Teenage Babylon (1989)
Teenage Babylon presents the aftermath of three teenage suicides through the medium of what purports to be 1960s vintage black and white police file footage. The film's haunting images, evoking teenage love gone wrong, are counterpointed by a series of saccharine torch songs, celebrating falling in love and the end of a masquerade. Through a kind of bathetic synthesis, the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos, love and death, is consummated in the 'morgue' of the forensic archive.
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Great Film overall
Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Okay, if you're reading this then there are only two possibilities: One: you may have heard of this short film on a message board. Most likely on a thread started by someone searching for this film.Two: You've read about this in David Kerekes and David Slater's Killing For Culture.It was #2 for me, the hunt for this film started when I was seventeen. Now at twenty-one I can say I've finally seen it.Fantastic Avant-Garde pseudo snuff film, featuring imagery that gets to you and never overstays its welcome. Featuring an endless song (highly reminiscent of 1950's music) that accompanies the imagery; obviously setting up an uncomfortable tone throughout while looking genuine through and through. If it weren't for the end credits, many would believe that this is entirely genuine. I would rank it alongside Ed Emschwiller's Thanatopsis so far as being an effective but minimalist short film.I'm surprised Cult Epics didn't release this on their 'Cinema of Death' compilation of disturbing short films. Perhaps a volume two would correct this.If you can, see this film.