Until a couple of months ago, it would never have occurred to me to review a surfing DVD, as it's a sport that's almost completely foreign to me. However, not long ago I moved to the coast of sunny San Diego, where I can walk to the beach and sit on the sand watching surfers, surfers, and more surfers out on the waves. After a summer of observing waves and the people who ride them, I was willing to take on Kelly Slater in Black and White and see if I could learn anything more about the subculture of surfing.

I can tell you right away: if you don't know who Kelly Slater is, I very much doubt that this 22-minute short film will be of interest to you at all. It's not a documentary so much as a brief glimpse into the life of a top surfer, so if you don't have any context for the material, you won't get any from the film itself.

Made in 1991, Kelly Slater in Black and White offers up snippets of a conversation with the 18-year-old Slater at home, on the beach, and before a major surfing competition. In addition to answering fascinating questions like "Do you like cereal?", Slater offers a few comments on topics like the early stages of his surfing career, and what he likes to do in the off-season. Slater also briefly introduces his friends (with names like "Wooly"), and we get to see snippets of them surfing as well.

But all that's really just filler material: the real point of this film, I think, is the surfing footage. And to its credit, Kelly Slater in Black and White offers plenty of it: we get to see Slater and others tackling a wide variety of waves, from tame 3-footers to monstrous giant waves in Hawaii. The big waves are the most viscerally impressive, but it's perhaps even more amazing to see the moves that Slater can do even on a relatively small wave. In addition to seeing Slater at his best, we also see him wipe out (sometimes spectacularly) on a number of occasions, providing a nice reminder that he just makes it look easy.

Unfortunately, the appeal of the film is diminished by the terrible video quality. This isn't a film that you'll watch for the visuals: the surf footage is really only worth watching to look at the surfers' technique.

The DVD

Video

I always try to cut a little slack for DVDs that are working with less than perfect source material, but at a certain point I just have to say, "This looks awful." Kelly Slater in Black and White appears to be made up of home movies from the early 1990s, and it looks about as bad as you might think. As we might expect from the age of material, it's very soft and lacking in detail. About half of the footage is in black and white (for no apparent reason, I might add), and is coarsely grainy and chunky-looking. As for the color footage... well, for most of it, you'll be squinting to try to distinguish it from the black-and-white material, as it's extremely washed-out. What should be glorious color shots of blue waves and neon surfboards are instead murky, faintly greenish images with occasional hints of color.

Audio

The audio track here is a lossless PCM format rather than Dolby Digital sound, but the potential for a high-quality soundtrack is wasted here. The dialogue ranges in clarity from barely adequate to poor, and on top of that the balance between music and dialogue is badly handled, with the music drowning out the voices at times. The music itself is adequate; it's fairly generic-sounding rock, and while it didn't actively detract from the program, it didn't add a whole lot either.

Extras

There are no special features on the DVD.

Final thoughts

This is a title aimed toward a definite niche audience, so most viewers will probably not be interested. Surfers (or those who enjoy surf movies) will probably find this of at least moderate interest, but the extreme brevity of the program (22 minutes) and the abysmal video quality lead me to suggest it as a rental only.