BFF FILM & FESTIVAL BLOG
Coming of Age: An On-Screen Guide to Growing Up
Written by Katerina Plescia
(From left) Tracy Letts, Saoirse Ronan, and Laurie Metcalf in Ladybird (2017) Photo Credit: IAC Films and Scott Rudin Productions
The mere thought of aging has the ability to send any individual into a downward spiral of overthinking and anxiety. As the years tick by, a person’s experiences will morph and shape their personality and their viewpoint on the surrounding world. Young adolescents and teens seek comfort in the early years of becoming an adult, figuring out where they may fit into society and how society may take to them. The classic coming of age film has provided a security blanket to a handful of generations, allowing impressionable viewers to connect with the fictional characters and lose themselves in a story paralleling aspects of their own life.
When I was in middle school, the majority of my Friday nights were spent at home sitting in the living room with my dad and our two dogs. At the end of every grueling school week, I had Friday nights to look forward to, a living room picnic dinner and a “new” 80’s movie. My dad, being a film enthusiast, introduced me to the paradigmatic films of the decade, from Footloose, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, to Back to the Future, Weird Science, and The Breakfast Club. Being on the cusp of teenhood, I soaked up every ounce of these films, setting my expectations for aging around a life written by John Hughes.
Now let’s take a time jump into a new decade, one engulfed in fast-paced technology, national terrorism, and a global pandemic. As the world that teens live in is vastly changed from that of their parents, their experiences in it differ wildly as well. Rather than shy away from these modern situations, coming of age films continue to evolve and provide comfort to a new generation.
This cinematic shift began to take place towards the late 2010’s, with the release of multiple indie films. The most popular, Greta Gerwig’s honest portrayal of a young girl’s trials and tribulations of becoming her own person, was Ladybird (2017). Saoirse Ronan delivers an authentic performance as Christine “Ladybird” MacPherson, concentrating on the hardships teens experience in their senior year of high school. While Ladybird falls in love a few times, Gerwig chooses to focus on the young woman’s heartache, high expectations for life, and tense relationship with her parents.
Streaming services quickly jumped on the coming of age bandwagon, producing countless teen rom-coms, dramas, and comedies, all attempting to strike a chord the way Gerwig had done. In the midst of endless titles, a small handful proved to resonate with their adolescent viewers. The most popular films determined that audiences preferred candid coming of age stories, seamlessly disregarding those with the overused plot line of boy meets girl.
Jenna Ortega (left) and Maddie Ziegler (right) in The Fallout (2021) Photo Credit: New Line Cinema
Following its premiere at South by Southwest and early 2022 release date on HBO Max, The Fallout (2021) sent chills up the audience’s spine and took critics’ breath away. Writer and director, Megan Park, sought out a similar outcome as Gerwig, by relaying a truthful narrative that today’s generation can relate to. Park introduces viewers to Vada (Jenna Ortega), a high schooler swimming in a sea littered with cliques, popularity, and social media. Vada’s world crashes around her as she finds herself huddled in a bathroom stall with popular girl, Mia (Maddie Ziegler), during a school shooting. In the year of the film’s release, there were 34 school shootings across the United States as tracked by Education Week. Ortega delivers an outstanding and genuine portrayal of post-traumatic stress while continuing to deal with the struggles of teenhood in the 21st century. National terrorism and school shootings have plagued the country heavily for the past decade, Parker’s film discloses students’ raw reactions and coping mechanisms in these brutal times.
(From left) Teala Dunn, Rowan Blanchard, and Tyler Alvarez in Crush (2022) Photo Credit: Animal Pictures
The Hulu original, Crush (2022), made its way onto the streaming service in late April of 2022. In her directorial debut, Sammi Cohen, alongside writers Kirsten King and Casey Rackham, put a twist on the classic coming-of-age film. Odd-ball artist, Paige Evans (Rowan Blanchard), composes a master plan to clear her name as the anonymous school graffiti artist and get her crush, Gabriela Campos (Isabella Ferreira), to notice her by joining the varsity track team. Cohen’s story demonstrates how life never follows a single path, especially as a teenager. Paige battles with her own self-image as an artist while realizing she may be falling for Gabriela’s sister, AJ (Auli’i Cravalho). Crush’s vibrant color scheme and witty writing grasps the attention of young audiences and broadens the genre of teenage love stories amongst the LGBTQ+ community.
Although the classic coming of age films will always hold a special place in my heart, I believe that writers and directors should continue to blend their stories into the times. While films offer an escape from reality, impressionable viewers seek comfort from their favorite pictures, hoping that maybe it means they are a little less alone in this unpredictable world. As teens continue to subconsciously utilize these films as a template to outline their unforeseeable future, the human desire to belong will fuel coming of age narratives for generations to come.
