Don't Call it Hipster: a new wave of surf movies redefine the visual language
- Text by Michael Fordham

Surfing is getting ridiculous. The more the masses delve deep and paddle out, ruining your horizons with their aesthetic choices and the horrible sound of chop on the underside of their epoxy SUPs, the more the vanguard keeps pushing things.
There was a time when it was a legitimate attitude to hate on proto-aerialists. A generation of salty cruisers saw a wave as something to nestle into all intimate-like as long as possible, pulling in and getting sexual with the curl and connecting any section with either a float or a sideslip or an an ass-wiggling nose-hopping hip-pump shuffle boogie, depending on the volume to four chosen craft.
But for a whole generation now kids have not only been hucking airs out of the wave’s womb, they’ve making them and reverting them and shuvving them all over the place. It’s time to make a capitulation and acknowledge that just because YOU can’t make them, they aren’t the present and future of performance surfing.
And along with this vanguard of out-the-lip wave riding there’s a whole cacophony of media out there that has been accompanying the new aesthetic. It doesn’t take long out there to come across a whole new generation of kids, especially in Southern California, who are taking those super hi-def, super wound up cameras and finding a new language. There once was a spectrum of ways of doing a surf movie that ranged from thrash and burn skate-rooted destructo-metal to soul daddy flow preaching that reeked of resin tints and second hand patchouli – but now there’s a way of doing film for everyone.
And the kids turning their lenses on the new generation are mixing up the tech as well as the textures to reflect the analogue versus digi – flow versus thrash, air versus barrel way of blethering the syntax of surf. What’s interesting too, is the way that the mainstream surf industry – never traditionally the most forward thinking or media savvy crew of antipodean small town boys – have been collaborating, distributing and helping to fund films across the web and in theatres too.
Sure, some of the clichés that made the ancien regime of the mainstream surf movie so dull are hanging in there. Especially the one about girl surfers having nice asses and young surfer kids flipping the bird at every opportunity. But for an imagined cult that pretends it lives on the beach and that trades mostly in board shorts and bikinis that’s hardly surprising. Notice we haven’t mentioned the H-word here. And I refuse to because it’s so predictable that this new generation of surf culture would be branded by the demotic derogatory.
If there’s a common thread in these new productions it’s a kind of whacked out neo-pyschedelia that’s as far from Morning Of The Earth as it’s possible to be.
Don’t call it hipster. Call it refreshing.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Latest on Huck

Maryam El Gardoum is breaking new shores for Morocco’s indigenous surfers
The Amazigh Atlantic — Through her groundbreaking career and popular surf school, the five-time Moroccan champion is helping women find their places in the waves.
Written by: Sam Haddad

Youth violence’s rise is deeply concerning, but mass hysteria doesn’t help
Safe — On Knife Crime Awareness Week, writer, podcaster and youth worker Ciaran Thapar reflects on the presence of violent content online, growing awareness about the need for action, and the two decades since Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy.
Written by: Ciaran Thapar

Volcom teams up with Bob Mollema for the latest in its Featured Artist Series
True to This — The boardsports lifestyle brand will host an art show in Biarritz to celebrate the Dutch illustrators’ second capsule collection.
Written by: Huck

A visual trip through 100 years of New York’s LGBTQ+ spaces
Queer Happened Here — A new book from historian and writer Marc Zinaman maps scores of Manhattan’s queer venues and informal meeting places, documenting the city’s long LGBTQ+ history in the process.
Written by: Isaac Muk

Nostalgic photos of everyday life in ’70s San Francisco
A Fearless Eye — Having moved to the Bay Area in 1969, Barbara Ramos spent days wandering its streets, photographing its landscape and characters. In the process she captured a city in flux, as its burgeoning countercultural youth movement crossed with longtime residents.
Written by: Miss Rosen

Tony Njoku: ‘I wanted to see Black artists living my dream’
What Made Me — In this series, we ask artists and rebels about the forces and experiences that shaped who they are. Today, it’s avant-garde electronic and classical music hybridist Tony Njoku.
Written by: Tony Njoku