To Find the Shark and Kill It - Conquering Cousteau's Silent World

Louis Malle had a hell of a film career.

From fictional features in his native France, for which he was nominated and won many international awards, to directing Hollywood films with major American stars, to his epic 6-hour TV documentary "Phantom India," his work has pretty much covered all subjects and settings, including some territory that in 1956 was quite uncharted.

I just got back from the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. It's been under the management of a pretty passionate cinephile for about 2 years now (same guy, I believe, who runs a video rental shop named "Cinefile" down by the Nuart), and the programming is pretty spectacular, even for a town like LA, which already has several decent rep houses competing for the attentions of the discriminating film-goer. Tonight's show was a must for me, being that a) it was two unreleased-on-DVD features, and b) the subject was the underwater world (I am a diver and underwater enthusiast), and c) one of the films was "Le Monde du Silence" (The Silent World) by Jacques Cousteau, which I have been itching to see for years, but have been unable to find even on torrent tracker sites due to its relative scarcity on video. How does this tie in to Louis Malle? Malle, it turns out, cut his teeth (fresh out of film school) by co-directing the film with Cousteau. I must confess to having never seen a Malle narrative feature, by the way, but his documentaries on India, and particularly his one on the American heartland, "God's Country" (1986), were what stirred the excitement when I first learned he had co-directed a Cousteau film. "Le Monde du Silence" was chum in the water for me: several interests bound up into one film and made extra enticing by its relative rarity.

I have not posted any thoughts to this blog in quite a while but tonight's films got a few bees buzzing around in my head, and after coming home and waiting for some rice to cook for my dinner at a tardy 12:30, I thought I'd finally get back to sharing some of that buzzing here. First off, I arrived early, which I never do, to find a line already forming outside, at least 40 minutes before the show was scheduled to start. Although there were only about 15 people waiting, I wondered whether this would be indicative of a strong turn-out. That would be miraculous. Friday night in LA and two Jacques Cousteau films from 50 years ago sell out the house? Turns out, that's exactly what happened.

As I speculated aloud while standing in line about a possible large turnout, the man waiting in front of me rationalized by explaining that the program had been highlighted by the LA Weekly as a "critic's pick" event. So there weren't really that many cool divers in LA. But nevertheless, I was still impressed.

Cinefamily's founder and programmer, Hadrian Belove, introduced the films and explained that he'd decided to show "Le Monde Sans Soleil" (1964) first, swapping the original order, because "Sans Soleil" was shot in 35mm Technicolor, and he wanted anyone who might leave after the first screening to definitely see that one. It was a beautiful 35mm flat (1.33) print, with minimal print damage (tail wear only) and no color fading. The story was mostly about Cousteau's team of divers, who he had dubbed the "Oceanauts," living in underwater research stations at several different depths, aided by their surface ship, the Calypso. Listening to the narrator give the statistical data, I was a little non-plussed with the depths of 35 feet and 85 feet for the research stations, although later my cocky superiority was leveled hearing of divers going to nearly 300 feet on trimix gas. There was a definite kind of hi-tech retro-future adventure flavor to it: part James Bond, part Danger:Diabolik. Besides the science and gadgetry combining to create a kind of futuristic, adventure spirit, in an effort to translate information into narrative, different little humorous gags were dropped in, and crew members were portrayed with enough quirks that one began to wonder why Wes Anderson felt the need to fictionalize the team into Team Zissou. There was even a scene with a cello-playing crew-member sitting atop the deck of the Calypso that gave Seu Jorge's guitar-strumming balladeer a run for his money. As the night's program wore on, it became pretty clear that Cousteau's crew was actually far more outrageous than the wildest stunts embarked on by Team Zissou (more on that later).

The audience was clearly primed for laughs (perhaps by virtue of their exposure to the Zissou crew), expecting to find the humor in a bunch of bare-chested guys playing grab-ass with each other while showering, or eating, or doing housekeeping aboard the sea-stations. Yeah, there was a lot of unintentional (I presume) homo-erotic subtext in a film about a bunch of manly men doing manly things out at sea. It was a hipster crowd, and everybody "got the joke" and the giggles continued through most of the night. Other things that elicited scattered (intentional) chuckles were the staged elements designed to dramatize the dangers or realities of underwater exploration, such as when one diver begins to experience symptoms of the Bends, and must be placed in a recompression chamber. It's a coffin-like cylinder that Cousteau and his men have rigged up on the deck of the Calypso, and after placing the diver inside, they all promptly head off to eat lunch without him. I found there to be some of the same brilliance of imagination in Cousteau as shared by Walt Disney. Both men are pitched to kids, although they can both come off as rather eccentric (with some dark overtones). They both imagine the future in great detail, but always in terms of "colonization," seemingly oblivious to the destructive effect of man's mere presence in certain environments.

