Surfing Films and Videos: Adolescent Fun, Alternative Lifestyle, Adventure Industry

Abstract

For 5 0years, surfing culture has represented the style, taste, aspirations, and behavior of millions of middle- and working-class Western youth. Film has been a critical ingredient in this culture; some 200 surf films and dozens of videos have popularized surfing fashions, values, and mores. One can discern three genres of surf film: Hollywood “beach stories,” aficionado “pure” surfing films, and surfing industry videos. Hollywood and aficionados began producing surf films in the late 1950s as the first generation of post-Second World War baby boomers reached adolescence. Surfing symbolized carefree fun in a period of economic prosperity and political idealism, and Hollywood and aficionados captured it all on celluloid. Hollywood ceased production in the mid-1960s as surfing became an alternative, opt-out lifestyle known as soul-surfing. Aficionados, however, continued to film, making surf movies that resonated with the “subversive” philosophy of the counterculture and soul-surfing. Surf films essentially died along with the counterculture in the mid-1970s. A decade later, surfing industry manufacturers began to fill the void with videos. Today, surfing appears on video as a form of commercial adventure.