Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, about a dystopic Britain overrun with rampaging teens, used extreme behavior to examine freewill. His name is Alex and his hobbies are rape, home invasions and a bit of the old ultraviolence. Vigo died of tuberculosis shortly after, but his defiance lived on: François Truffaut cited Zero as a major influence on his own tale of troubled adolescence, The Four Hundred Blows. Though it now seems to occur in some nebulously ideal dreamworld, the film was banned by the French Ministry of the Interior, fearful of the dissidence it might incite. You get as much of a charge out of a boy talking back to his teacher as you do the students’ exhilarating, storm-the-barricades uprising, in which the patronizing adults (who Vigo brilliantly caricatures as stiff-backed, overweight or dwarfish tyrants) are tied up, pelted with sticks and driven into hiding as the children come to power. What resulted was anarchy in its purest form: This 41-minute wonder feels timeless in its presentation of disobedience, perhaps because it embraces childhood’s quotidian and fanciful aspects with equal fervor. The French director and artist Jean Vigo was at a low point in his career when a rich businessman agreed to finance his semiautobiographical tale of four rebellious boys at boarding school. But the commitment of all involved (especially debuting actors Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson) was undeniable. A normal day in the life? Audiences cringed. With AIDS tearing apart the fabric of the city, these high-schoolers splash blithely in the pool of shared fluids-that is, when they’re not partaking in copious drug use, random acts of violence, homophobic slurs and rape. No one partied as hard as these untended NYC teens, and, it was implied, no one would suffer as much. But unlike many of the films on this list, Kids leaves an especially bitter aftertaste: Its rebellion is self-destructive. The behind-the-scenes story is legend: Scripted by a then-18-year-old Harmony Korine, a Washington Square skate rat directed by observant photographer Larry Clark, keen to make the ultimate teen movie and sold by distributor Harvey Weinstein, who consciously courted outrage-the movie is an emblem of indie provocation.
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