Bustin' Down the Door

Seeing this documentary was a really intriguing view of the development of professional surfing from a personal point of view- through the eyes of those who were forming it. This sparked in my mind a connection to the memory encoding and retrieval topics that are currently being discussed in my Cognitive Science course. I was taught that very day that memories are reconstructed, they're not an exact movie reel of your perceptions. Memories are a combination of the real event that happened, prior knowledge, post knowledge and imagination. The interviewees were all able to discuss about the same topics because there is the true episode of what happened in their memory. But when one person had a memory the others didn't, or if a memory had been skewed in one way or another, it doesn't necessarily mean that this one person wasn't there or had a different view of the scene, his memory may have simply reconstructed itself differently. I find this to be an interesting point to add to this and most documentaries because they are from these people's memories. How might their memories be skewed? How might their telling of the same story have been morphed or shifted because of a reconstructed memory? It was a thought that adjusted my point of view while hearing all of these memory tellings in the film.

On a completely different note, I couldn't help but to contrast this week's film, Bustin' Down the Door, with last week's film, Morning of the Earth. Bustin' Down the Door presents the immersion of Australians into the Californian and Hawaiian surf scenes and their critical development in making surfing the professional sport that it is today. They brought money into the sport based on, as Morning of the earth shows, a personal and spiritual connection with the waves and the Earth as a whole. Morning of the Earth presents surfing as a personal experience. It shows the simplicity of living in a less developed country, living as simply and as Earth conscious as possible. This seeming dichotomy struck a note in my mind: How would the surfers in Morning of the Earth view the commercial surfing scene as it has become today through the active work of the surfers interviewed in Bustin' Down the Door?  How strongly do the surfers of Bustin' Down the Door have the same personal and spiritual connection to the Earth and the waves as compared to the surfers in Morning of the Earth? Does all of this show a split in the seemingly unanimous mentality of the surfing scene?