The Silent World (1956) User Reviews

This movie must be viewed in the context of its time

[seer-2 · 8/10 · 11 June 2010]

While I understand Badge's deep concern for what is portrayed in this film regarding what we now consider serious mistreatment of the creatures from our oceans, this film must be viewed from its historical context. I am old enough to have seen it when it was first released, and to have been awe inspired by it. Cousteau and his crew were pioneers, entering a world few knew at that time... and even fewer (including the Captain) knew how to treat. It just can't be viewed and judged properly with the benefit of today's understanding of our ocean.

More than a decade later I was a practicing marine biologist and killed sharks myself, some for research, some for their flesh and skins (to tan) and some just for the heck of it. Despite claiming to be an environmentalist, we saw little wrong with most of that since sharks had been given a black eye by the media (even prior to "Jaws") and at the time they were so plentiful in my local waters. No one foretold at that time how we would devastate them and impact ecosystems from shallow sandy bays to tropical coral reefs.

It was early Cousteau films like this that led many in my generation to pursue SCUBA diving as a career, and often work for the cause of ocean conservation. I was fortunate enough to work for JYC and his son Jean-Michel during the 1985 filming of one of his TBS episodes in the "Rediscovery of the World" series. By that time Cousteau and many of us who loved his work, had developed real concern for the oceans that grew out of what was revealed to him and what he revealed to us over the decades.

Visually breathtaking, culturally significant but ecologically incorrect...

[ElMaruecan82 · 7/10 · 7 September 2016]

"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.

Steve Zissou fans UNITE!!!

[SONNYK_USA · 7/10 · 25 June 2005]

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.

Cousteau should have hung his head in shame

[Badge · 13 November 2006]

I was looking forward to finally catching up with this old documentary and was saddened to see that despite the advances in underwater photography (in 1955), which brought the undersea life vividly to the screen, that every other aspect of the film was embarrassingly dated. I am referring specifically to the appalling behavior of the crew of the Calypso who bear scant resemblance to any naturalists and scientists we know of today, without an ounce of respect for the animals they encounter. Who in their right mind would set off dynamite in a lagoon, destroying coral reef and killing countless numbers of fish?? The only wildlife that gets off unscathed are the dolphins in the early part of the film – otherwise, everything else that gets in the path of the "explorers" is eaten, tormented, or killed outright: when they see a whale they rush on deck to harpoon it; when sharks start to work on the whale carcass, the men haul shark after shark on deck and feverishly beat them to death under the (highly scientific) rationale that "everybody hates sharks"; when they find a giant sea turtle they clutch on to it for a ride without any concern that it is struggling to the surface to breathe; when they find a group of tortoises on an island their only thoughts are to first stand on them and then use them for stools while they have lunch. Even good old Cousteau gets into the spirit of things by bringing his rifle on deck and shooting a whale in the head (well, it was probably suffering after they ran over it with the boat and then later harpooned it).

These guys would be up on criminal charges if they'd made this film today. Worth watching only as a historical curio to see how unenlightened people were back then.

Breathtaking Movie

[wh0dare5 · 9/10 · 17 March 2005]

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

It's time to break my silence. I kinda dislike this Jacque Costeau's documentary.

[ironhorse_iv · 6/10 · 11 October 2019]

