This review is part of Honi Soit’s continued coverage of the 71st Sydney Film Festival, 5-16 June. Read the rest of our reviews here.
In many ways, it feels like Jolyon Hoff’s You Should Have Been Here Yesterday (2023) is an important film. It documents and draws from an important period of Australian film history; the underground surf films of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; movies like To Ride a White Horse (1968), or Children of the Sun (1971). I knew this, and that’s why I wanted to go and see it. Although these films are significant in what they document — the start of Australian surf culture — and in what they are, early and idiosyncratically Australian independent films that few people seem to know about, and they are difficult to watch.
The film begins with a brief present-day sequence, of someone viewing and splicing a reel of film, before we are plunged into archival footage, taken from the films of the 1960s-1980s. This footage is beautiful — 16mm shots of surfers in remote beaches, of the sun rising and setting, and imagery of the water on its own. It’s good that the visuals are gorgeous, because this, largely, is all we see for 81 minutes. If you have no interest in videos of surfers, this is not the movie for you.
As we watch these images, we hear the voices of various people who were a part of surf culture, of the films we are watching. They are kept offscreen until the end, which is an effective ploy.
You Should Have Been Here Yesterday proceeds in segments. We learn about surfing’s early history in Australia, surfer’s “discovery” of Indonesia, the introduction of drugs into the culture, the commercialisation of surfing, and the role women played. This is effective for the most part, but at times feels slightly trite, and is not particularly narratively compelling.
Women are largely unrepresented in the film until we reach their “segment” and we hear briefly about and from “Marjorie Ma Bendell,” a woman who was born in 1910 and who began surfing at the age of 50. This is an amazing story, but we hear very little about her. In the film’s attempt to provide a survey of a whole culture, individual stories are lost. This is somewhat inevitable, a result of the movie’s scope, but it does make it slightly less engaging as a story.
Hoff’s film is less a movie about surf movies than a surf movie itself — none of the insight provided by the off-screen interviewees is all that shocking or new — too many drugs are bad, more people surf now than they used to, the people that made these surf movies were young and free and felt like they were a part of something. We also don’t learn that much about how or why the original surf movies were made. A brief sequence depicting a screening and people putting up posters is all we get. The film comes tantalisingly close to exploring the cultural significance of the original movies it draws from, but it stops just short.
Almost all the footage we see is archival, and it is attributed to the original directors, though obviously re-edited. One slight frustration is that the viewer can’t tell which techniques were used by the “original” filmmakers, and which were used by Hoff in making the film. Double exposures, step printing, and creative intercutting abound, but is this Hoff trying to give us an impression of the original film’s creativity, or is this actually the creativity of the original films? This remains unclear.
Hoff’s film is beautiful, and great as a “primer” film, but when it ended I was left wanting to watch the original movies. This feels like a shortcoming in some ways, and a huge success in others. It does a wonderful job of conveying the heady excitement of the era it depicts, but it feels ironically constricted by its ambition. But is a definitive film about something as intangible as surfing even something we would want? I doubt it.
It felt telling that the first question Hoff was asked as a part of the Sydney Film Festival Q-and-A was, what happened to the scans they made of the original films? Good news, then: The Surf Film Archive has devoted itself to the preservation of this slice of Australian film history, though unfortunately only clips are available for viewing on their website.
If Hoff’s subject eclipses his film, so be it.
