The silent world
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The silent world ( GDR : The world of silence) |
| Original title | Le monde du silence |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1956 |
| length | 85 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Jacques-Yves Cousteau , Louis Malle |
| script | Jacques-Yves Cousteau |
| production | Viviane Blavier-Guibert |
| music |
Yves Baudrier , Serge Baudo |
| camera |
Edmond Séchan , Louis Malle, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Albert Falco , Frédéric Dumas |
| cut | Georges Alepée |
| occupation | |
|
Than herself:
| |
The silent world (original title: Le Monde du silence ) is a documentary film by the French marine researcher Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the then still unknown young French director Louis Malle from 1956 . The color film deals with loosely strung together episodes of a two-year underwater expedition (1954–1955) that Cousteau undertook together with the crew of his research vessel Calypso through the Mediterranean , the Red Sea , the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf . The research trip was funded by the French CNRS and the US National Geographic Society . Cousteau comments on the pictures from the off and supplies u. a. short explanations about underwater technology, about sponge diving and deep intoxication , about understanding dolphins and about coral reefs . In addition to the underwater photos, everyday life on board the Calypso is shown.
The film was the first documentary to win the main prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and an Oscar . Today it is one of the most important contributions to underwater film , which was followed by other internationally successful film and television productions by Cousteau based on a similar pattern.
action
The film begins with a relay of divers who dive towards the sea floor with underwater torches in order to explore a coral reef at a depth of 50 meters .
The well-known oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau undertakes a research trip on the Calypso through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The team with Cousteau's long-time confidants Frédéric Dumas and Philipp Daé consists of a total of twelve divers, scientists from universities, museums and laboratories and a dachshund. The research vessel Calypso is u. a. equipped with an autopilot , an echo sounder and a pressure equalization chamber. Diving in bad weather can also be carried out via an underwater shaft in the middle of the ship, which leads over the kitchen. The Calypso also has an observation room under the bow. For the research trip, André Laban constructed a waterproof camera with a plastic housing that enables filming underwater. Professor Harold Edgerton , who is part of the team, has also constructed automatic cameras that can be lowered into a depth of up to 2000 meters in addition to the nansen bottle . The devices have 30 meters of film and an electronic flash that triggers every 15 seconds. In this way, 800 underwater recordings can be produced in three hours, which can be developed immediately on the Calypso .
At the beginning of their journey, the Calypso crew meets Greek sponge divers . On the hunt for lobster , André Laban dives deeper than 50 meters. According to Cousteau, he almost succumbs to the deep intoxication and has to go to the decompression chamber.
In tropical waters, the crew encounters schools of dolphins . Frédéric Dumas and Albert Falco dive up to 75 meters deep on a coral reef and make film recordings. Samples are taken from the reef and corals are damaged in the process. Images of sea cucumbers , puffer fish and sea turtles are also shown . With the help of dynamite fishing , scientists "systematically" record all species living on the coral reef. Some specimens are preserved in formalin . At the same time, the use of diving scooters is being tested and the divers sometimes form relay races. With the help of radar and echo sounder, the crew tracks down the English freighter Thistlegorm, sunk in the Red Sea, and explores it.
In the Indian Ocean which is Calypso by a monsoon surprised meets the Equator on flying fish and sperm whales . While observing the group of whales, the bow of the ship collides with a full-grown specimen. Later, a six-meter-long sperm whale calf gets under the ship and is seriously injured by the propeller. The heavily bleeding animal is finally tied to the tail fin by the crew of the calypso and released with a gunshot. The carcass attracts 30 gray and blue sharks , which are filmed by two divers while they are eating from a cage. Later, according to Cousteau because of their disgust for these animals, the crew pulls numerous sharks onto the boat with fishing rods, harpoons or ropes and kills them.
The team encounters giant tortoises on an uninhabited tropical island . Some men "play" with the animals - sit or stand on the turtles. They also encounter palm thieves and become aware of a man who is digging for eggs from giant tortoises that are currently in the mating season. There are recordings of attempts at mating as well as the laying of the eggs of a giant tortoise and the hatching of the offspring. On the island reef, the divers feed fish for several weeks, including a 25 kg grouper , which they call “Jojo”. The “trusting” fish accompanies the divers up to their pressure equalization stage and is temporarily locked in the shark cage due to its voracity. The Calypso crew finally leaves. As off-speaker Cousteau announces that so far only a tiny part of the sea, "its upper layer", has been touched. In the near future one will penetrate even deeper, where many discoveries "in the world of silence" would be waiting.
History of origin
Jacques-Yves Cousteau had made his first short documentary film ( Par dix-huit mètres de fond , 1943) when he was still diving with bated breath , which was followed by others. In 1953 he published a successful book about his underwater adventures under the title Le Monde du silence (Eng: The Silent World ), which was published in 22 languages and sold more than five million times. Cousteau was not interested in a film adaptation of the book, but planned to shoot a first feature film about the underwater world. He felt it was wrong to re-enact what he said was the “true content” of the book.
