Louis Malle’s World

The Silent World (1956) is a somewhat strange film in which one can see a kind of prototype for both Luc Besson’s The Big Blue and James Cameron’s Titanic. Made by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle the film is an artistic documentary of sorts that chronicles the life of marine explorers and the sea-life they are exploring. The Walter Reade’s site says, “Louis Malle was just 23 when he was asked by author and undersea explorer Cousteau to help him make a film that could be a kind of illustrated companion to his immensely popular book also entitled The Silent World.”

It is unclear which language this film was made in originally. The version screening at the Walter Reade seems almost dubbed in English at moments and this is distracting. Some of the attempts at acting/dialog between the real life explorers are a bit off. One of the divers who gets the bends is asked to go into a decompression chamber, at this point the narrative voice of the film is broken so that he can ask the captain if he must go into the chamber. Apart from a few annoying instances such as this where the divers seem to be trying to act like actors acting like divers, the film is captivating and beautiful.

We see the depth and wealth of the sea floor, the exploration of a shipwreck (that and the monsoon storms the ship weathers feel so much more real than the studio created special effects of the Titanic), the daily life on sea. The score is allowed to take over from the narrative when the ship encounters a school of dancing porpoises. These prefigure schools of dancing dolphins. Tragically, a baby dolphin ventures too near the ship and is injured. Malle and Cousteau capture the inevitable dance of death that follows with beauty and an unwavering eye. The baby dolphin’s death seems to be radioed across the ocean surface within minutes. A school of sharks come to feed on the carcass. The narrator calls it an “orgy.” The ship’s crew at this point decides to avenge the dolphin. What follows is rendered all the more sharp by the narrative silence. In these short minutes we are shown the full nature of our situation, our abuse of our power over nature, our capacity for sympathy, our despicable hypocritical morality, and our lust for blood. Unlike the sharks who simply follow their hunger and biological drive we humans hide our monstrosity behind convenient masks.

The Silent World will screen at the Walter Reade on Sat June 25: 12:30; Mon June 27: 1 Wed June 29: 4:15 & 8:30 as part of Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle. The festival is a near complete retrospective including Malle’s seven-hour film Phantom India. For more information on the film screenings check out the Walter Reade website.