(viewed on 6/25/11)


There are reasons why anyone who has seen The Endless Summer will recommend it to you.  You will want to go surfing, you will want to go to the ocean.  The film will drench your eyes in sunlight and salt water, and you will wish for summer.  I watched it in June, on my birthday, after a week of blissful family vacation in sunny Myrtle Beach, SC.  I was stuck in the airport, trying to get back to even sunnier Los Angeles, and still I found myself dreaming of a beach day as though it were January. 

The longing isn’t just for summer.  It’s for a summer most of us have never known, and none of us will ever know again— summer in the 50s and 60s.  It’s the summer I imagined while watching Gidget reruns as a kid, where the girls wore flattering bathing suits, the boys looked like a Ken dolls, and problems were not only solved easily, but weren’t all that difficult to begin with.  You could go away to summer camp, meet your long-lost twin sister, and cleverly reunite your divorced parents, nbd.  Times were (portrayed) simpler (on television). 

The magic of this time period comes through the images captured in The Endless Summer of course, but also in the sounds that weren’t captured.  There is no sync sound in the entire film, only the voice of the filmmaker Bruce Brown describing the action, the famous and the unknown surfing spots, and the noteworthy surfers of the day.  His California dialect and laughter at his own cornball jokes makes it a time capsule of this golden age of surfing.  Oh, and the surf rock soundtrack helps too.  The lack of sync sound has everything to do with Brown’s lack of budget and crew, but it works so well as a thematic device.  You don’t even notice while watching it that the sounds of the waves are only in your mind.

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