A new wave of surf based film premiers and live screening events is surging. During the last few months alone a cavalcade of movies launched on national and international tour. Taylor Steel’s Proximity, Chris Burkard’s Under An Arctic Sky, Keith Malloy’s Fishpeople, Jess Bianchi’s Given, and Eddie Obrand’s Pedro Bay are just a handful of the features circulating through major cities.
While demand for live screening events is pulsing, excitement around surf film exhibitions is nothing new. The act of presenting surf footage to live audiences originated in 1953 inside a high school auditorium when Bud Browne presented Hawaiian Surfing Movies. Browne was soon followed by John Severson, Bruce Brown, and Greg Noll in the late 1950s and 1960s as they pioneered the surf movie genre and screening tour format.
Since the beginning, true surf movie presentations revolved around the lively ambiance and fiery audiences they drew. To quote the Encyclopedia of Surfing website:
Surf movies as a rule were less interesting than the gatherings they attracted while on tour, as surfers—beer-soaked suburban teenagers, mainly— filed into the theater to whistle, shout, cheer, boo, hiss, stomp their feet, roll beer bottles down the aisles, throw paper airplanes, and occasionally sprint onstage to moon the audience.
Throughout the remainder of the 1970s the trend continued to thrive with headliners such as Morning of the Earth (1972), Five Summer Stories (1972), Crystal Voyager (1973) and Free Ride (1977) making their way into the fold.
It wasn’t until new home movie technology came of age in the mid 1980s that live screenings took a back seat to the process of watching footage in a more insular way- a pattern that had a long standing effect. To site the Encyclopedia of Surfing again, “The 1984 video release of The Performers marked the beginning of what turned into a wholesale change in surf cinema from celluloid to videotape, theater to living room.”
With a modern day vantage point it’s easy to see where this was all headed. From VHS and Betamax to the expansion of cable TV, DVDs, streaming and social media, there was a vortex of tech innovations that led deeper and deeper into an over saturation of content and personal viewing abyss.
Crawling out from the soloist spectating rabbit hole, and back into public spaces en mass to witness surf movies has been a long overdue and slow going process. And yet, in the height of the information age, where people are so thoroughly sucked into smartphones that they’re walking into walls, we’re seeing a resurgence of live theater screening events. Surfshops, retail outlets, local watering holes, art galleries, auditoriums, and good old-fashioned movie theaters are again spilling over with psyched up audiences.
Surf and ocean film festivals have added to the effect, drawing large crowds, and pushing viewers further out of their comfort zones. Save The Waves, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving surf breaks and coastal environments around the world, hosts a benefit film festival every year, getting people actively involved in not only watching films but making a difference in the world as they do so. The San Diego Surf Film Festival (SDSFF), which took place recently, also proved to be multifaceted and highly interactive. SDSFF included a tribute to Skype Frye, beach run and clean-up event, live music, and invitational surf exhibitions at local beaches.
Although live screening events have been through peaks and lulls since Bud Browne’s original exhibition, people are once again coming out in force to experience surf movies on big screens. As documentations of the surf experience continue to push boundaries in and out of the water, it may very well be worth crawling out of our digital shells to see how the live screening format evolves once again.
sources and links:
http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/surf-movies
http://www.budbrownefilmarchives.com/about/
featured photo by Jake S.