189 South

SURF REPORT


10 February 2010

The jerk working the line at the Arlington looked around in mock-frustration at the masses in front of the theater and said loudly: “ Why are the crowds so hard to manage when we have a surf flick?”
Phaneuf and I hear this like the starter’s pistol for the 100 word dash.
“ Uh, maybe because it’s best to ignore each other when we’re in large crowds.”
“ He should know by now that most surfers have an aversion to authority.”
“ Is this the line for a movie? We just want a burrito.”
“ The lineup is always like this when the surf is small.”
Dada-adada-ya-da.
Judging by the age and demeanor of the crowd, few expected the usual surf-flick skatepark-at-sea entertainment, full of snaps, punting aerials and busy daring-do. When confusing a pack of model citizens, however sun-burnished, for rowdies, the jerk was accidentally complimentary, and having some fun at his own expense.
Surfers waiting in line could empathize with the guy’s surprise. The world premier for Chris Malloy’s beautiful 180 South brought in a huge SRO audience, the largest by far to attend a 2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival event.
The film is an elegy to place, capturing feelings like reverence and joy in its visual selectivity, teaching without preaching, and mediated by a nicely unintrusive sound track.
180 South follows a hallowed forty-year template cut by passionate wilderness existentialists Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins when they traveled south overland from California to southern Chile in 1968. Footage from the documentary of the original 1968 trip, Mountain of Storms, is occasionally cut into 180 South. The first film seems worth being revived, according to people who have seen it. Surfing and mountaineering their way south, the trip and the spirit that brought it off blueprints the irresistible lifestyle now followed by legions, including the voyagers of 180 South. Relating to that inspiration is easy: a long trip down Baja California I made in the same year began my own forty-year enchantment with nature.
The 1968 journey made by Chouinard and Tompkins assured the social path the 180 South participants would choose later, championing the environment, being faithful to the spirit of discovery, unwilling to yield to the status quo. In 180 South, Chris Malloy elected to have chief protagonist Jeff Johnson travel by boat, perhaps knowing that retracing a 5,000 mile land trek would lead to 10 movies, not just one. Johnson personifies the kind of unrepentant thrillseeker that the charismatic Chouinard and Tompkins were and still are. At the age of seventy, Chouinard impulsively joins the climbing team headed upriver. Johnson, an environmentalist documentarian, is only just one part-time job away from another life-affirming adventure.
According to many of the people who created the film, 180 was hard to get done because it seemed to keep on creating itself: what happens inadvertently on the journey, like the breaking of the boat’s mast en route to Chile, ushers sudden content into the mix that could not be ignored. The dismasting creates an unforeseen opportunity to introduce important philosophical structure for the key theme in the film and leads to the addition of an important character in the story. The delay for repairs on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), causes the climbers to fail in reaching their ultimate goal, the peak of Corcovado in Patagonia, because the snow has melted on the now-crumbling crag when they finally arrive.
What began as a documentary becomes more of a personal drama that gradually becomes a warning against continuing the rapacious resource destruction wrought by cancerous cities against the surrounding wilderness. Rapa Nui’s Makohe, the impulsive athlete who joins the crew of the Sea Bear, exemplifies the apogee of a natural human, whose life within the wild is seamless, uncomplicated by Western culture. The story of her island’s antecedents serves as a perfect allegory for the world-wide despoilation of the environment. The tragedy of Rapa Nui which was mindlessly destroyed by its inhabitants long before Western discovery, underscores the seriousness of global circumstances once only perceived by a handful of iconoclasts. To give formal emphasis to the relevance of the island disaster, Malloy effectively references the Rapa Nui chapter in Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse.
Chouinard and Tompkins’ 1968 trip was both motivation for the new film and prism for the present: 180 South is an eloquent call for all of us to work to save wild places. The principals are drawn down a southern line to less complicated and cluttered places, both then and now. They independently discover the clean clarity of wild seas and pristine Andean peaks never visited but by guanacos and condors. Doug Tompkins, founder of both North Face and Esprit, is so devoted to this part of the world he is spending his fortune on its preservation. Chouinard lends his estimable credentials to the project. Over two million acres have been acquired, which Tompkins intends to turn over to the governments of Argentina and Chile if they can guarantee the land will not be violated. Yet Conservacion Patagonica is assailed on all sides by pulp mills and hydroelectric dam projects which bring broad havoc to an unspoiled ecosystem.
Malloy’s film gets its title from a recent comment by Tompkins, who suggested that when facing unredeemable change to the environment, only one choice remains: “ When you get to the edge of the precipice, you can still move forward by doing a 180. Turn around and take the next step forward.”