Crikey.
First of all, I should have gone to see this in a theater. No excuse. I’ve made a decision not to spend $11 on whatever Nicolas Cage craps out anymore, but I should go see and support independent films and documentaries in theaters when I can, and I’m sorry I missed this one.
I am not even a fan of surfing; it’s not a great spectator sport to be honest, and I don’t do it myself, so this should have been just marginally interesting. But this film is SO GOOD. The history, the interviews, the fantastic old home movies that Stacy Peralta tracked down are wonderful.
His story arc tracing this bohemian post-war lifestyle to the jet-ski aided extreme sport it is today seems to happen gradually, and Peralta doesn’t dwell on whether this is a good or bad thing – it just is.
It’s not deep. It’s just very sweet. Peralta’s respect for the sport and its pioneers comes through all the time. And it is completely captivating. We started watching this movie late at night, and I didn’t glance at a clock once, or even get up.
I can’t say enough for the quality of this film. I honestly can’t think of another film I’ve seen in the past year or two that was as enjoyable and transporting as this one.
I agree. We saw this last year in the theater, and we really enjoyed it. I had only seen maybe one or two surf documentaries before this–all of Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer and snippets of another that I cannot name. I’m a fan of authentic surf music (as well as the Hollywood/Capitol Tower stuff), but I’ve never had the guts to give it a try surfing. It’s big out here, so we were happy to see this film come to town.
If I recall, it was pitched as a documentary on surfing, rather than a surf documentary. That is, rather than just slap some high-octane indy music on top of slo-mo footage of a gremmie scoring a bomb (as the surfers say…or were said to have said), Peralta really does a nice of job of balancing narrative, history, and awesome footage. I especially like the sequence in which Jeff Clark discovers this amazing spot in Monterey (no one believed him). It’s a really engrossing film. A nice example of the wonderfully magic (and sadly tragic) things that can happen to a filmmaker while documenting his or her subject.
This film, as Mark and I are saying, is entertaining for surfers and non-surfers alike. I was glad we saw it on the big screen, but it should be enjoyable on the small screen as well.
It was enjoyable on the small screen. I’ll just echo the above–the film is engaging. There was one surf guy whose romanticized hyperbole about surfing bugged me, even more than his square jaw and rugged good looks. And, despite its Hawaiian roots and some prominent Hawaiian ‘stars,’ it struck me how very, very white surfing is. (This becomes particularly intriguing when some of the early surf-culture ne’er-do-wells dress up in Nazi uniforms and ride down a drainage pipe.) But blah blah all that, I found it very entertaining, ‘though I haven’t caught, and will never care much about catching, a wave.
Mike’s point about the whiteness of surfing shouldn’t be blah-blahed away. Endless Summer (1964) has a particularly odd sequence where “African natives” observe Robert August and Mike Hynson surf the coast of Senegal. West Africa is depicted as virgin surf territory, with Robert and Mike representing the glorious golden west. Jokes about dark skin, cannibalism, etc. It’s an uncomfortable moment in an otherwise flawless film.
I have a friend who told me he hates this film. He grew up out here and knows how to surf, though he doesn’t surf regularly now. He has friends who do, and he has friends very connected to the surf/punk culture (He also worked at Epitaph.) his criticisms struck me as interesting. The whitewash of the topic as a whole, and particularly the commercialization / organzied competition that happened in the 90s. He also hated the way Laird hamilton was held up as the current king of the sport – a controversial choice to say the least.
What I liked about the film was that Peralta didn’t get bogged down in such things, and didn’t let those obvious changes in the sport negate his love-letter to surfing.
But it would have been all too easy to say it was great then, and it’s different now.
The nazi subtext is a larger topic than Peralta or Reynolds lets on: my friend says it was used as a way to scare away new people from their favorite beaches / surf spots. But the Iron Cross and other WW II regalia shows up frequently in 60s surf films, and even in other Southern Califoria subcultures – including Latino ones(I’ve seen more tricked out lowrider cars with iron cross decals on them than i can remember out here)
I wouldn’t give it to much credence as political or racial symbolism. As Freud said, sometimes a swastika is just a swastika.
