In trying to account for my own abiding fascination with the teen movie genre – a fascination that has gone on for 30 years – I figure I could begin in three different ways.

First, by simply giving a random list of titles – very diverse films of various styles, moods and qualities, from many different countries, some well known, some hardly known – but all films that capture, for me, some essential part of the contemporary teen movie: LE DÉPART (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1967), EN KÄRLEKSHISTORIA (Roy Andersson, 1970), AMERICAN GRAFFITI (George Lucas, 1973), FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (Amy Heckerling, 1982), RECKLESS (James Foley, 1984), PURPLE RAIN (Albert Magnoli, 1984), FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (John Hughes, 1986), NEAR DARK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987), LES ROSEAUX SAUVAGES (André Téchiné, 1993), RIRI SHUSHU NO SUBETE (Shunji Iwai, 2001), WASSUP ROCKERS (Larry Clark, 2005), PRINZESSIN (Birgit Grosskopf, 2006), THE HOUSE BUNNY (Fred Wolf, 2008), ADVENTURELAND (Greg Mottola, 2009), EASY A (Will Gluck, 2010), STEP UP 3D (Jon M. Chu, 2010) and UN AMOUR DE JEUNESSE (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011).

Second, I could offer a quotation. It is from the French director Olivier Assayas, who has made at least three bona fide teen movies, Désordre (1986), L’EAU FROIDE (1994) and APRÈS MAI (2012). In 1997 at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Assayas confessed: