Andrew McMurtryREVIEW: Going Vertical: The Shortboard Revolution
Rating: $10.00
David Bradbury isn’t the kind of filmmaker you’d expect to make a surfing documentary. Having been hired by the ABC as radio journalist in 1972, David has since made over 20 documentary films, mostly exposing political oppression and environmental vandalism. He has won five AFI awards and has twice been nominated for the Best Feature Documentary award at the Academy Awards for his films Frontline in 1980, which followed war cameraman Neil Davis, and Chile: Hasta Cuando? in 1986, which looked at life in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and had to be filmed covertly.
So why would a hard hitting journalist, one Australia’s most successful political documentarians, add yet another surfing documentary to the already burgeoning sub-genre? Although he is searching for the elusive truth behind surfing’s great breakthrough of the shortboard, Bradbury is not actually a surfer.
“I think a little bit of nationalistic pride has come in there that the Americans have always claimed it and aligned with Dick Brewer and Robert [Raymond, the films producer] being an old time surfer from his old days as a young surf board rider on the northern beaches of Sydney decided that he’d like to redress the issue and reinvestigate it. He’s got the money and gone out and tried to pursue it to try and put the record right.”
In the film, Going Vertical, he looks at a subject he seems to care a lot about, taking a snapshot of the burgeoning surf culture of the ‘60’s and the social revolution led by youths that aided the growth of surfing. But the main point of the film is delving into the issue of who invented the shortboard – was it the Australian Bob McTavish or the American Dick Brewer?
Well narrated by a neutral Simon Baker (Aussie actor of “The Mentalist”), the film has been made to give both men as well as their followers a fair chance to tell their side of the story. It makes the film seem fair and well balanced, although a little more time is given to the Australian. It looks at the lifestyle of surfers, especially before it became a strong movement, as several, including McTavish, lived in poverty on ‘a few bobs a day’. The chronology of the film works well as it follows a straightforward timescale but brings to light the outside influences of the time. Before the youth revolution of the late ‘60’s and surfing becoming synonymous with a drug culture, the pop culture breakout and Hollywood exploitation turned surfing from a movement and into a craze.
The documentary itself is stylish and well put together with file footage of the ‘60’s to break up the interviews. For non surfers, it gives some insight that caters to all knowledge levels as the masters and inventors explain how they continued to remake and innovate to create the boards that are still, more or less, used today. In the end there are no real conclusions reached as to who the father of the shortboard is, as McTavish and Brewer give their respective sides of the story. Both will probably go to their graves swearing they are the creator, yet however you look at it, both men changed the world of surfing forever by combining their individual ideas.
For more information, visit the films website at: www.goingvertical.info/
