GELFAND’S WORLD-Sometime around 1964, a man who was obviously an unknown in the film world finished up a documentary about a couple of guys who travel the world in search of the perfect wave. Not just the perfect wave, but pretty much any and every wave that was rideable and not full of sharks. The actual story of Bruce Brown's film The Endless Summer is fascinating in its own right. The film itself turns out to be a good movie, even after 50 years, and teaches us some things, not only about surfing, but about the ocean and about filmmaking. Thus the lessons of a 50th anniversary showing of The Endless Summer at the San Pedro International Film Festival.
When Bruce Brown decided to make a movie about surfing, there had already been a few films that involved surfing at some level. One was the pop feature Gidget, which caused real surfers to cringe in embarrassment. There were also some documentary type films that played to specialty audiences when they played at all.
Brown realized he needed to do something different. Thus was born the idea of a couple of young Californians who would travel the world with their boards, sampling the local waves and meeting up with locals. In some of the places they visited, mainly along the west coast of Africa, they met with people who had never seen an American surf board, even though they were seafarers of many generations standing.
The story of the movie and how it became a hit that has lasted through the last half century was told to us by Alexander Mecl, the managing director of Bruce Brown Films. The film company actually works out of a local office in Torrance, which was quite a surprise considering that the film had never been screened in San Pedro before.
As Mecl described, Bruce Brown shot the film on a budget of $56,000. With that money, the two surfers, director Brown, and a cameraman traveled from the US to Africa, across the Indian Ocean to Australia and then Tahiti, finally to conclude in Hawaii with a dramatic backlit sunset shot that has become iconic.
Seeing the film once more after a 48 year lapse was interesting in itself. I thought I might be bored, since what I had remembered was a couple of guys traveling around and riding waves. There have been lots of films about surfing since Endless Summer, and they can be a little flat. I mean, after you've seen the same guys ride the same waves a few times, you don't have a lot more to see. No matter how acrobatic the moves, there is a limit to the viewer's patience.
Brown had one other limitation. He was on a microscopic budget, so all that modern technology of 35 millimeter film and high quality synchronized sound (what they started calling "the talkies" in 1929) was beyond his means.
Instead, he used a 16 millimeter camera and shot without sound. There are a lot of shots of the two American surfers chatting with people from other countries, but we don't actually hear what they are saying. The audience doesn't seem to notice the lack.
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In other words, Bruce Brown shot a silent movie about surfing. It was different from the earlier era of silents, because he had good quality color film to record on, something that the 1920s lacked. But he had what 1920s directors also had, actors with great physical dexterity who could do daring stunts.
Brown added one other element to the mix, his own voice as narrator. In one sense, Brown reinvented the narration of witty comment, in the same way that written title cards had earlier graced silent movies. What came out of this was a synthesis of voice-over narration, remarkable shots of wind and waves and humans courageously confronting them both, and athletic displays that involved surf boards instead of ballet shoes or skis. When you look at The Endless Summer at this point in the evolution of cinema, you see that it is something different, not only from earlier film, but from film that came later. There have been lots of films about surfing, but there doesn't seem to be anything that attempted to be anything like The Endless Summer. There can only be one Chaplin, so maybe there aren't ever going to be many Bruce Browns.
As Mecl described, the first couple of years of The Endless Summer were essentially a long road trip. Brown would screen his film footage where he could, in the coastal towns of southern California and then across the country. At each place, he provided a live narration. Mecl didn't spend a lot of time talking about the musical accompaniment, but it is obvious that by the time the film was made into a theatrical release including the sound on film narration we hear today, the musical elements had themselves undergone their own evolution.
What Bruce Brown must have figured out pretty early on was that his witty narration was what held the film together. He would talk about wipeouts, and then the film would show a wipeout of fairly spectacular proportion. To the half dozen of you who don't know this term, a wipeout was the surfer language for falling off your board in a particularly traumatic way, like right into the white water breakup of a large wave.
He made fun of his lead characters, even as he turned them into modern day searchers with a sort of zen of their own. Then, after musing about what constitutes the perfect wave, Brown would go back to joking about himself. Then he would do a few jokes about the vicissitudes of life.
One joke which sticks with the viewer is the oft-repeated scene of our heroes visiting some local surf spot, only to be told, "You should have been here yesterday." Apparently the search for the decent wave, like life, involves timing, luck, and the luck that goes with good timing.
