“‘The Best Synonym of Youth’: G. Stanley Hall, Mimetic Play, and Early Cinema’s Embodied Youth Spectator.”

While studies of early cinema’s relationship to the spectator’s body have long engaged with issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality, early cinema spectatorship and embodiment in relation to age, particularly adolescence and youth, continues to be a developing area of study. As this essay will discuss, the concept of adolescence as a distinct life stage between childhood and adulthood came of age with the emergence of cinema. First defined in detail by child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, modern adolescence came to represent the most embodied period of life, marked by a mimetic relationship to one’s environment.