 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Riding Giants
|
 |
|
Director
Stacy Peralta faced a tough job making another sports documentary to match his
previous effort, Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). He could count on the hipness factor when
chronicling the urban subculture of skateboarding, but here he must grapple
with the somewhat musty, hippie aura that attaches itself to fanatical surfers.
As
in Dogtown, the canvas is stretched
broadly. Although promising at the outset to squash the history of this sport
into a minute or two, in fact the film never stops detailing the recurring saga
of the “new generation”, the “next milestone”, the “hottest location” on the
globe and, last but far from least, the “biggest-ever wave”.
As
the clapperboards show, Big Wave was
the working title of this project, and that is a better name than Riding Giants. Peralta, like the maker
of any decent surfing movie, tries to take us deep into the death-defying
philosophy underlying this activity, its distance from the Gidget-style pop culture cliché, and the lightly anarchistic,
self-sufficient, dropping-out lifestyle it has promoted.
But
do not expect much in the way of political insight from Riding Giants. Whether in documentary or fiction form, surfers on
film usually resemble the contestants on the TV reality-series The Amazing Race: they are so anxious to
get to the water that they hug the shoreline and scarcely cast a sideways
glance at whatever foreign culture they inhabit. Only a single anecdote – about
Laird Hamilton’s problems growing up as a blonde, white American in Hawaii –
suggests a different story.
Peralta
simplifies both his style and content here. Whereas Dogtown banged on relentlessly about the photography and graphic
design associated with skateboarding, here the huge and fascinating cottage
industry of surfing cinema is barely mentioned – although almost all the
important footage used comes from these precious, amateur sources.
Those
into surfing will need no recommendation to see Riding Giants. To an outsider like myself, it seems an authentic
and comprehensive account of its subject, and it gives a lot of time to such
luminaries as Greg Noll and Jeff Clark.
But
it will surely be hard for any viewer to overlook the fact that the portrait of
surfing presented here is overwhelmingly male. Although one female surfer,
Sarah Gerhardt, is highlighted, and an occasional supportive partner is
glimpsed (particularly Hamilton’s wife, Gabrielle Reece), all the most intense
talk from the guys is comprised of father-son bonding tales, and evokes the
ocean as a “lady” who winks at you and has to be tamed.
It’s Big Wednesday (John Milius, 1978) all
over again but, alas, Riding Giants is not in that league of cinema.
MORE Peralta: Lords of Dogtown © Adrian Martin March 2005 |
