The Silent World

Infobox Film | name = The Silent World


caption = original film poster
director = Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Louis Malle
producer =
writer = Jacques-Yves Cousteau and James Dugan
starring =
music =
cinematography =
editing =
distributor =
released = flagicon|France May 1956, (Cannes)
flagicon|USA 24 September, 1956 (NYC only)
runtime = 86 min.
language = French
budget =
amg_id = 1:128989
imdb_id = 0049518:"This is about the film. For the book see ""The Silent World" ( _fr. 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. [ "Sesto Continente" directed by Folco Quilici and released in 1954, was the first full-length, full-color underwater documentary [http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=231244] , [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046299/] ] Its title derives from Cousteau's 1953 book "".

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 more environmentally conscious, involved in marine conservation, and was even called "the father of the environmental movement" by Ted Turner [http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9706/25/cousteau.obit/] .

"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.

Notes

External links

*imdb title|id=0049518|title=The Silent World
* [http://www.salon.com/ent/masterpiece/2002/07/15/silent_world/index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110 Jacques Cousteau's "The Silent World"] by Greg Rubinson at salon.com, July 15, 2002, retrieved February 19, 2006

###@@@KEY@@@###succession box
title=Academy Award for Documentary Feature
years=1956
before="Helen Keller in Her Story"
after="Albert Schweitzer"succession box
title=Palme d'Or
years=1956
before="Marty"
after="Friendly Persuasion"