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Surfing the Global Wave
Surfing belongs, without a doubt, to the more aesthetically appealing sports on this planet: Sunsets, girls
in bikinis, and the unleashed forces of nature. It’s no wonder that the market for surfing-lifestyle is
booming. At this year’s X-Dance Film Festival, usually referred to as the Academy Awards of action sports
filmmaking, a group of Austrians raked in the top honours. Their film: A surf-movie with a twist.
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text_michael ginthör photo_jakob polacsek
Wave-riding means
synchronizing to the
cycles of nature.
Last year, Quiksilver extended its already
remarkable brand-portfolio with the addition
of the French ski-manufacturer Rossignol.
Billabong founder, Gordon Merchant, pocketed
200 million dollars for a mere 5 percent of his
company shares. That’s not bad for a couple of
brands whose beginnings basically consisted
of stoned daydreaming on Australia’s South
Coast about business ideas that originally
would serve only one purpose: To be able to
drop everything as soon as a swell hit the
shore. Merchant and his wife tailored their
first boardshorts in their kitchen in Torquay,
while Quiksilver’s venture capital was a 2,500dollar loan that Alan Green had been granted
by his father to produce wetsuits.
Like in so many cases, yesterday’s hippies have
turned into the “work hard/play hard” yuppies
of today. Quiksilver generates an annual turnover of more than two and a half billion dollars
with their myth of the endless summer. Hardly
any sector of the fashion industry has grown
faster and more consistently than the surfing
segment, with current annual growth rates at
a steady ten to twelve percent. And that’s certainly not because of the recently discovered
surf breaks in Baden-Württemberg or Central
Siberia. Future markets like Russia and
Germany will never truly be wave rider destinations. After all, Billabong and Quiksilver
don’t sell any wetsuits or surf booties there.
What they do sell, though, is something completely different and infinitely more profitable:
A whole lifestyle.
No doubt: Action sports, in general, and surfing, in particular, communicate a wild and free
attitude towards life. The sensation that comes
from the intense dialogue with nature that is
required of these sports often takes on mystical dimensions. It comes as no surprise then
that wave riding, today, enjoys an image of
mythical proportions. While Jack London and
Mark Twain were among the first of a whole
cohort of writers, filmmakers and artists to be
inspired by its deep blue fascination, it was
Hollywood’s dream factory that mystified and
Americanised surfing by nurturing its sporty
and aesthetic development.
Surfing has a 1,500-year-old history with a lot
of ups and downs, so to speak – from its religious beginnings in Hawaii, to its total oppression and near-total annihilation during the
years of the Calvinistic colonial government,
all the way to its pop-cultural renascence in
the 1960’s. Throughout its long history, surfing
was never just another sport: It always had
underlying elements of a spiritual journey, a
mystical endeavour or even a rebellion against
ECONOMY
the establishment with its 9-to-5 schedules.
Surfing is the only action sport with far
eastern roots. As such, it also has traces of
eastern philosophies.
It is obvious why a phenomenon of such proportions also needed its cultural outlets:
Accordingly, the early 1960’s saw the birth of
the first surf-movies. Bruce Brown’s “The
Endless Summer”, produced for a mere 50,000
dollars back in 1963, made more than 30 million dollars in the box office – and that’s
without TV-, video-, or DVD-deals. After that,
Hollywood recognised the niche and tried to
capitalize on this countercultural trend.
Nevertheless, John Milius, the co-writer of
“Apocalypse Now”, failed in his attempt to rake
in the blockbuster dough: His film, “Big
Wednesday”, flopped in both the financial and
the aesthetical sense.“Step into Liquid”,“Riding
Giants” and “Young Guns II” were among the
most successful surf-flicks of recent times, all
of them, at their core, American movies exporting the fascination of surfing as a countercultural movement and spiritual experience to
the rest of the world.
The media presence and image value of surfing keeps growing, partly because of the
sport’s obvious visual advantages and partly
because of its wild-boy attitude. American
Express uses big-wave superhero, Laird
Hamilton, for its TV-ad campaigns. In countries
like Germany and Austria, the surfboard serves
as the archetypical beach-decor in ads used to
promote sunscreens and leisurewear. And in
Tokyo, teenagers even take their boards out on
the street or on their dates, rendering them
useless accessories. Boards have ceased to be
sporting goods and have instead become a
means of identification.
