David Buckingham's Youth on Screen. Representing Young People in Film and Television tries, and to a great extent succeeds to, really get to the heart of the problem of representing young people on screen. This means that it puts into question the very concepts of the youth and representation. The youth, Buckingham soon establishes, is constructed and defined by adults and reinforced by cultural media like films and television, which implies that youth film as a genre not only is created for a young audience, it also actually creates the young audience as a specific age category with certain attributes, prerequisites and needs.
To sum up, Youth on Screen is a rich, fertile and important read for anyone interested in children and youth, film and television, culture and society—as well as the relations and motions in between. As the author himself notes, it is a comprehensive, but far from all-encompassing, study, and there are numerous more themes, nations and film and television titles worthy of attention.