How Long Is “Junior War”?

In Junior War, a throng of high schoolers congregates at night for a party in the woods sometime in the year 2000. A band plays, the kids get drunk, the boys and girls tepidly flirt, and groups deploy into cars for the purpose of destroying mailboxes, tee-peeing houses, breaking lawn ornaments, and sparring with the police. The film is composed entirely of footage Trecartin took during his senior year of high school in exurban Ohio; as such, it baits the viewer with genealogical significance. The film is incontrovertibly source material dangling the possibility that we've finally unearthed Sarah Source--but it's also rigorously repurposed, just as any social media #tbt marks the present more reliably than it renders the past.