Although this 1956 live action adaptation of the 1953 book, 'The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure' is one of the first motion pictures to use underwater cinematography to show the ocean depths in color. The documentary contained so much animal cruelty that I felt I was watching a vicious snuff film rather than a conservation piece. Shot aboard his ship the Calypso. The environmental damage done to the ocean and sea life during the two years of filming was just disturbing. First off, divers use dynamite on a coral reef knowing full well that it's deadly and illegal. Their excuse of making a more complete census of the marine life in its vicinity is lame. Even for the 1950s, it's better off to use autonomous reef-monitoring structures (ARMS) to study the species that inhabit coral reefs than blasting them to kingdom come. I get that these structures take nearly a year to form wildlife, but using dynamite prevents adjacent coral colonies to recover in the long run. I just surprised that the crew didn't get arrested or fine for such an act. Another scene that really bug me is how the divers use sea turtles as transportation, holding onto them and riding as the turtles struggle to break free and get to the surface to breathe. Even on land, Cousteau's men are jerks, as they ride around on the turtles and use them as stools. You can clearly see that the animals is distress. Yet the movie plays it off as silly fun. However, the worst thing the crew did has to be accidently driving the ship to close to a pod of sperm whales; injuring one and causing the death of another by lacerating its skin. All because they wanted a closer view. This is downright incompetence. They didn't follow any of the rules of whale watching such as keeping down to a minimize speed, avoiding sudden turns & most of all, do not pursue, encircle or come in between the whales. I should had saw this ineffectiveness coming from a mile away. After all, the crew of the Calypso did coerce dolphins into bow-riding earlier in the film. To make it worst, in the following scene, Cousteau's seamen massacre a group of sharks that were drawn to the carcass of a baby whale, just because the school was hungry for meat and the crew viewed them as pest. Those graphic and bloody beat down scenes kinda remind me of 2009 documentary 'The Cove'. It's hard to watch as the animal clearly didn't do anything wrong. Sharks are not a nuisance. They help the environment by ensuring species diversity and keeping the carbon cycle in motion. It's really wrong to kill them like that. Thank goodness later Cousteau gain a more environmentally conscious, as his following films 1964 'World Without Sun' & 1976 'Voyage to the Edge of the World' were a lot less destructed. Regardless, I still surprised that Cousteau won a Palme d'Or award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival & an Academy Award for this movie. The documentary has some really awkwardly funny staged moments with really bad acting with really tight and short swimwear. A good example of this is the lobster hunting scene. It felt like a softcore gay porno at times with all the scenes with the men with their shirts off. It was hilarious looking. Don't get me wrong, the film does have some amazing not sexual gorgeous moments as well, such as scouting the shipwreck and the scenes with the friendly grouper. However, the sequence with the rapture didn't really show much. As for being informative. The documentary has its moments. Nevertheless, I would like more of Cousteau's men to demonstrate the effectiveness of scuba gear over old-timey diving suits. That's probably one of the best moments in the film. I like how there is two versions of this French film. One is with English dubbing, while the other has the subtitles. Either way, overall: 'The Silent World' didn't make quite a splash with me. Nevertheless, I do see its appeal with audience members to the point that it was the basis for the acclaimed 2004 Wes Anderson movie 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou'. I just like his later works better. In the end, this is one silent world not worth revisiting.

Great historic undersea documentary

[mulvenna · 10/10 · 26 January 2005]

I remember seeing this first Cousteau documentary when it came out and being totally enthralled. No one had shown use of aqualungs before, and compared to the previously used helmets with air hoses and cables, the amount of freedom allowed the divers was amazing. It opened up a whole new exotic world and made trips to the beach a lot more exciting. Compare this to the old Lloyd Bridges Sea Hunt TV show and there is no comparison - what can you do with those old cables and hoses attached? And besides, Cousteau was a master. I hope the Cousteau Society comes out with DVDs of this and other early works in my lifetime. English or subtitled. Fifty years is a long time to wait for a second viewing.

Louis Malle and Jacques Cousteau

[SnoopyStyle · 7/10 · 23 June 2022]

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.

Forgotten Gem

[mben111 · 10/10 · 13 January 2016]

This visually stunning masterpiece by the great undersea explorer, and co-directed by a young Louis Malle, is one of the most gorgeous films ever made. With his revolutionary equipment, Cousteau was able to capture the eerie majesty of the ocean and its mysterious inhabitants with vibrant, dazzling color. It's no wonder to me how this film won the Palm d'Or and an Oscar because it is probably the best filmed documentary ever.

