Mass Marketing and Reception of The Freshman
Conclusion: Before the Teenpic
Cinema and Youth Cultures engages with well-known youth films from American cinema as well the cinemas of other countries. Using a variety of methodological and critical approaches the series volumes provide informed accounts of how young people have been represented in film, while also exploring the ways in which young people engage with films made for and about them. In doing this, the Cinema and Youth Cultures series contributes to important and long standing debates about youth cultures, how these are mobilized and articulated in influential film texts and the impact that these texts have had on popular culture at large.
Commissioned volumes include:
The Freshman (1925)
Rock Around the Clock (1956)
Gidget (1958)
American Graffiti (1973)
Halloween (1978)
Grease (1978)
Breakfast Club (1985)
Heavenly Creatures (1992)
Clueless (1995)
American Pie (1999)
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
L’auberge Espagole (2002)
Y Tu Mama También (2002)
Easy A (2010)
Hunger Games (2012)
Boyhood (2015)