According to Louis Malle, Cousteau originally wanted to make the film together with Jacques Ertaud as a “one-man film crew”. At the time, however, Ertaud was intending to marry, which made Cousteau nervous. Despite working with two other cameramen, Cousteau turned to the director of the Paris film school, Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), and asked for a replacement during the 1953 summer vacation. Louis Malle, who found the training at IDHEC too theoretical, was the class representative at the time. He was one of the first to find out about the offer, while his fellow students would have been more interested in working on the feature film. Malle, who had previously only made films with his father's 8mm camera, met with Cousteau, pretended to have knowledge of editing and photography, and then traveled to Marseille , where he boarded the Calypso . Cousteau was impressed by Male's intelligence.
At the end of the summer he'd learned to dive and camerawork underwater, Cousteau asked the 20-year-old Malle to stay, as Ertaud actually wanted to get married. Thereupon Malle left the IDHEC and became familiar with directing, camera and editing in the first year. Malle preferred practical work and said he was interested in this type of filmmaking: “[...] I was in a constant state of amazement at what we were filming. We had to invent the rules: there was nothing to refer to, it was just too new. Since we were under water, the camera had the flexibility and flexibility with which we filmed the most unbelievable shots that can only be achieved on land with a combination of crane and immense tracking shots. For us it was as easy as breathing because it was part of the movement of diving. ”Actual filming in the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf took place from 1954 to 1955 over a period of eleven months. During this time, the Calypso covered a distance of 15,000 miles, while the divers completed a total of 5,000 dives, according to Cousteau. In addition to the 35 mm “SM-2” cameras designed by the 25-year-old chemical engineer André Laban, true- color underwater wide-angle lenses developed by Marcel Dratz were used during the shoot . For the lighting, five 6000 watt lamps were used, which were supposed to be cooled by the sea water, but which still broke during the filming in the Red Sea.
Originally, the team had planned to record underwater scenes on coral reefs discovered by them in 1951 off the coasts of Sudan and Yemen . In one case the divers found the coral gardens destroyed, in the other case the sea was so saturated with algae that the filming could not take place. The crew then turned to the coral reefs on the island of Assomption in the Seychelles . Cousteau and his crew spent six weeks there. After their food supply was depleted, according to Cousteau, they fed themselves with captured turtles twice a day.
While working on the film, Malle and Cousteau had various differences of opinion. The young film student was influenced by the works of Robert Bresson at the time and wanted long shots that should stand for themselves. Cousteau, on the other hand, relied on staging tricks to meet the spectators' desire for sensation and preferred a melodramatic and carefree narrative style. "I was of the opinion that the film should remain absolutely pure and that we shouldn't use techniques that we know today as docudrama," Malle said decades later. Cousteau has always felt drawn to the feature film and looked for ways to "go beyond the scope of documentary film". Although Malle did not withhold his opinion from Cousteau, he was fully aware that The Silent World was Cousteau's film.
Malle spent a total of four years with Cousteau on the film project. 30,000 meters of film material was produced, which was cut in Paris for the final version. Despite a different plot, the film took over the title of Cousteau's successful book.
reception
After its premiere in May 1956 at the Cannes International Film Festival, the film enjoyed great success with critics and international audiences and was sold in 120 countries. Influential French film critic André Bazin praised the beauties of film as indescribable, and since they are nature's, one could just as easily criticize God.
In Germany, the camera technology and color “masterpiece” of the underwater recordings was particularly well received. The silent world rushes by in its full-length length “like a dream adventure”, according to the contemporary criticism of the film service . The individual film episodes would have “their own factual drama or, instead, mood values in a very high concentration.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also praised the film above all for its “unreally beautiful” and enchanting underwater shots, the “nature without romance "show. In a short review, Der Spiegel praised the film as "a graceful inventory of the strange underwater magic of colors and shapes", but regretted the fact that the footage was cut to length.
The Silent World also received critical acclaim in the United States, where the film also received awards. Bosley Crowther ( The New York Times ) praised the production on the occasion of its US theatrical release as "certainly the most beautiful and fascinating documentary of its kind that has ever been filmed". He emphasized the “intelligent and humorous” intimacy with the discoverers, which was largely responsible for “the lively feeling of participation” in the film. In a later review, Crowther compared the “beautiful and fascinating nature film” with Walt Disney's nature documentaries , which at the time did not have any underwater documentaries. In contrast to The Silent World, the Disney works do not depict “real life” and instead combine only skilful excerpts with music to create a “theatrical success”. Except for the episode with the “dancing” grouper, such a “Disneyism” is not recognizable in the film by Cousteau and Malle. However, the results of Cousteau's expedition would not be further explained. The Los Angeles Times praised the French production as a "miracle film" and as "an event of uniquely humanity". The French view of the narrative is very attractive, while the “wonderful underwater shots are second to none”.
