The national big-screen tour of ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday’ starts tomorrow. The movie presents an entertaining deep-dive into the archives of Australian surfing. Check out the cinema screenings here.
Read Monty Webber’s review below.
In these modern times, in which we are flooded by a daily tsunami of surfing content – including shorts, feature length surfing movies and documentaries – it’s rare to come across something genuinely extraordinary. The internet overload seems to have sucked the specialness out of just about everything. But now and then, a surf filmmaker either lucks on to an epic swell or story or works particularly hard on a project, elevating it into the realm of the classics. Jolyon Hoff did the latter with You Should Have Been Here Yesterday. The film is was shown at the Sydney Opera House earlier this year as part of the First Wave Festival.
Jolyon is a surfing film purist who made his name in the surfing world with his brilliant documentary Searching for Michael Peterson (2009). This maverick dedicates himself to his productions as if they were his children, directing them as a labour of love. He also had the good sense to surround himself with an incredibly talented team of like-minded professionals.
Jolyon has spent the best of the last ten years collating, cleaning, scanning and digitising hundreds of hours of lost and forgotten 16mm surfing footage for his much-lauded operation – The Surf Film Archive. For YSHBHY, with the help of his crack team, he selected many of the iconic and memorable sequences and sewed them together into a modern masterpiece. Most of the film was shot in Australia and New Zealand, but there are also segments from Indonesia, Europe and Hawaii. The final cut is a breathtakingly beautiful 80-minute homage to the late ’60s generation of surfers who, jaded by city life, headed off to live in the country and took their surfboards and movie cameras.
While it’s not your run-of-the-mill surfing film, based on the lionization of masterful surfing, it is a masterclass in old-school surf film photography. Far more feeling and emotion is captured by the thoughtful cinematographers who shot celluloid film than today’s ‘auto-everything’ videographers. Coupled with the times and places documented, YSHBHY succeeds in transporting the willing viewer to a whole forgotten suburb of memory lanes.
The film’s narrative arc leads the audience through the romantic and escapist, almost utopian, late ’60s, through the surf travel-obsessed ’70s, and into the corporate branded egoic ’80s. By the end of the film, you’ve heard the disembodied voices of the key protagonists of the genre: Albe Falzon, Paul Witzig, Dick Hoole, Wayne Lynch, Maurice Cole and many more. It reminds me of the war movies that focused on archival footage rather than the ancient talking heads, like a time machine.
For a lover of surfing films from the period when camera operators had to use light metres and pull focus manually, this is a gold mine of majestic images woven together into a wonderfully crafted story. This film has more mind-bogglingly beautiful shots than any made since this footage was originally shot. The editing, by Ernest Hariyanto and Nick Meyers, makes it feel like you’re watching it projected against the wall of a pub in 1970. The sublime original soundtrack – It’s Got Something to do with Love, But I Don’t Know What, by Headland, fits like a snug wetsuit during a nice long winter surf. Definitively one for the ages. Something we who care about the history of surfing owe a massive debt of gratitude for.
