The Endless Summer

Two young surfers, Mike Hynson and Robert August, travel the world following summer. When it is winter in the northern hemisphere they go south: Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii. At every stop they look for waves. What they are after is the perfect wave, and they find it in South Africa at Cape St Francis. Bruce Brown shot it, cut it and read the narration himself. How it was made and distributed is part of the story. Brown shot it with his own means and could not find a distributor; he was told it would not work where surfing was unknown. To show that this was wrong he hired a hall in Wichita, Kansas in winter and screened it there, and the hall filled. National distribution followed and the film went into wide release in 1966. The tone is light and comic; Brown's narration comments continuously and the film never claims seriousness. It is counted as the work that carried surfing in America from a subculture into general interest, and its poster is among the best known of the period. It was shot on sixteen millimetre and blown up to thirty five for distribution, so the image quality is uneven. Who it is for: anyone curious about surf culture, travel documentary and sixties American independent film. Who it is not for: the structure is loose, the narrative repeats, and the narration sounds talkative to an ear today.