Katerina is a senior at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY. After graduation, she aspires to work as an entertainment journalist, centering her writing around music, film, and the arts. She grew up in Bethel, NY, and is a dog mom to a Pitbull rescue, Maddie. Find more of her work on her website or Instagram.
Baring More Than the Soul
A critical analysis of how sex scenes are shot and the way women are depicted on the screen.
Written by Alyssa Cosme
Photo Credit: Jason Laveris via Getty Images
As she promoted her new Netflix film The Last Letter from Your Lover, actress Shailene Woodley discussed her most recent roles with The Hollywood Reporter. She talked about shooting sex scenes, by critisizing the way women are depicted on the screen. Most actors know the ways they must expose their bodies in intimate scenes, but most audience members are unaware, causing some scenes to go over the heads of viewers. It made me think about how sex scenes in television shows and movies have been portrayed over the past few years. Woodley goes on to say that “Oftentimes in movies, you see two people having sex and the woman has her bra on, and in real life, I don't think I ever did that, sex with a bra — or very, very rarely.” It was more important to capture whatever the director envisioned. Woodley described the type of relationship an actor could have to successfully hit the mark when it comes to filming intimate scenes. She shares:
“I always sit down and talk with the director, the other actor. We always have conversations of, ‘Is nudity necessary? Is it going to distract from the scene, add the scene?’ We know exactly what the boundaries are. And I’ve never been in a situation where those things haven’t been honored.”
It is very important for actors to be vocal and honest with their directors, not only because it will make everyone on set more comfortable, it will ultimately convey realistic and organic storytelling. Woodley is no stranger to filming intimate movies. She is well known for her dark projects such as Big Little Lies and White Bird in A Blizzard. Although, Big Little Lies contained sexual violence, the context was important for the narrative in this particular series. I think she is the perfect person to expand upon this topic because she is very open with intimacy in her work. This comes from an actress who had her big break starring as a pregnant teenager in the ABC family drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager, a groundbreaking show when it premiered in 2008.
Photo Credit: Normal People via IMDB
Moreover, I wondered how many other people thought about the ways sex scenes in the media have taken a toll on the overall arc of the narrative. So what purpose do these scenes serve? I realized that audiences enjoy shows on streaming services that leave little to the imagination in their sex scenes, such as Normal People which aired on Hulu and Bridgerton which appeared on Netflix. I found that it was the closeness of these stories that kept the shows engaging and overall fun to watch. And by that, I mean that this kind of content can be impactful for people. It may make them look at themselves differently by how sex is represented and affect them negatively or positively, depending on the subject matter and the person. Overall, it is the way we engage with intimacy. It was the perfect feeling that many people might have felt watching dramas back in the day. It could be the ones that had us at the edge of our seats, waiting to see what happened next week. It could be the reason so many people lined up to see movies like Fifty Shades of Grey. Whatever the reason, there is definitely something to expand upon.
Photo Credit via Netflix
The idea of including sex scenes can be tricky because you wonder if the filmmakers decided upon it because they want to advance the narrative and the potential character development or for the sake of shock factor. Woodley highlights “realism over modesty” when it comes to her roles. Perhaps she wanted to convey that she values how realistic and natural these scenes are and pointing out the fact that wearing bras is just an idea that society is holding back because she says so herself that it is not something that she has done. The fact that we are having these conversations is significant because it is important to mention how realistic intimate scenes can be for actual people. Also, being able to talk about topics like these can be more accepted for mainstream purposes. For so long women were silenced when it came to discussions on sexuality and nudity in the media. And as time has gone on, we have become accustomed to intimate scenes and possible comfort in the relationships we see on screen. In some instances, it seems as though modesty is not an issue. In recent times, baring more than one’s soul is nothing out of the ordinary. It is in fact, very typical in any kind of show or movie. I’ve noticed this level of intimacy in many genres across all media platforms more than ever before. This certain kind of content has continued to to be explored and keeps the conversations open and less restrictive, which I appreciate as an avid movie/tv show watcher.
We can make up our own minds about how much intimacy we want to see, on the big or small screens. Perhaps this can make someone else think about the way they watch films or how they view people in general.
Alyssa is a recent Marymount Manhattan College graduate where she focused on script writing and media studies. She continues to write while residing in NYC.
On Film Editing and the Math Proof
Film editing is a characteristic of filmmaking separating it from other artistic mediums and the math proof similarly characterizes mathematics in regards to other sciences. Analyzing the relationship of these characteristics to their fields, similarities arise between them that could be used to enrich both fields.
Written by Tashrika Sharma
Filmmaking and science have a long documented history, going as far back as early amateur filmmaker like Eadweard Muybridge who invented devices in the late 19th century to record movement. However, filmmaking and theoretical mathematics have little conversational history. One method of creating a conversation between the two fields could be by connecting them through their unique characteristics. While editing exists in all artistic mediums, editing in film is a technique that distinguishes film from other art forms. Whereas in mathematics, the math proof remains a mysterious combination of prose and symbols used to verify abstract statements unlike the hard sciences. These distinguishing characteristics of film and math reveal their ephemeral natures and thus provide one basis in which they can be related to each other.
“It may sound almost circular to say that what mathematicians are accomplishing is to advance human understanding of mathematics,” William Thurston wrote in On Proof and Progress In Mathematics, focusing on the psychological and sociological aspects of how math is practiced and not upon how to define it. The key aspect is that practicing mathematics involves advancing how human beings think and understand various aspects of the field. This can range from being part of a team that discovers a new result, or a team that rediscovers an old one. Thurston enumerates that aspects of math thinking involves: human language, visual, spatial, and kinesthetic sense, logic and deduction, intuition, association, and metaphor, as well as stimulus-response,and processing of time. Combinations of such thinking practices can lead to understandings that are harder to explain since they are often intangible, difficult to communicate, individual, and often the subtext of the conversation.
Photo credit: 8 1/2 (Dir. Federico Fellini, 1963), the audience is often between what the film director, Guido (center, played by Marcello Mastroianni), is fantasizing and experiencing as he embarks on making his film. He imagines Claudia Cardinale (left) gliding to give him a glass of water only to snap back into reality by the woman offering him the water (right).
The subtext is the unconscious aspect of communication that creates a more profound experience of the storytelling. “To me, the perfect film is as though it were unwinding behind your eyes, and your eyes were projecting it themselves so that you were seeing what you wished to see. Film is like thought. It’s the closest to the thought process of any art,” John Huston said in an interview published in Christian Science Monitor in 1973. The film 8 ½, which follows the creative process of the film director at the center of it, famously makes seamless transitions between the past, the present and the conditional future representing the thoughts of the director. While film is an immediate manifestation we experience, there are also internal understandings that arise in filmgoers. They arise from the thoughts guiding the films colliding with the personal associations each individual makes while watching.
Photo Credit: Meshes of the Afternoon (Dir. Maya Deren, 1943), “the woman (Maya Deren) later on in the film watches herself from a window experiencing an incident that occurred earlier in the film.” via Flicker Alley
Mathematics distinguishes itself from other fields in that ideas are communicated through proofs. A proof in the most general sense is defined as a clear flow of convincing mathematical ideas. While proofs are read linearly, readers often engage and process them non-linearly. Non-linearity in storytelling is often associated with surrealism or dynamic storytelling, one can see non-linearity in many of the sequences of the experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon which unfolds in a dream-like form. Proofs are not primary information but are a way to organize mathematical understandings and are extremely useful. These proofs are what subsequent generations encounter in terms of past work. The language they’re written in inadequately captures the way each generation thinks about the same ideas and communicates them.
Photo Credit: Meshes of the Afternoon (Dir. Maya Deren, 1943), “knife sequence is immediately proceeded by a key in the same spot” via Flicker Alley
While every field of art involves editing, filmmaking separates itself through the function of “separation” (or referred to in other cultures as “assembly”) of footage. This editing process produces a rhythm defined as the unseen but strongly felt guiding force behind an audience’s experience of watching. For these reasons, filmmaking is described as “sculpting in time” by the director Andrei Tarkovsky in his book Sculpting in Time. The editing process in this sculpting works similarly to how we blink, as remarked by Walter Murch in In The Blink of An Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. Murch wrote.
“the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway.”
The choices in visual discontinuity by the blink (the edit) create a path for the film to convey the language intrinsic to itself, quite like a dream, to an audience ready to be convinced. In mathematics, it’s hard to talk about anything without explaining it. The proof or the explanation is a way of making the invisible visible - of building a path to get everyone on the same page. The communal language of the mathematical proof presupposes that the reader is prepared to be convinced. In both fields, one is telling a story making an audience familiar with something that at first feels unfamiliar, but with inexplicable revelations in each part of the proof or film, one is also at the same time becoming unfamiliar with the familiar. The latter sensation occurs when we shift our experience in reaction to something, whether a mathematical object becomes deeper in our mental image of it or watching a film expands our understanding of ourselves or others. In both cases, the math proof and the film are both temporally dynamic and exist in ways that paintings, sculptures, and other biological, chemical or physical objects are not.
If the film edit works to make films feel like a waking dream, then math progress and the mysterious way proofs work are like that of a sleepwalker. In that sense, there could be a relationship between the waking dream and sleepwalking to create work that enriches math communication and filmgoing experiences.
