Riding Giants
dir. Peralta
Opens Fri July 23
Cinema 21
This fascinating exploration of the culture of big-wave surfing by the director of the skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys is distinguished first by the quality of its footage. I have no idea how Stacy Peralta and his crew managed to get on top of the water the way they do, but the actual surfing in this movie is heroic. Your heart rises and your breath leaves you as the surfers take on waves of 20, 30, 80 feet–waves that could easily kill them–then go back for more, then go back again. It’s a cliché to say that surfers live to surf, but after seeing this film, it’s a lot easier to understand why.
For one reason, Peralta treats his movie as a sociological inquiry into a legitimate American subculture. Examining three specific chapters of surfing lore, Riding Giants begins in the late ’50s, when a handful of WASP kids from SoCal moved to Oahu’s North Shore to ride 20- to 30-foot waves. The movie treats them like exponents of the growing bohemianism of late-’50s America–only instead of going on the road, they went to the beach.
The film’s second chapter involves Jeff Clarke, who in the mid-’80s discovered Mavericks, a surf break off Northern California whose waters are ice cold, and whose coastline is massive, jagged boulders. You have to paddle for an hour just to get to the 40- to 50-foot waves.
Which brings us to Laird Hamilton and his innovative tow-in technique, which allows him to ride 80-foot waves in the middle of the goddamn ocean. I promise that you have never seen anything like Hamilton’s climactic ride in this film. You have also never seen anything like the respect that is afforded the surfers in Riding Giants. Instead of the usual stereotype of dumb, quasi-mystical hunks, Peralta offers his subjects up as athletes and innovators. At times, he fails to obscure their dumb, quasi-mystical tendencies (Clarke calls the ocean his “saltwater church”), but when you see them ride, you have no choice but to bow down.