Dir. Stacy Peralta, 2004, USA, 101 mins
Cast: Greg Noll, Jeff Clark, Laird Hamilton
When the skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys won both Best Director and the Audience award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001, ex professional skateboarder Stacy Peralta had come of age as a filmmaker. Since the mid eighties, as part of skateboard company Powell & Peralta, he helped nurture some of the big skateboarding names of today through a series of groundbreaking promotional skateboarding videos that pushed production and narrative quality, helping to define the look of extreme sports that is so ubiquitous with the youth of today. And now as television has become saturated with these images it is only right that he has turned his talent to the more challenging medium of cinema. In Dogtown and Z-Boys he traced the birth of skateboarding's extreme style in the 1970's when the surf-addicted kids of Venice Beach began translating their moves from the waves onto the sidewalks and empty swimming pools. In Riding Giants, Peralta concentrates on the history of surfing, the archetype and originator of all the board sports of today. From ancient Polynesian beginnings, he traces its discovery and adoption by modern American culture, leading to the recent innovations in surf technology that allow surfers to ride giant waves taller than houses. Using archive, interview and original footage he lets the surfers tell their story through their own words, but more importantly through the incredible footage of them riding. It is literally awesome, with the thrilling dangers sadly too real.
Peralta developed a highly stylised visual language for Dogtown and Z-Boys. Using frenetic rostrum camera work to create movement out of still images, he brought the subject alive despite a paucity of original footage, and then combined it with relaxed, natural looking interviews. In Riding Giants , he had a huge range of content to work with, but the film carries on with innovation and imagination from the very beginning to tell the early days of surfing's history using cut out paper figures. Not dissimilar to Indonesian shadow theatre, the look contrasts well against the rest of the film as an effective preface and it is a shame this scene is let down by a highly affected narration that seems out of place and unnecessary. Next, the chronology turns to the most fascinating part of the film. Before surfing took off there was a group of pioneer wave riders, epitomised by surf legend Greg Noll, living a reclusive, bohemian lifestyle devoted to the ocean on Hawaii. Remarkably, there is lots of original footage that the surfers shot themselves. Their uncompromising idyllic lifestyle became the mould for generations of dropouts and soul searchers to come. The search for bigger and bigger waves continued as the surfers discovered new beaches, and this journey through the generations is the basic theme for the rest of the film. Their story is compelling viewing, mainly because the scale keeps growing, right up to the recent riders like surf superman Laird Hamilton and his friends who catch their giant waves by being towed by a jet ski. With the size of the wave, the stakes get higher and a deep bond forms between the jet ski rider, normally a surfer himself, and the surfer he is towing.
Unlike Dogtown and Z-Boys, a personal story for Peralta that had never been told, surf movies and videos have been big business since the sixties. The first surf craze was initiated by the Gidgit films and then followed by more authentic films like Endless Summer. In the seventies surf culture was defined by Big Wednesday and in the nineties Point Break and the British Blue Juice. Glistening swell and rolling waves under a blue sky have proved an irresistible backdrop for waves of 16mm and video filmmakers since the early surfers themselves. As their boards battle with nature, the image is so photogenic and compelling, often filmed in slow motion accompanied by an instrumental rock soundtrack, it is hard to resist, with the only artistic danger being repetitiveness. Peralta, a surfer himself, has produced a very special contribution to the genre, arguably the best. He was uniquely placed with an insider's viewpoint and access to all the main characters still alive as well as choosing to make the film at a time just after a recent period of rapid progress in surf history. Surf fans are going to embrace this film as a classic from the start, and for everyone else it will provide a thrilling journey through the story of the original adrenalin board sport.
Gavin Bush
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