The Silent World
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| The Silent World | |
|---|---|
 original film poster |
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| Directed by | Jacques-Yves Cousteau Louis Malle |
| Written by | Jacques-Yves Cousteau |
| Release date(s) |  May 1956, (Cannes) 24 September 1956 (NYC only) |
| Running time | 86 min. |
| Language | French |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Silent World (French: Le Monde du silence) is a French documentary film released in 1956, co-directed by the famed French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and a young Louis Malle. The Silent World is noted as one of the first films to use underwater cinematography to show the ocean depths in color.[1] Its title derives from Cousteau's 1954 book of the same name.
The film was shot aboard the ship Calypso. Cousteau and his team of divers shot 25 kilometers of film over two years in the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, of which 2.5 kilometers were included in the finished documentary.
The film later faced criticism for environmental damage done during the filmmaking. In one scene, the crew of Calypso massacre a school of sharks that were drawn to a whale's carcass. In another, Cousteau uses dynamite near a coral reef in order to make a more complete census of the marine life in its vicinity. Cousteau later became involved in marine conservation, and was even called "the father of the environmental movement" by Ted Turner [3].
The Silent World was the first of Cousteau's two documentary films to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the other being World Without Sun in 1964. The film also won the Palme d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, being the only documentary film to win the award until Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 repeated the feat in 2004.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Sesto Continente directed by Folco Quilici and released in 1954, was the first full-length, full-color underwater documentary [1], [2]
[edit] External links
- The Silent World at the Internet Movie Database
- Jacques Cousteau's "The Silent World" by Greg Rubinson at salon.com, July 15, 2002, retrieved February 19, 2006
| Preceded by Helen Keller in Her Story |
Academy Award for Documentary Feature 1956 |
Succeeded by Albert Schweitzer |
| Preceded by Marty |
Palme d'Or 1956 |
Succeeded by Friendly Persuasion |
