Keith Beattie, Contemporary Studies Program, University of Queensland

k.beattie@mailbox.uq.edu.au

"Surf movies"- nonfictional representations of surfing practices and surfing lifestyles- constitute, in the words of one observer, "a unique Australian contribution to world cinema". A central aspect of the privileged status of surf films and videos resides in their particular combination of documentary and experimental practices and techniques. Such a combination, however, has placed the form outside definitions of documentary which emphasise the "sober" characteristics of the mode. In this relation, film theorist Bill Nichols has sought recently to locate ways in which "documentary film theory [has] failed to comprehend the full dimensionality of those practices we may call documentary". This paper begins to address this project by approaching surf film and video through an understanding that such documentary texts represent a challenge to the assumptions that inform documentary theory.

The study revises traditional conceptions of documentary as a "discourse of sobriety" with an assessment of selected Australian surf films and videos as an avant-gardist "discourse of delirium". The paper traces changes to the form from the so-called pure surf film of the late 1960s to contemporary surf video productions. The presence and persistence of formal innovations have been denied in typologies of the development of the mode which pose a shift from pure surf film to the rise of repetitive and unoriginal commercialised texts produced under corporate sponsorship. An alternative history runs from the experimental tendencies of certain pure surf films to the expressive and uncontrolled video brut practices of non-corporate "power surf" videos. The stylistic innovations of certain surf films and videos and their impact on documentary theory emerge within and through such a revised history.