MartinHafer "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, the film will no doubt horrify many viewers today, as sensibilities have definitely changed and 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.

ElMaruecan82 "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.

Jack Hawkins (Hawkensian) I have long known of Jacques Cousteau and his pioneering technology through my father, he transferred his childhood interest of diving and the oceans onto me. Despite this, I was not aware that Cousteau and his team were the subject of several feature-length documentaries with two Academy Awards and a Palme D'or to boast of. When I stumbled upon The Silent World in a CEX shop, I was immediately attracted to the idea of seeing the ocean through the wonderful vibrancy of Technicolor – it was one of the first films to create such an experience.The documentary follows Cousteau, his crew and a lucky little Dachshund aboard the Calypso. They may grow tired in the oppressive sunlight and absence of activity when they're travelling across the vast, lonely stretches of ocean, but it is all proved worthwhile when they get into the water.Using Cousteau's aqualung, the men swim around with relish, in one instance encircling a sponge diver heaving along in a metal helmeted diving suit that today we see only in tacky gold fish bowls. The man hiding in his relic of a suit doesn't mind the aqualung upstarts, the men shake hands and scour the seabed for sponges together.The greatest liberation however is afforded by their rotary propelled underwater vehicles. They glide among an array of wildlife with ease, including a sea turtle, with one diver seizing the opportunity and hitching a ride on the majestic animal's back until it's exhausted – it all looks thoroughly enjoyable until he overstays his welcome.Indeed, the documentary regularly reminds you of the age it comes from – they provoke most of the animals they encounter! When they happen across the group of whales, the skipper decides to try and harpoon one with little success, Cousteau narrates: 'Under our skipper's nose is a whale sixty feet long and he can't resist having a crack at it'. Soon after this, the Calypso's propellers mortally injure a small whale and the crew mercifully kill the profusely bleeding animal.This inevitably attracts scores of sharks, and the crew's reaction to them surprised me more than anything in the film. Cousteau narrates: 'For us divers, the sharks are our mortal enemies.' As the sharks tear through the whale carcass of the men's making, he continues: 'Every seaman hates the sharks, after what we have seen, the divers can't be held back, they grab anything they can to avenge the whale.'The men proceed to brutally catch the sharks, tearing their mouths open as they yank them on board, battering some of them with the blunt end of an axe. Marine biologists would abhor such attitudes and behaviour today, however like with the lobsters and flying fish earlier in the film, the Frenchman probably made good use of them in the kitchen.No animal is left unpestered, even land animals aren't safe. When the men arrive at a desert island, they meet a group of giant tortoises and sit and stand on them as they casually eat their lunch. The men's irreverence seems to leave an impression on the Dachshund, as he is seen nipping at the legs of a poor tortoise trying to mind his own business. Their cavalier style also sees them blowing up part of a coral reef and collecting the detritus in the name of science – it's an awfully destructive approach to taxonomy.The crew restore your faith in them somewhat when they befriend 'Ulysses', a gregarious eighty-pound Grouper fish who, along with scores of other fish, becomes surprisingly tame when the men present them with a bag of delicious gristle.There are moments where the men contrive conversations to show the viewer the procedures that happen aboard the ship. I use the word contrive because of how awfully stilted the men are, but this is mainly because of the useless dubbing on my Blu-ray, so I'll give the crew's acting abilities the benefit of the doubt. I liked Cousteau's French-inflected English narration, but I would have preferred subtitles when the men spoke to each other.The Silent World is a charismatic documentary that provides a compelling insight into the history of both diving and underwater photography.78%www.hawkensian.com

William Bushing 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.