Echoes and George Greenough

Pink Floyd "Echoes" (1973) from the film Crystal Voyager

Crystal Voyager is one of the most beautiful surfing movies ever made, and one of the most successful. It was the first surfing film biography, and the first to concentrate largely on one surfer. Greenough’s innovations had helped revolutionise surfboard design in the 1960s, but the film concentrates on his efforts to capture the perfect surfing footage, from the perfect platform – his own boat.

The film took the surfing road movie, a well-established genre, to the water, with a camera strapped to Greenough’s back. Riding his famous kneeboard – known as 'the spoon’ – Greenough’s footage from under and inside the waves gave the film an extraordinary immediacy.

The final sequence, a 23-minute odyssey, has an almost abstract beauty, aided by an ecstatic song contributed by Pink Floyd. The band had seen his first film, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1970), when it was shown in a Sydney experimental art gallery, The Yellow House. Crystal Voyager was produced and directed by David Elfick, who went on to produce Newsfront.


The Innermost Limits Of Pure Fun- George Greenough (1970)

This release is essential watching because it is a cinematic masterwork of the highest magnitude. In it, George Greenough chronicles ground zero of the shortboard revolution as it evolved in 1968. This highly personalized film is the prime instigators perspective of the innovations that changed surfing forevermore as they came down. Track the inside out with George in groundbreaking point of view sequences that are utterly unique. Experience remote Australia and hidden California as ridden by Mac T, Ted Spencer, Baddy Treolar, Chris Brock, Gary Keys, Russell Hughes and a brigade of the undergrounds best. Revel in the morphic hand hewn artwork of Patty Hennick. Hear the distinctive improvisational soundtrack which was scored on the spot by Dennis Dragon, (before the Surf Punks), his brothers Doug and Daryl, (the Captain before Tennille), and Denny Aaberg, (before Big Wednesday).

Finances entirely with the proceeds generated by Greenoughs fishing business, this document is entirely free of and commercial constraints or advertising sludge. Gritty, witty, unexpurgated, unadorned and essential; this is the first film from the tubes perspective (GreenoughVision). It is the Innermost Limits of Pure Fun.
-C.R. Stecyk