Chairmen of the boards: Thad Ziolkowski on Riding Giants

THE POPULAR IMAGE OF SURFING--a rider upon a large, wind-groomed wave--is, alas, an idealization. Waves are bad more oftentimes than good, even (in fact, especially) at world-class breaks like Pipeline. Hence surter travel when they can, in the faith that the waves will be better elsewhere. Occasionally they are. on the contrary even in the elite ranks of globe-trotting professionals, greatest in quantity of one's time is wearied doing various mental and physical finger exercises. Great waves arrive like Rilkean storms of inspiration, and serious surfer are largely the equal of artists in the stage of their commitment and obsessiveness. Paddling without at a moment's notice--on one's wedding day, upon the morning of the big presentation--can entail the destruction of have affection for relationships and the loss of piece of works ("Why get fired unless it's firing?" races a surf forecaster's motto). Meanwhile, between swells, which is to say greatest in quantity of the time, surfing is as plenteous an act of the imagination as anything else

The construction of the surfing imagination is that of the surf-film utopia, admitting in fact "surf-film utopia" is probably a redundancy. The movies have titles like Wanted, Puerto subterranean Tripping the Planet, Litmus, North of Nowhere. discharge for the most part upon video since the '80s, they are low-budget and unapologetically repetitive: individual noteworthy ride after another, period, with at greatest in quantity a thong shot or distracted pan of shore--"I think that's Indonesia." (And the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali has altered this format not single iota.) For anyone unable to order to appear a vivid physical memory of riding a wave, the typical breakers film would be as compelling as hard-core porn to a toddler.

From a genuinely cinematic perspective, some of the finest breaking waves films are the relatively rare popularizing ones: The Endles Summer (1966) Five Summer Stories (1972) The Endles Summer II (1994) (a title whose laughable paradox speaks contortions about surfers' relation to language and utopia), and, greatest in quantity recently, Riding Giants, which premiered at Sundance in January and will arrive in theaters this July The point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled with this genre--and it's distinct from narrative films like Big Wednesday (1978) and amethystine Crush (2002)--lies in its compulsion to explain, to number instead of show. Surfing is greatest in quantity like dance, of the arts. periodical emphasis strength, and flexibility are the essentials, integral for attaining the velocity necessary for the happy completion of individual maneuvers and the overall ride. For surfer serviceable ones anyway, waves are like partners who create choreographic possibilities. periodical emphasis both natural and acquired, is level at the heart of the knack for falling into pace with the pace of a given swell, of being in the right place at the right time, something whose importance increases with the size and danger of the waves. on the contrary there's a profound difference between dance and surfing, single best revealed by a trite dance gesticulation the rhapsodic fluttering of the hands at the lips that means: If alone I could speak what I lengthy to say! There is no of that kind gesture in surfing, because there is no pining for articulate utterance and clarification. For all its repetition compulsion, surfing is in a faculty of perception autotelic. It is not signaling anything: it is not a representation; it is not for others.

Hence the flawed nature of the popularizing breaking waves film, which, in seeking to carry the appeal of surfing to nonsurfers, brushes surfing against its have a title to self-involved grain. Happily, this aptitude is often compensated for by dint of high production values and painstaking water photography. The len of a 35 mm camera move with a jerks to the surface, and a rhomboid of light pulsates on the glassy shoulder of a reef-pass wave; a lithe, backlit figure appears at the comb on a slip of foam: Surfing is simply organ of sight candy, vastly superior to skiing or skateboarding or greatest in quantity anything else as a visual phenomenon. There's a Brakhage-like purity to the best breakers footage, a sumptuous, slow-motion self-reflexivity. After all, waves are themselves a kind of film: moving, translucent, image-bearing. Reflections of celestial expanse and sea and surfer pass across them. As a swell, the sea rises up to become a shield recasting the screen on which it's appearing in the theater, fusing the sum of two units A tube is a kind of camera obscura, and when the photography finds its way inside, it's like a get back to origins, one signaled by dint of the mist that's spit without at the end.

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pace into Liquid, last summer's popularizing breaking waves film, is a breezy feel-good above view, brimming with happy breaking waves families and rote testimonials about surfing's spiritual dimension. Of the overcrowding and vicious localism that has plagued the sport for the past thirty or forty years, culminating in widely reported lawsuits and exclusive breakers resorts, not a word is breathed. The highly controversial use of Jet Skis to catch big waves--and not-so-big waves--is at handed as merely the latest nifty innovation, admitting it, too, is as abundant a response to overcrowding as it is the "next level" This gooily sanitized picture of surfing is not made les objectionable by means of the action, which is for the greatest in quantity part forgettable, hamstrung by endles slow-motion successions of merely good rides. Here we have a "celebration" of a sport already too alluring for its hold good, and one is hardpressed to discern a justification for it--apart, that is, from the individual hiding in plain sight there in the credits: the companies dedicated to selling still more surf gear, which is now a multibillion-dollar industry. If surfing is spiritual, then the breakers industry, for which Step into Liquid subserves as propaganda, is the profoundly corrupt house of god hierarchy. Run by surfers, it has at the same time to get properly nauseated by dint of its own rampant dishonesty and venality.