Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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Its cultural impact was profound. The Washington Post would dub it a “classic” account of “the sport’s golden age.”³² Members of the National Screen Council, which in January 1967 awarded The Endless Summer its Boxoffice Blue Ribbon Award—“unusual for a documentary,” the group noted—were ecstatic. “You could be 85 and never have put a toe in the water and still think this is great,” chimed one. “Who would have thought I would sit enthralled for 91 minutes by a documentary about surfing!” said another.³³ Brown came in for extraordinary praise. To Time magazine he was the “Bergman of the Boards”; the New York Times christened him the “Fellini of the Foam.”³⁴ So historically significant is The Endless Summer that in 2002 the Library of Congress selected the picture for inclusion on its exclusive National Film Registry. The movie’s signature poster, featuring the silhouettes of Brown, August, and Hynson “backlit by the sun,” has been “immortalized,” noted the Washington Post, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.³⁵ The Endless Summer theme music, composed and performed by the Sandals, helped define the surf music genre. As a global project, the film awakened thousands of surfers to the possibilities of exploration in Africa, the South Pacific, and other exotic locales, and it introduced countless people worldwide to California’s more genuine surfing “subculture” (as opposed to the caricature that appeared in Hollywood’s teenage surf movies).³⁶ Yet in ways that have not been explored by scholars, The Endless Summer also illustrates how, during the height of the Cold War, the United States came to view surfing as an ideological weapon in its anti-Communist crusade, for in May 1967 it was announced that the documentary would appear, under State Department sponsorship, at the biennial Moscow Film Festival.³⁷