Well….
how can a swastika avoid having political or racial symbolism? I know what you mean: the uses of the Iron Cross and its ilk have as much to do with the trappings of power, cheap shock tactics, disruptions of the norm. And certainly they can seem silly (wasn’t there a recurrent Nazi-uniform-clad character in the Avalon/Funicello flicks, who was played as the ‘bad guy’ but who was more ridiculously impotent than even Colonel Klink?) or even strangely subversive (in Peralta’s film, the guys in the uniforms then hop into a drainage pipe–there’s no overt rationale of any sort for wearing Nazi regalia, so there’s this collapse of its authority into the silly games being played).
But. And it’s a big but. The surf “counterculture” pops up at the same time as the civil rights movement emerges forcefully and nationally as a significant challenge to racial politics, and a Nazi uniform for a bunch of white guys in California is not just there for shits and giggles. I’m curious–Peralta never (or barely?) mentions, and I only have dim memories of Hunter Thompson’s book on the Angels–how much do biker and surfer cultures intersect? They develop roughly contemporaneously, don’t they?
Mike – It’d be an interesting exploration to look at the parallels between biker culture and surf culture and the way they co-opted (to various degrees) nazi imagery.
Yes, it was that guy from the Avalon movies I was talking about – even his name in the film was nazi-esque: Eric Von Zipper. I could say that it was a play off of Stroheim, a play on bad (and good) WWII movies and pop culture, an effort to re-cast that war as something silly, b/c of their youth, etc. In fact there are many reasons that nazi imagery in those movies works – not least b/c of the great Harvey Lembeck, who played Von Zipper in no nless than 5 films, and played variations of the cahracter in many more.
Oddly, I just noticed that Lemback, before playing Von Zipper, played a POW in Stalag 17 with Bill Holden… to say nothing of his stint on Sgt. Bilko.
I take it with a grain of salt (sand?) what my friend said about the practical purpose of the nazi uniforms to those surfers – to protect their surf turf. But it makes sense, when you see how insanely these guys protect their waves today in OC. Don’t even try to buy a board and go out into decent cali waves without someone making introductions and vouching for you first – they’re a lot of thugs. and you;ll be lucky to get out of there with your board and face in one piece.
Finally, I’ll say that SoCal is a long way from Ole Miss, and at that time most likely the surfers were guilty of ignorance and apathy more than any overt hatred of Jews or blacks. I sincerely doubt there was thought-out political statements behind the regalia. And if any, it was less than the bikers had in mind when they did the same thing.
There’s an extended discussion of swastikas in the bonus feature from FILTH AND THE FURY (called “Un-Defining Punk”). Who is it who says that he never thought his swastika was anything more than “fuck you equipment”? I’ll go back and watch this again and report back.
Silly me, I forgot all about the UK punks co-opting the swastika. Siouxise Sioux used to wear a swastika armband when she was part of the Pistols’ entourage.
Something definitely a little different about UK youth in the 70s using it compared to US youth in the early 60s though… For one thing, the UK has a better sense of irony. Oh well, all I know is I’m going to rent me some Eric Von Zipper films.
The UK had a better sense of irony, as wee Prince Harry will attest.
There’s a better movie to be made about the subject, but American (male) adolescents’ attraction to Nazi arcana and mythology is evoked to queasy effect in “Apt Pupil,” and even more critically in the Stephen King story.
If the UK has a better sense of irony (which is true…they have a better sense of everything when it comes to comedy), then why was Harry seen as just a stupid tit?
And don’t forget AMERICAN HISTORY X, which is a wonderful film. Subtle PR for the positive effects of shared laughter in that one, by the way. The director, Tony Kaye, is British so maybe this one doesn’t count. Whatever happened to him, anyway?
i think yes got back together.
Wah! prog-rock joke!! I could tell you a few stories about Tony Kaye and his fall and further fall from Hollywood. A friend of mine worked with him for quite a while on a project about a man dressed as a lobster.
Really.
I’ll ask her if she wants to post the gory details.