Youth culture in global cinema

the imported rebellion 31
Freddy (Horst Buchholz, center) casts an ominous stare with his buddies in Die Halbstarken
(1956).
tices which are to be celebrated and exposed at the same time.The celebrated
authenticity of the postwar reality with its bombed out houses was mostly
generated through location shooting and the expressive cinematography of
cameraman Heinz Pehlke (Grob, 217).
The ambivalent stance of the parent culture vis-à-vis the young generation
is especially played out in a scene that takes place in an Italian espresso
bar, where the teenagers gather and dance to rock ’n’ roll. The Italian owner,
himself a recently moved migrant and therefore still a foreigner within a
very homogenous national framework, tries to navigate his rebellious customers
with a mixture of contempt and humbleness: ‘‘Signore Spaghetti,’’
as he is nicknamed, is economically dependent on his young customers as
much as he is scared by them. The youth challenge the hegemonic culture of
a reestablishing postwar society and its petit bourgeois values—at least on
a symbolic level—by wearing jeans and black leather jackets, riding motorcycles,
and so forth. At the same time, they already stand for the increasing
purchasing power typical of a rising teenage consumer culture: after the decline
of the Halbstarken riots in 1958, teenagers were primarily perceived