Coming-of-age films chronicle adolescence—a fraught, turbulent journey—showing how teenagers and parents sail or stumble down that road. These films gained traction in the 1950s-60s, as baby-boom teenagers exerted cultural and economic force. But the genre had a 19th-century literary predecessor: the Bildungsroman, novels whose youthful protagonists experienced psychological growth and moral uplift. Traditionally, young white males anchored these stories, but recent decades have brought dramatic change: our film selection follows both LBGTQ characters and people of color. Also, coming of age isn't only about the teens: mid-life shocks shake the parents, too. (The parents in Lady Bird open the newspaper and are stunned to read of the death of someone they knew in high school.) Yet often enough there's humor in teenage angst; three of our four films are comedies. The films to watch prior to class meetings are:
- The Graduate (Mike Nichols, US, 1967)
- Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, UK, 1990)
- Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, US, 2016)
- Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, US, 2017)
Michael Walsh previously chaired Cinema Departments at Binghamton and University of Hartford, where he co-founded the Cinema major and has taught film studies for 25 years. He has published widely on film, literature, and theory. His recent articles are about the French New Wave director Chris Marker and the issue of adult/adolescent sexuality in Nabokov’s Lolita and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. His book Durational Cinema: A Short History of Long Films came out in 2022 with Palgrave Macmillan.
Mondays, Jan. 12, 19, 26, Feb. 2 | 3 p.m.–4:30 p.m. | Wilde Auditorium/Harry Jack Gray Center | $80
Made possible in part by the generosity of the Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
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