The film was followed by numerous other similarly conceived game and television productions, including the Oscar-winning documentary Welt ohne Sonne (1964) and Secrets of the Sea (1966–1976), which was one of the most popular television series in the Federal Republic of Germany for 13 years. The film director Louis Malle, who was established in the following decades, refused to collaborate with Cousteau again ("I think my own documentaries are the ultimate thing a documentary can be, the ultimate in ' cinéma direct '").
Today the artificial dramatic form and the arranged dialogues of The Silent World seem out of date to the viewer. With the growing importance of environmental protection , the killing of the sharks in the film and the depicted dynamite fishing are also viewed more critically . Nevertheless, The Silent World, together with Cousteau's World without Sun and the works of Hans Hass ( People under Sharks , 1947; Adventure in the Red Sea , 1951) are counted among the most important contributions in underwater films.
In 2011, the French television broadcaster France 2, with the approval of Cousteau's widow Francine Triplet, announced that it was planning a new edition of The Silent World as a documentary film series in two seasons of six one-hour episodes each. The almost one million euro co-production with a Brazilian broadcaster and the US Discovery Channel will show Cousteau's youngest son Pierre-Yves as he visits the locations from The Silent World on his father's second research ship, the Alcyone to show how they evolved. A second mission should take him along the coast of Central and South America, from Mexico to Chile.
Awards
The Silent World took part in the competition at the 9th Cannes International Film Festival in 1956 , where the production under jury president Maurice Lehmann was the first documentary to be awarded the Palme d' Or (it was not until 2004 that another documentary, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, was to win the main prize in Cannes win). Malle spoke of a compromise by the jury. In the dispute, she was unable to agree on the comedy The Smile of a Summer Night by Ingmar Bergman, which was also in the competition and which ultimately received a special prize for its poetic humor. In the same year, The Silent World won an award from the US National Board of Review for Best Foreign Language Film .
In 1957, the Association Française de la Critique de Cinéma The Silent World together with René Clair's The Great Maneuver received the Prix Méliès as the best French film. In the same year, the Oscar for Best Documentary followed and a nomination for the British Film Academy Award in the same category.
Web links
- The Silent World in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ 'Silent World' Due at Beverly . In: Los Angeles Times , October 10, 1956, p. 19.
- ↑ a b c d Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Susan Schiefelbein: Man, the orchid and the octopus. My life for exploring and preserving our environment . Campus-Verl., Frankfurt, M./New York 2008. ISBN 978-3-593-38564-8 , pp. 26-27.
- ↑ a b c d Jacques-Yves Cousteau: 'Studio' Under the Sea . In: The New York Times , September 16, 1956, p. X7.
- ↑ a b c Louis Malle, Philip French (Ed.): Malle over Malle . Alexander-Verl., Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89581-009-6 , pp. 25-30.
- ^ Richard John Neupert: A History of the French New Wave Cinema . Madison, Wis. : Univ. of Wisconsin Press, London: [Eurospan, distributor], c2007 (Wisconsin studies in film). ISBN 978-0-299-21704-4 , p. 87.
- ↑ a b 100th birthday: Jacques Cousteau - ocean researcher and animal tormentor at welt.de, June 9, 2010 (accessed on December 31, 2012).
- ↑ Back to Cousteau . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 19, 2011, p. 15.
- ^ André Bazin : Le Monde du Silence (The silent world) . In: What is film? Translated from the French by Robert Fischer and Anna Düpee. Alexander Verlag, Berlin 2004, 2nd edition 2009, ISBN 978-3-89581-062-6 , p. 61.
- ↑ a b The silent world . In: film-dienst 28/1956 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
- ↑ "The Silent World": Cousteau's award-winning underwater film . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 13, 1957, p. 10.
- ↑ New in Germany . In: Der Spiegel , October 3, 1956, p. 56.
- ↑ Bosley Crowther: Screen: Beautiful Sea: 'Silent World' Opens at the Paris Here . In: The New York Times , September 25, 1956, p. 30.
- ↑ Bosley Crowther: The Real: Underwater Exploration In 'The Silent World' No Tricks What For? . In: The New York Times , September 30, 1956, p. X1.
- ↑ Edwin Schallert: 'Silent World' Glowing Underseas Film Event . In: Los Angeles Times , October 12, 1956, p. 24.
- ↑ Jacques-Yves Cousteau . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 38/1997 from September 8, 1997, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 43/2011 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
- ↑ Louis Malle; Philip French (Ed.): Malle on Malle . Alexander-Verl., Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89581-009-6 , p. 29.
- ↑ Louis Malle; Philip French (Ed.): Malle on Malle . Alexander-Verl., Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89581-009-6 , p. 28.
- ↑ Hans J. Wulff: Underwater film . In: Koebner, Thomas : Reclams Sachlexikon des Films . Reclam, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-15-010625-9 , pp. 707-708.
- ↑ Guy Dutheil: “Le Monde du silence” de Cousteau refait surface . In: Le Monde , May 18, 2011, p. 2.
- ↑ Louis Malle, Philip French (ed.): Malle on Malle . Alexander-Verl., Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89581-009-6 , p. 30.