movieweb.com - 10 Surfing Movies That Inspired Generations
These films followed the summer across continents, documenting surfing's evolution and inspiring up-and-coming surfers to get pitted.
Surf films generally fall into three distinct genres: surfing documentaries, beach party films, and fictional films with surfing used as their backdrop. The first known documentation of surfing in film was in Robert Kates Bonine's film Hawaiian Islands in 1906, made for inventor Thomas Edison, who sought to use new camera technology to document every corner of America by exploring its culture. These early Polynesian pioneers helped spread the gospel of surfing, and ushered in a new cadre of documentary films about the practice, which developed simultaneously to the sport's quantum leaps from new concepts and fiberglass development.