There used to be a time when surf flicks were just sports films, unskilled documentaries of sportsmen displaying their prowess.

Then Bruce Brown's Endless Summer changed all that. It showed surfing was more than a sport — it was also an attitude to life. Endless Summer introducedsurfing to worldwide audiences, not just those clustered around the beaches of Australia, Hawaii and California, but also those of inland cities, many of whom had never seen a beach. What everyone picked up on was the beauty of surfing, the harmonious union of man and nature, the adventure implicit in riding waves where no one had surfed before, and the sense of freedom to be found away from civilisation's complexity.

One thing that was apparent from those early surf films was how suited surfing was to the film process. The flow of a surfer on a wave somehow synchronised with the flow of the celluoid thru the projector, the dynamics of surfing and of film having something in common. Film, by being able to render surfing in slow motion, revealed aspects of wave motion and the sufer's response to it that could not be perceived by normal vision. So the surf film-maker became more than a sports film-maker; he became an artist capable of revealing truths about life that we otherwise overlook or take for granted. Above all others, George Greenough in Innermost Limits of Pure Fun demonstrated the capacity of surf films to become art of a high order. His "Coming of the Dawn" sequence has cosmic implications that film artists working in any genre would be proud of.

— Albie Thoms