Le monde du silence

Beautifully shot, colorful and swift, but OH BOY is this a documentary that hasn't aged well.

Over the course 88 minutes we see Mr Cousteau and his boys basically torture their way through the sea. It's a bad time for everything from sea turtles, baby whales, sharks and lobsters.

Thanks but no thanks to this parade of human arrogance.

Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World) is based on the best-selling book of the same name by famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Set on board--and below--the good ship Calypso during an exploratory expedition, this feature-length documentary was co-directed by Cousteau and Louis Malle, whose first film this was (Cousteau selected Malle for this assignment immediately upon the latter's graduation from film school). Highlights include a shark attack on the carcass of a whale, and the discovery of a wrecked, sunken vessel. After winning adulation and awards at the Cannes Film Festival, Le Monde du Silence went on to claim an Academy Award. Much of the breathtaking underwater camera-work was photographed personally by Louis Malle, who thereafter confined his film-making activities to dry land.

See the underwater world through the eyes the divers of the Calipso and Jacques Yves Cousteau and Dumas.

This was Cousteau's first feature-length documentary film, which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, as well as an Oscar for best documentary, and became a true artistic landmark. Fascinating from its first frames, which show five divers descending through the blue expanse of the ocean. Each carries a bright flare, blazing a path of light into the murky ocean depths as a cascade of bubbles rises to the surface in their wake. "This is a motion-picture studio 65 feet under the sea," announces the narrator. These are Cousteau's "menfish" -- divers who, thanks to the aqualung, have gained the motility of creatures born to live in the sea.

They go deeper, to 200 feet, and enter what Cousteau calls "the world of rapture." At this depth, the body cannot process the increased levels of nitrogen in the bloodstream, and divers suffer from "nitrogen narcosis" -- an instantaneous intoxication that, Cousteau tells us, causes the coral to assume "nightmare shapes".

They dive deeper still, to 247 feet, and film the deepest shot ever taken at that time by a cameraman.

The latest precision cameras... the deepest dive yet filmed...' Things change, though. Whereas this was regarded at the time as irreproachable, improving, suitable for classroom bookings, the good Captain Cousteau and his all-male ensemble come across now, in 1998, as an aggravating lot, in their once natty '50s swimwear, amusing themselves by straddling giant turtles and turning them into agonising 'comic relief', or filling the screen with torrents of blood as they slaughter a passing school of sharks ('All sailors hate sharks'). On the other hand, the film-makers' intermittent poetic ambitions are strikingly justified as the cameras explore the wreck of a torpedoed freighter, the commentary becoming an elegy for the lost ship and her crew. The movie has acquired a further dimension as an apprentice work by co-director Louis Malle, though students of his oeuvre will need ingenuity to relate this to anything he made subsequently.

There is some amazing footage on this. The bell of a shipwreck is cleaned to reveal its identity 'The Thistlegorm'. Watch Dumas dancing with a giant grouper. See the team experience narcosis whilst catching lobsters below 60M!

If you have read the book of the same name you will have imagined the excitement and wonder that Cousteau and his team felt during their pioneering expeditions. Now you have a chance to see for yourself the original footage of Cousteau's adventures

"The Silent World" has left me with the same puzzlement than that first Mickey Mouse classic, the first cartoon with synchronized sound, you know, "Steamboat Willie". That the two milestones are set above the water isn't the point, the point is in the cruel treatment animals get all through the journey. And keep in mind, one is a cartoon and the other is praised for its ecological values. In fact, my puzzlement had a lot to do with my expectations, but the reputation of "The Silent World" is likely to set them high.

The 1956 documentary featured the first Technicolor underwater shots made possible thanks to great water-proof cams combined with Jacques-Yves Cousteau innovative scuba diving equipment. The iconic Commandant and soon-to-be ecological icon has always been revered as the early defender of environment at a time where global warming and ecosystem didn't even belong to the dictionary. The film was the directorial debut of Louis Malle, whose body of works includes "My Dinner With Andre", "Atlantic City" and "Au Revoir les Enfants". Last but not least, the film won the Golden Palm at Cannes Festival and the Oscar for Best Documentary. In a certain way, "The Silent World" exuded cinematic respectability from every drop of water the Calypso sailed over.

