In Australia by the late 1960s, the Beach Boys and Gidget were out, Durban poison, blotting paper acid and prog rock were in and surfing movies were the ultimate underground cinema. They combined abstract images with contemporary music; if the audience was a little baked, all the better. Films like The Endless Summer and Morning of the Earth promised a world beyond clocks and workaday mundanities. The ocean was its own reality, man.
“We would go up the coast with our girlfriends and stick handbills under the wipers on the cars at surfing spots and in the surf shops,” says film-maker David Elfick. “And then put up the sheet and the projector and people would turn up. It was always $2 in. At the end of it you always had all these wet $2 bills, because people kept their money in their board shorts.”
Elfick’s magnum opus was Crystal Voyager, the Citizen Kane of surfing pictures. It’s mostly the story of surfer and film-maker George Greenough’s global search for the perfect wave, which eventually morphs into a 23 minute “trip” to the sounds of Pink Floyd. The film crossed over from waxheads to underground hippies to critics. Having opened at the Sydney Opera House 50 years ago, a restored 4K print returns to Bennelong Point this week.
An incorrigible maverick, Elfick was one of the real movers and shakers of alternative culture in Australia: a magazine editor, publisher, film-maker, actor and screenwriter.
In 1970, he co-founded Tracks magazine, hoping to do for surfing what Rolling Stone had been for music. It was through Tracks that he gradually became involved with the circle of board-riding film-makers such as Paul Witzig and Albie Falzon. Then in 1971, Elfick co-produced Morning of the Earth, a spiritual film following surfers in Australia, Bali and Hawaii, encountering cultures untouched by modernity or materialism – perfect viewing for the peace and love generation.
But perhaps the most innovative of the surfing film-makers was Greenough: an Australian-based California savant, who invented a new apparatus that allowed him to strap a camera on his back and film from inside the wave. It was a perspective that had never been seen on film, Elfick says: “He’s such a good surfer that he was able to get back inside these huge tubing waves and give people the point of view of the ultimate surfing experience.”
As Greenough says in Crystal Voyager, “You’re only in there for a few moments in time, but in your mind, it goes on for hours. There is nothing like riding inside a big grinding wave. Time enters a space, a zone of its own. The only thing that’s happening is right now.”
Elfick and Greenough spent months working on Crystal Voyager, which was in effect Greenough’s surfing manifesto. His laid-back California drawl describes an almost monk-ish dedication to being in the ocean; his immersive shooting style makes it all tangible to even the most devoted land lubbers. When Greenough’s mum gave him the Pink Floyd album Meddle, he cut the end of the film to the 23-minute Echoes. They didn’t have permission to use it, but Elfick immediately saw the potential of linking two wings of the counterculture.
Elfick managed to land a meeting with Pink Floyd and flew to London with a 10-minute sequence with the music synched in. “The lights go up and I’m waiting for the answer. I think Dave Gilmour said, ‘Yeah, good. But next time, turn the music up’.”
With the band on side, Elfick and their manager, Steve O’Rourke, negotiated. Pink Floyd had recently been paid a substantial amount for their music for the Zabriskie Point soundtrack.
“[O’Rourke] said, ‘it won’t be cheap’. And I said, ‘well, I actually haven’t got any money’,” Elfick says. In a completely unprecedented act of generosity, Pink Floyd gave Elfick the rights – in exchange for the right to use the footage in their live show when they perform Echoes.
Crystal Voyager went to Cannes film festival where it secured international distribution; it was paired with the surreal animated feature Fantastic Planet, which won the 1973 Grand Prix award. The double bill ran for an unprecedented (for an art film) six months and grossed £100,000.
“At the press screenings in London someone gave out some marijuana,” Elfick recalls. “And one lady journalist, halfway through the Echoes sequence, ran out of the cinema screaming, ‘I’m drowning! I’m drowning!’”
There is more to Crystal Voyager than just a head trip, Elfick says: “I feel that the marrying of George’s extraordinary footage with Pink Floyd’s music does what a great rock concert or a great performance by an artist does. That music and those images for 23 minutes transport you to somewhere where you could never ever go before. I think it’s an extraordinary piece of cinema.”
At 83, Greenough still makes films occasionally and surfs the north coast of New South Wales. Elfick went on to make more films, including the acclaimed Newsfront, Starstruck, Emoh Ruo and Rabbit Proof Fence, among many others. And Pink Floyd did OK too.
A new 4K restoration of Crystal Voyager will be screened at Sydney Opera House on 9-10 August, 50 years after its first screening at the venue, as part of First Wave
