Movies - The Silent World

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	Movies - The Silent World

The Silent World (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 the first film to use underwater cinematography to show the ocean depths in color. It took its title from Cousteau's book of 1954.

The film was shot while 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 was included in the finished documentary.

The film later faced criticism for some environmental damage done in the filmmaking. In one scene, the crewmembers 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 himself was involved in marine conservation, especially later on in his life, and was even called "the father of the environmental movement" by Ted Turner .

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 Golden Palm 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.

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