Even the title was the promise of some magnificent shots under the sea where we would be transported into the majestic beauty that dominates a few leagues under the sea and discover the fauna and flora with only the sound of bubbles pouring or the diver's breathing in the background, you know a more Bergmanian version of National Geographic stuff. But what we get in "The Silent World" is a world that is anything but silent, it's about a bunch of explorers aboard the Calypso, sailing over the Indian Ocean. Guys who wander in the boat wearing swimming trunks, smoking cigarettes and not acting like the noble-hearted environmentalists we expect. Sure, they are experts in diving and the film fulfills its documentary value by educating us on the origins of scuba diving and such but these are not the parts the Captain-Planet generation will most remember.

I still have the dynamiting of the reef in mind, the only way to number the sea population, what an odd irony, killing creatures to identify the living. There's another scene where a diver uses a brave tortoise to move into water and almost complains that he had to abandon it when it was out of breath. I guess this is all preparing us to the infamous encounter with the sperm whales, and when a baby whale goes under the boat and gets torn up by the propeller, "because it was careless, like a kid" says the narrator, his long agony is shown, someone tries to harpoon it but the only way to end its misery is to shoot it in the head, and it's shown in close-up. Pretty hardcore. But this is nothing, the bleeding whale attracts dozens of sharks, and when the narrator says that "sharks are the mortal enemies of sailors" (unlike the dolphins who're like their pals), you know the worst is to come.

The Calypso crew literally rail at them. It's a live massacre that didn't seem to bother anyone by the time of the film's release and that even Cousteau regretted later, you see the so-called environmentalist display such a high level of violence, hitting, harpooning, disfiguring the sharks, that a PETA member would call them Animal Nazis or Apocalypso. So, give Spielberg a break, he didn't start that whole trend against sharks. This is the climactic display of violence, only followed by the discovery of giant tortoises in an Island, and at that point of the film, we're not even surprised to see them sitting on them and smoking cigarettes. The film is to documentary what "Tintin in Congo" is to comic-books, if you're not familiar with this album, never mind, you don't miss much.

The film ends with a friendlier encounter with a grouper nicknamed Jojo but even the narrator has a sense of condescension toward the animal, and it seems that "The Silent World" is about men who loved the sea but didn't treat its inhabitants with equal respect, there was still that 'distrust' and ancestral hatred pumping in their macho veins… and as strange as it sounds, maybe it's all these controversial characteristics that made "The Silent World" an interesting film, it didn't try to play the documentary card, it just was a honest and bold reflection of its time, and the guys there were no environmentalists, or ecologists, but adventurers as flawed and disrespectful as treasure hunters.

It's obvious that the world of sea would be better left without humans, I was just watching these disaster documentaries, one about the future of the planet if there were no humans, and if the Earth stopped spinning. In both cases, fish species wouldn't suffer much, on the contrary. So it's obvious that men had an impact on the oceans and we're doomed already, it's been 10 years since we've been briefed about this inconvenient truth. It's certain that we have enough documentaries to look with hypocritically tearing eyes at how the sea used to be. But when I had "The Silent World" in mind, I was expecting this kind of documentaries, it wasn't, but strangely enough, it was entertaining in its own wicked way.

So, for its controversial content that reflects the behavior of men that prevailed even within the context of a respect toward the environment, for its lack of moral consensus and its rather acid and condescending tone, "The Silent World" has the appeal of these controversial milestones, a shocker but a necessary one. I wasn't prepared for how awful some parts would be, but this is what makes it so interesting, the film doesn't leave you indifferent, and still, some underwater shots are breathtaking.

