Litmus helped shake the surfing world awake to the fact that stylish, flowing surfing didn't fade out with the advent of the tri-finned shortboard, and that the act of surfing itself is far richer than a set of saleable clich s. The film spread the gospel of what has been labelled a 'retro-progressive' school of aesthetic exploration, and what was being practiced by a core avante-garde soon spread all over the world.With the inclusion of Frank's soft-focus, less than perfectly-lit action, Mark Sutherland's anti heroin animation Dream, a hand wrought soundtrack by The Val Dusty Experiment(Kidman, Frank, Sutherland), and an unashamedly opinionated message, the film sounded a chord for a generation of surfers who had become alienated by the way their passion was being represented by the surf media.Litmus was, of course as much a product of the demographic shifts in surfing as a spark that ignited a new, more open minded era within surf culture. But the surf culture that survives to this day, a scene where surfers can ride any sort of board they imagine and be by and large respected for their choices, owes much to Kidman's foresighted exploration of what sort of surfing could be and should be immortalised on screen. But the truly lasting influence of Litmus just might be the ambience, the elevated mood and the meditative approach that Kidman took to making a film about surfing.