The focus on the new technology and the lives of the shipmates was even more fascinating than the nature, particularly the more violent scenes like the butchering of the sharks by the sailors or the dynamite in the water, used to discover the diversity of fish in the area. It is for this reason, I would guess, that this film has been forgotten and the animal rights movements of today would likely shun the film. Still, I hope for a resurgence of "The Silent World", and all Cousteau films for that matter.

Murderously fun!

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 1 April 2017]

"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.

Award winning animal cruelty

[fredrickcarlsson · 3/10 · 7 January 2021]

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.

The Dark (and Silent) Side of Science

[rolotomasi_70-398-336619 · 1/10 · 18 November 2012]

Both Le Monde du Silence and Le Monde Sans Soleil are remarkable documents of the underwater world. At this time, during the fifties, very little was known about coral reefs, sea creatures, and the sheer profusion of life beneath the ocean's surface. Cousteau and his crew go a long way (indeed dedicated their lives) to allowing us a glimpse of this fascinating world. Yet, there are scenes in both films which seem to pride themselves upon this human mastery over other creatures, and the destruction of their habitat. Whether sledge hammering at coral walls, or tormenting fish by enclosing them within a glass box, or dispersing chemicals in the sea as 'harmless waste', or simply killing a wide variety of creatures in the least humane way possible (appal to appeal), all in the name of learning, there comes a point when I simply switch off and think to myself: Were scientists really that dumb in the fifties? How can anyone watch this and think Cousteau (and his cronies) great pioneers of 'knowing' (science)? Of course, not all scientists were that dumb. But there are always exceptions. Recently, we could see this, at least televisually, with the Australian 'tormentor of beasts' Steve Irwin who, when his karmic credit finally ran out, was stung to death by a manta ray he was attempting to toy with for the sake of his Channel 5 program.

It's curious, more than slightly ironic, that the following year the best documentary award was handed to Jerome Hill for his moving portrait of the Alsatian polymath Albert Schweitzer. Cousteau, irrespective of how he popularised the underwater world (I shall not enumerate the crimes that have been carried out under the pretext of 'scientific endeavour'), would have done well to have been acquainted with Schweitzer's work, and above all the 'ethics' that Schweitzer extolled. "A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives." When science (and exploration) 'shrinks' from ethics, when it just becomes an excuse to gain more knowledge and 'better understanding' (does understanding even come in degrees?) that will invariably rationalise post-factum the deeds we have done, it has already debased itself and become the way forward for a race of people who have lost their entitlement to the nomenclature 'human'.

Watch only if you enjoy animal tourture

[ConradSeba · 1/10 · 19 October 2021]

Screw this guy! He must be a pioneer but he was also cruel and merciless with the animals. Here they kill fish with dynamite, a whale with the propeller of the boat, sharks jus because, eat lovesters like there is no tomorrow, and basically molest every single animal the find around. Just a disturbing documentary (if you can call it that) to see.

Le Horror du Silence

[lodey-1 · 1/10 · 4 April 2024]

We watched with such glee the later Cousteau's of the 80's from our thrift find dvd boxset. Each night an episode, until the last dvd we realized that it was not an episode but the movie!

And as the movie progressed we watched with lot's of uneasy questionmarks (all of the harrasing and destroying) and finally we just watched with plain horror (all of the slaughtering)...as the other reviewers have described the scenes, it is insane to witness this. What was this man doing that we watched with such pleasure..? Our scientist and animal/nature-lover was not so scientificy and not so lovingly to say the least! We were dumbstruck. How a man can change? From bombing a reef to making sure his anchor is not going to damage or hit the reef in any way.

People say: "You have to see it in that time". Or that it still serves education, that is true in a way. It really shows how dumb we were back then. I think we had enough Cousteau's for now.

Without subterfuge, Le monde du silence reveals itself (also) in all its horror.