"The Silent World" is an Academy Award-winning documentary from directors Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle. It helped to introduce many around the world to ocean exploration and for that we should be grateful. That being said, as a certified diver, I realize that the groundbreaking film will no doubt horrify many viewers today, as sensibilities have definitely changed. The nice conservation-oriented crew of the Calypso from the 1970s and 80s is no where to be found! Instead, this earlier version of Cousteau and his team are at best irresponsible! As you see them travel the world, they commit atrocity after atrocity all in the name of science!! If you think I am being overly sensitive, try justifying them dynamiting a coral reef in order to 'get an accurate count of the fish', running over a baby whale and then harpooning and shooting it and THEN murdering the many sharks that then come to feed on the whale carcass!!! By today's standards, it's completely insane and I must say I had to speed through the shark-killing orgy as seeing crew members with axes bashing the crap out of the creatures was upsetting! You also see the crew destroying stretches of turtle grass, harassing a sea turtle, riding atop tortoises, petting fish, you name it...all the things they now tell people NEVER to do!

In addition to all this senseless violence, the film also lacks a cohesive plot as well as scientific rigor. The bottom line is that the film is seriously passe now....and you'd be a lot better off watching the much more responsible and interesting reruns of "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau" from the 1960s and 70s.

In the mid-fifties, Jacques-Yves Cousteau was already famous and on the way to becoming a veritable institution. Cinema was an important element in gaining popularity, through the various short films (such as Épaves) that he made throughout the 1940s. The step forward, towards a work of greater brilliance, needed to be taken, corresponding after all to the status it already possessed and which could well be translated into the acquisition of the Calypso, the legendary ship specially equipped by the French navy for the Groupe d'Etudes et des Recherches Sousmarines directed by Cousteau. And that step forward was this Le Monde du Silence, chronicle of a great Calypso expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society: Cousteau's first feature film, and his first color film - beautiful colors, the copy to be shown render full justice. Given the unprecedented nature of the experience, and because it was no longer compatible with the "artisanal" amateurism of some of his short films, Cousteau recruited the very young Louis Malle (he was then 23 years old) to oversee issues more directly related to cinematographic technique. (ending up recognizing him as the "co-author" of the film, since it was Malle who conceived most of the "dry" scenes), and chose Edmond Séchan as director of photography, who had worked with Albert Lamorisse (the director of Le Ballon Rouge) and was used to shooting under extraordinary circumstances.

As anyone who has seen Épaves will easily see, this increase in ambition translates into significant differences, not all of which lead to entirely positive results. From a technical point of view, it is obvious that the sea in Le Monde du Silence is much more spectacular, restored in all its polychrome, and guaranteeing moments that will not fail to fascinate the spectator who is usually more insensitive to "beautiful images". But, if we gain this, we may lose some of the "poetic" spontaneity of Épaves or of other of those early films, Paysages du Silence: contrary to what happened in them, in Le Monde du Silence Cousteau's didactic and scientific responsibilities now occupy the first flat, leaving little room for purely lyrical daydreaming. One can feel a greater adherence to reality (and to the "realism" of a mimetic tendency) and this results in a sea that is certainly much more beautiful but, with equal certainty, much colder. And one also feels (a reflection of Cousteau's status and ambitions) that the sea is no longer the only protagonist, having a strong rival in Calypso himself, in his crew and logically in the figure of Cousteau: we perceive it when the we see it in a work of "self-iconization", looking at the sea with a pipe in its mouth, or when the camera is more fascinated by the "gadgets" available to the team (the underwater "scooters", for example) than by the surrounding scenery.

On the other hand, it remains true that Le Monde du Silence faithfully fulfills its pedagogical purposes, in addition to having more than enough moments to justify the expectations that were naturally created around Cousteau's first production of this dimension. There are rare episodes, some curious (even at the level of mere scientific "fait-divers", such as the sequence of catching the lobsters), others more violent (the beautiful submarine "travelling" over the dead fish after the dynamite explosion on the reef of coral). But the film's greatest virtue resides in the fact that Cousteau, while still celebrating the harmony of nature (note the amazing shots of the birth of the baby turtles), does not fall into that idyllic vision that so often undermines projects with these characteristics. There is a brutal and savage dimension to nature that Cousteau does not forget to focus on: the best and most impressive moment of Le Monde du Silence will therefore be the whole sequence of the accidental death of the young whale (caught by the Calypso's propellers), whose blood attracts the shoal of sharks that will eventually devour it. Without subterfuge, nature reveals itself (also) in all its horror.