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Empire in Waves. Scott Laderman
Читать онлайн.Название Empire in Waves
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520958043
Автор произведения Scott Laderman
Серия Sport in World History
Издательство Ingram
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
It is not difficult to envision the film’s appeal to those tasked with American cultural diplomacy. In its story of two young Californians who meet the locals while looking for surf in Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawai‘i, Brown’s picture is entertaining, funny, and visually striking. But it is much more than that. Through its protagonists’ carefree travel, The Endless Summer highlighted the freedom afforded Americans—unlike most of those living in the Soviet bloc—to explore and discover the nations of the world. In the stars’ quest for nothing more than good waves and fun, the film illustrated the pleasurable lifestyle promised by the capitalist system that made such leisure possible. And in the visiting surfers’ interactions with the locals—as embarrassingly racist as some of these interactions may appear to audiences today—The Endless Summer painted a portrait of the United States as a benevolent and sympathetic power at a time when, given the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the U.S. image was suffering in much of the Third World. Such people-to-people encounters, for which global tourism played a leading role, were an important Cold War weapon at the heart of America’s soft overseas propaganda.38
For reasons more nepotistic than meritorious, The Endless Summer was withdrawn from the Moscow festival just weeks before it was to get under way. The Soviets told Washington that it needed to whittle down the number of films it intended to present, including just one commercial documentary. The United States had planned to show two: The Endless Summer and The Young Americans (1967), a patriotic account of high school-and college-age American choral singers performing in venues across the United States. Marc Spiegel, the Russian-speaking executive of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) who traveled to Moscow to consult with the Soviets, recommended The Endless Summer.39 But Columbia Pictures, whose founders’ scion made The Young Americans and which served as the film’s distributor, “prefer[red]” its own documentary, MPAA chief and U.S. delegation organizer Jack Valenti notified Spiegel.40 The MPAA, of course, represented the big American studios, while The Endless Summer was made by Bruce Brown Films and distributed by the small art-film company Cinema V. It was no contest. The Young Americans received the official nod.
Much to the frustration of the American contingent, in the end it, too, failed to show in Moscow. Its scheduled presentation was abruptly canceled by the Soviets without official explanation. Informally the authorities stated that the film was considered “American propaganda” by “high-level” Soviet viewers.41 This incensed Valenti, who had been assigned by the State Department to oversee American activities at the festival. “If the portrayal of young, wholesome Americans as they tour the United States giving concerts, climaxed by appearances in patriotic settings in Washington, is propaganda, then this was ‘propaganda,’ and about as good as could be found,” Valenti wrote to Washington. “But it was, first of all, an excellent motion picture.”42 While Valenti believed The Young Americans’ cancellation was ultimately a coup for the United States—the “meaning of the cancellation was not lost on Festival delegations or the world press, and thus the indirect effect was to benefit the United States,” he concluded—the MPAA chief was in fact being shortsighted. The censorship may have redounded to Washington internationally, but it had no discernible effect on the Soviet citizenry, who viewed the festival films by the hundreds of thousands.43 The most effective propaganda, of course, is that which does not appear as such. If the principal reason for the American film industry’s investment in Moscow was “90% political,” as Valenti wrote to Secretary of State William Rogers, he failed to fully appreciate that the showing of Bruce Brown’s film, with its implicitly positive representations of the United States as a confident and courageous nation of economic abundance, would almost certainly have resonated with the Soviet people, as it had with countless Americans.44 The Endless Summer, from this perspective, would have been a more inspired choice in 1967.
Those tasked with American cultural diplomacy gave surfing another chance not long afterward. The year was 1970, the place was Japan, and the setting was the first world’s fair ever to be held in Asia: the Japan World Exposition, or Expo ’70, in Osaka. Running for six months, the exposition was spread over 815 acres and featured the participation of seventy-seven countries, more than two dozen Japanese and foreign corporations, several U.S. and Canadian local governments, and three multilateral organizations. It drew an estimated 64 million visitors.45 The general purpose of Expo ’70, like the purpose of all world’s fairs, was to showcase various nations’ geographies, economies, cultures, and societies. Yet such exhibitions, regardless of their innocuous facades, are always political.46 In 1970, deep into the Cold War, there was no question that the United States was competing with the Soviet Union over which country would mount the most impressive national display. “Whether we like it or not,” wrote the chief of the American delegation to the director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), “we really are being thrown into a competition with the Russians over here.”47 American officials thus took their cultural work very seriously.
The United States Pavilion, with 100,000 square feet of enclosed floor space spread over a six-acre site, embodied the vision of architect Yasuo Uesaka. Its exhibits—organized by the USIA—were designed by the joint venture team of Davis, Brody, Chermayeff, Geismar, de Harak Associates and divided into seven categories: Folk Art, Ten Photographers, American Painting, Sports, Space Exploration, Architecture, and New Arts.48 American officials assumed the highlight would be the space exhibit, which featured several spacecraft and a moon rock brought to earth by the Apollo 11 astronauts; the Soviets were also planning a space exhibit at Expo ’70, so the moon rock afforded the Americans—who alone had undertaken manned lunar landings—an opportunity to demonstrate their national superiority. Yet competing for popularity was the exhibit devoted to sport. This is hardly surprising. Only war is more effective—and even that is debatable—in exciting people’s passions. It was there, within the sports exhibit, that, so far as I am aware, surfing for the first time became an official object of U.S. cultural diplomacy.
By 1970, surfing was already firmly established in Japan. As was true of a number of places around the world, it arrived as an indirect by-product of American military power. Japanese fishermen had ridden ita-go, which were a primitive form of bodyboards, since at least the second decade of the twentieth century (and perhaps