[jordison-23652 · 5/10 · 18 January 2023]

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.

Great value, sadly kept low by great flaws

[I_Ailurophile · 5/10 · 24 January 2023]

This isn't quite the movie I thought it was going to be, and sadly, I don't mean that in a good way. It's unfortunate that the pure intent of this picture, the showcase of underwater life, landscapes, and exploration, is paired with recognition that some of the practices seen here were very harmful to the environment and wildlife. There's a carelessness to some events, outright thoughtlessness, or undeniable gratuitous cruelty, that's abjectly appalling and runs absolutely counter to the work Jacques Cousteau is known for. While I'm sure there are incidents of a kind in much more recent projects, none immediately come to mind, and even if there were, that hardly excuses what we witness here. I suppose it's true that even those renowned for their advocacy can make mistakes, and may come to their progressive outlook by learning how they have been wrong, but still the matter is a looming mark against the movie in the annals of both cinema and science, and dampens what this could have ideally been.

While it's not nearly so serious a fault, it's also noteworthy that for those familiar with other documentaries, especially those capturing the natural world, 'The silent world' is anything but hushed. Many scenes are emphatically staged, specifically putting on a show for the camera rather than exhibiting the oceans in their totally natural element, or the crew as they go about their daily duties. Not that we don't get those, too, mind you. Yet compared to modern conceptions of similar fare, there's a peculiar aspect of good-humored insincerity that contrasts sharply with the honest stated purpose, applying even to Yves Baudrier's original score that's often almost cartoonishly dramatic and out of place. As a frame of reference, this feels more like those loose-form docuseries on TV (Animal Planet, Discovery Channel), in which the presenters are unflaggingly enthusiastic if not downright bombastic, than earnest documentary projects like the BBC's 'Planet Earth.' It gets to the point that one is led to question, for example, if the divers really are seeing such and such a location for the first time, and the life that has taken it over, or if they're just letting us think they are. This would certainly be bad enough if not for the fact that we're led to question at other times if the crew of the Calypso really were the detached, well-meaning, water-loving scientists they proclaimed themselves to be.

Such facets are immensely, profoundly regrettable, for they severely detract from what should be an engaging, informative, awe-inspiring experience. There is, truly, some fabulous value that 'The silent world' can claim, not least of all the underwater color cinematography of Philippe Agostino. His contribution in and of itself is generally a wonder to behold, and altogether brilliant at times, nevermind its rather groundbreaking place in the history of the medium. It goes without saying that the sights the cameras give us are mostly just as terrific, primarily the visions of marine wildlife and ecosystems to which prior examples can surely scarcely hold a candle. The more innocent instances of the crew's interactions with sea life and their environs are touching or altogether heartwarming, and while the authenticity of scenes aboard the Calypso are in doubt, in theory it's interesting to see a bit of the day to day operations Cousteau and his fellows undertake between ventures below. To show the world the beauty of the oceans is an admirable endeavor, and I very much appreciate what 'The silent world' has to offer in that capacity, well exceeding any spiritual predecessors.

Would that this particular effort were characterized by more mindful care, and more heartfelt genuineness, in pursuing that goal. I don't doubt the intentions of Cousteau in the 1950s, only his methods, and unhappily, I'm of the opinion that as we see them here those methods rival those intentions, if not overshadow them. I still believe this is quite worth watching: for fans of Cousteau and what he would come to represent, for fans of co-director Louis Malle, for lovers of the oceans or the natural world, for avid moviegoers and documentary enthusiasts. It's also, however, worth watching as a teachable moment of what Cousteau and his crew did wrong in their expeditions, and maybe too of what tone to not strike with a documentary. In and of itself this feature isn't bad - only, it's so significantly weighed down by its shortcomings that as far as I'm concerned it becomes a hard sell, especially almost 70 years on when there are many other options to obtain the same value. Watch 'The silent world,' by all means, but watch it with knowledge of what it provides, both good and bad.