What's different about The Endless Summer as compared, for example with Waiting for Godot, is that they find the perfect wave. Brown doesn't even stick with standard cinematic format and make that discovery some sort of denouement.
The perfect waves are discovered more or less by accident, in the most unexpected place, in a corner of South Africa along the Indian Ocean called Cape St Francis. And Brown more or less sticks to the linear chronology of the journey, planting the perfect wave scenes more or less in the middle of the film.
What follows is a scenic exploration of Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, with a wry commentary suggesting that in the places where they should have found good surf, it was absent, and the places (like Tahiti) that are supposed to be without surf, they actually had some. Brown doesn't go all Yoda on us and muse on the journey of life, including its ups and downs. He holds his commentary to the experience of the traveling surfer, who may find waves by luck on some days, and find nothing on others. The narration is actually a form of art, in that the deeper messages are there for you to take if you like, but there is a compelling and entertaining story line that is there on the surface for you to enjoy. Like other kinds of art, you can muse on the deeper meaning later, or not at all.
It's a little sobering to realize that Bruce Brown, the Beatles, and Linda Rondstadt all burst onto the scene about the same time, half a century ago. What's curious is that when you look at comparative viewings, Brown's most famous film is reasonably well up there. As Alexander Mecl explained, when you count the theatrical screenings, the betamax sales (remember those?), vcr sales, and now even more theatrical screenings, The Endless Summer has been seen by around a hundred million people. It seems to be developing new energy in this half century anniversary tour.
When I thought about the film and chatted with Mecl afterwards, I was, strangely enough, reminded of Japanese silent films of the 1920s and 1930s. Japanese films of that era were directed and edited with the understanding that they would have live human narration going on during the theatrical screening. The narrator was known as the Benshi. and it's a remarkable skill indeed. Modern recreations of the Benshi craft involve somebody with nearly operatic voice control, able to convey the plot twists and emotional voyages of the main characters.
Bruce Brown is not doing quite the same thing as the Japanese Benshi, but he is conveying the power of the water, the danger to the surfer, and the emotional satisfaction that comes with the battle. It might as well be an operatic aria or a Benshi performance, except that the most ferocious antagonist is the wave rather than the sword. By the time we reach the ending scenes in Hawaii, the brute force of the Pipeline surf break is quite scary, even to the naive viewer. Brown calmly and dispassionately mentions that you can drive a car over a surf board and not damage it, but the Pipeline waves can snap a board in half.
I don't think that another Endless Summer will ever be made, because it is really a comedy and melodrama and musing on life that is held together by voice-over narration. In the modern era, perhaps the Kung Fu movies are the closest analogy (absent the humor), since they involve humans fighting unnatural odds for noble purposes, with zen-like repose.
The San Pedro International Film Festival was interesting for presenting three separate films that involved surfing, but each presenting the idea in different ways. Of the other films, Mana was about (mostly Hawaiin) surfers who are also artists. Bella Vita was perhaps the better as a movie, even though it is couched as a mix between adventure and documentary. It involves a professional surfer from San Pedro, California, who has roots in Italy because he spent summers with family there in his youth. Bella Vita shows Chris Del Moro as he goes back to Italy, visits with family and the quickly developing surf culture over there, and shows the locals a thing or two about the kind of technique that a Californian and professional would be able to show. And yes, there is surf in Italy.
All three movies provided a romantic take on the idea of surfing as sport and as culture. For example, the surfers are shown, in general, as dedicating themselves to environmental preservation and goodness. The most defiantly pro-environmental stance is taken by Chris Del Moro, as he donates a wall mural of whales to the town of Pisa, Italy. It's not how I remember surfing culture of the 1960s, which seemed to be more about male adolescence, but then again, we have the surfrider foundation right here right now, and it seems to be a serious effort to call attention to oceanic preservation.
One irony: Bruce Brown's film was so successful on a worldwide scale that it has had its own effect on the places, once so deserted, that Brown, his cameraman, and his two surfers visited. The Cape St Francis area with the perfect waves, so totally deserted at the time, is now host to tens of thousands of visitors during the summer months, and it's all due to the publicity (one might say honor) that The Endless Summer bestowed upon it.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 83
Pub: Oct 14, 2014
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