Brian Wimmer, originally a Sundance Film
Festival kid and a personal friend of Robert
Redford for decades, saw the sign of the times
and founded the X-Dance Action Sports Film
Festival in Park City, Utah back in 2001. It takes
place at the same time as the Sundance and
generates a lot of action-sports momentum.
Wimmer’s wish for the festival is “to do for
action sports films what Redford did for independent films: provide them a unified forum."
And he does this with the help of partners like
Fuel TV, the American extreme-sports network, which provide the means with which to
reach big audiences.
When my film team and I took off on our trip
from L.A. to Costa Rica in 2004 to deconstruct
the myth of wave riding in our very own
Austrian way, we never would have dreamed >>
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>>that we could get a foot in the door of the American action-sports
industry. In the past few years that industry, with its increasingly
competitive market situation, has mainly produced very visually
oriented, high-performance surf movies. The concept of soul-surfing
was put on the back burner and the original quest for the perfect
wave was replaced by the search for the most radical cutback and
the most spectacular helicopter-shot. Even big corporations, like
Quiksilver, Billabong and Ripcurl, have founded film companies of
their own to produce the necessary, premium-image footage, with
the great advantage of also having the best athletes on the planet
under contract. It wouldn’t have taken much more than to put Kelly
Slater and Andy Irons on a cruise ship, ship them off to Indonesia,
and you would have your surf-movie right there – granted of course,
the weather played its part. “Zen and Zero”, our philosophical, yet
quirky cultural comedy, on the other hand, seemed to have little or
nothing to do with these super-cinematic, ultra-technical stunt
extravaganzas on the seven seas.
“Zen and Zero” was basically a calculation with very few variables:
We bought two off-road vehicles in L.A., a Chevy Suburban and a
Toyota Pickup, hoping to be able to sell them 7,000 miles down the
road in Costa Rica for double the price. The profit should buy us three
months of time along the coast of Central America to dig into the
secrets of surfing. After two years of working on the film and when
we were sufficiently happy with the product to introduce it to the
public, we suddenly received notice of our invitation to the X-Dance
Film Festival.
“Right on!” we thought, “We’re finally going to have our premiere.
The days of cutting and re-cutting the movie are finally over.” Then
we googled directions to Park City and left L.A. with few illusions
about winning, even if a mere flower pot. After all, we were up
against some serious competition: Laird Hamilton was going to be
there promoting his latest film, and Quiksilver-afiliate, Roxy, would
be showing a movie starring the surfing world-champion, Sofia
Mulanovich. Even “Going Downhill”, Bode Miller’s biography, was
scheduled for a screening. With all of these high-end productions
featuring top athletes we thought we didn’t stand a chance.
But “Zen and Zero” won awards for Best Director and Best Story and
was even nominated in the categories for Best Film and Best
Soundtrack. They called our movie the “Sex, Lies and Videotape” of
action-sports filmmaking, and described it as the “Hippest surf film
ever! Hilarious, heartfelt, and, at times supremely heroic.”
Unfortunately it only occurred to me later, that I could have declared
the birth of a new genre during my five seconds of glory, when I
received my awards: “Austro-surf does today, what the spaghettiwestern did back in the 1960’s,” I could have proclaimed. But then
again, maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t. ><
On the road: We finally wrapped up
filming almost 3months after taking off.
The result: Awards for Best Director and
Best Screenplay at the X-Dance Film
Festival 2006 and, of course, a few good
memories.
ZEN AND ZERO
The journey: 7000 miles through Central America searching for the perfect wave and the outlaw and
surfer-poet, Allan Weisbeker.
The team: Michael Ginthör (co-author/director), Philipp Manderla (co-author/producer),
Edwin Steinitz (editor), Jakob Polacsek (sound), David Auerbach (camera) and Herwig Mauer (score)
www.zenandzero.com