Le monde du silence

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

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.

MUST-SEE viewing for any 'adult' that caught Wes Anderson's send-up of the Cousteau crew earlier this year in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." If anything, this early documentary proves that the actual Cousteau crew was even more outlandish than Bill Murray's gang.

One politically incorrect scene in particular shows the crew pulling sharks out of the ocean and beating them to death with clubs, while nightly dining includes plenty of fresh SEAFOOD! The major project of the expedition is the mapping of the ocean floor using advanced sonar, but in between the crew stays busy exploring the ocean and occasionally 'interfering' with the habits of the local sea creatures.

You'd never see this kind of disrespectful attitude in a National Geographic docu today and in a way it's kind of refreshing to see that these guys are not infallible.

One note to those with sensitive stomachs, there is a scene where the Calypso 'accidentally' runs over a baby whale and the resulting wound turns the ocean bright red forcing the crew to capture the whale and administer a 'kill shot' in order to put it out of it's misery.

Parents might want to think twice about bringing kids to see this rather graphic look at ocean research and some of its inherent dangers.

"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.

Louis Malle directs Jacques-Yves Cousteau in a nature documentary. He follows Cousteau and his crew on the Calypso as they explore the underwater world. This would win many awards. It's the first full length theatrical movie for Cousteau and quite frankly for Louis Malle as a director. It's informative but it is the spectacular ocean footage that truly amazes. They still don't know about the different layers in the water column at that time. I would do something slightly different with the music. The dynamite and dead fish are distressing. They keep running over whales. It's bad. The baby whale is bad. The shark slaughter is even worst and has not aged well at all. Sometimes, these guys act like drunken frat boys. All I've got to say is that it's a different time and they don't do that anymore. In the end, this sets the bar high for future nature documentary.