The Silent World

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The Silent World

original film poster
Directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Louis Malle
Written by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Release date(s) Flag of France May 1956, (Cannes)
Flag of United States 24 September 1956 (NYC only)
Running time 86 min.
Language French
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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

  1. ^ Sesto Continente directed by Folco Quilici and released in 1954, was the first full-length, full-color underwater documentary [1], [2]

[edit] External links

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
In other languages