Now that I think about it, when I was in Yonaguni Japan, drinking awamori with a fantastic human and diving-guide, Keizen, he asked me why I had taken up diving and I answered that when I was a kid I had seen Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." So I can certainly respect the spirit of exploration in both of these men, and credit them for inspiring others to take an interest in the world. But I also find that with exploration, and "conquest," however benign it may seem (conquest of the sea, conquest of space, conquest of the frontier), there is a certain carelessness and disregard (and arrogance) that can accompany the drive to push forward into new worlds. "Le Monde Sans Soleil" contained some examples of this recklessness, but the earlier "Le Monde du Silence" contained far more - a fact that I hope points to an evolution in Cousteau's thinking in the intervening 10 years.

Before I detail some of the offensive bits of these films, I should take a minute to clarify that I am not a member of PETA. The strongest position I hold on animal rights is that I don't believe in torturing them (for research or any other purpose) and I don't own any pets (because I acknowledge that my neglectful irresponsible lifestyle would be a hazard to them). Still, I once explained to my diving buddy, Peter, why it was that I chose not to spear-fish (an activity he was eager to try). It was not because I don't enjoy eating fish. Oddly, every time we surfaced after a day of diving, we both shared a craving for sushi. The reason I chose not to spear-fish was that, after my first couple of night-dives, hovering among sleeping fish with my dive light blasting a beam of 8 "C" cell-powered white light over that "silent world," I realized how destructive my presence was as an observer, without becoming any further intrusive. As one of the only creatures underwater making noise, by the expulsion of my air bubbles, and certainly the only creature shining a bright light into the milky black water, I compared myself to the "ghetto-birds" that hovered over my apartment, whirling blades chopping the night sky into thunderous pieces, shining their "night sun" into windows at 2 in the morning, "observing." In my dive training, which was administered by a good guy, but not the most "humanitarian" individual imaginable, I was instructed that divers were "ambassadors to the ocean." We were to tread with caution, leave the environment untouched, to the extent that we not even touch the reefs, or stir the sand too much so as to cause a cloud in the water. We should respect the creatures whose world we were visiting, and seek to promote knowledge and awareness of oceanic concerns above water whenever possible. It was always my understanding that not only the science of diving, but these attitudes of conservation had their roots in Cousteau's legacy. I know that Cousteau was the man who was really responsible for scuba - he created the Aqualung !

So imagine my surprise (and evidently, judging by the shocked, nervous laughter, the surprise of the entire audience) when Cousteau's team was pictured, in their own film (!), proudly DYNAMITING a peaceful cove to collect specimens of fish for study (while the voice-over narration reminds us that fishing with dynamite is illegal due to the fact that many more fish will be killed than can be harvested). The camera drifts over piles of fish corpses that look like the aftermath of the Somme. This scene was a kind of climax to a building sense of shame I was feeling at watching Cousteau's researchers as they hammered away at reefs with mallets and chisels, collecting samples, or grabbed fish and stuffed them in plastic bags, which the film's narrator described without remorse as floating prisons, while the fish inside were attacked by predators who could not understand the plastic barrier that prevented them from swallowing the smaller fish. Clearly the "leave no trace" philosophy of diving did not originate with this Cousteau.

The worst episode, by far, was when a beautiful scene of hundreds of dolphins racing alongside the Calypso was followed by a scene of the team searching for whales. A cry goes up from one of the crew members and the boat races off to follow a pod of giant sperm whales. One of the crew races down to a platform below the bow of the boat, standing just above the water's surface. The narrator explains his excitement, "[in 32 years at sea, this is the closest he has ever been to a whale of this size]." He is promptly handed down a home-made harpoon by one of the crew-members. The narrator tells us that the man simply cannot resist having a throw at the giant mammal. We watch him hurl the harpoon, but it merely bounces off the whale's tough skin. The Calypso chases on, running with the whales for several minutes until the narrator notes danger. A baby whale has fallen behind the pod and the Calypso is closing in on it. Cousteau calls for the engines to slow, but it is too late. The engine room calls out that something has hit their left propeller and the camera pans over the side in time to see the water turning red and the baby whale gashed and sliced like a large sausage. The man who had previously tried his hand at harpooing decides that he must administer a "mercy kill," and delivers it with gunshot to the baby whale's head. The crew, "feeling horrible" begin to tow the body up alongside the boat, but the blood in the water attracts a school of sharks who begin to pick and tear at the whale's body. The crew, out of guilt and a general contempt for sharks, decide to "avenge" the whale by gaffing as many sharks as they can hoist aboard and BEATING the living shit out of them. No, I am not kidding. The film glories in several minutes of footage of crew hoisting whatever blunt object was handy high overhead and bringing it crashing down on the thrashing, bleeding, fighting sharks. I am a diver, and no lover of sharks. Encountering a large one would surely scare the piss out of me. But I could not for the LIFE of me understand how JACQUES fucking COUSTEAU could allow this to happen on the deck of his boat ! First of all, it was the Calypso that RAN OVER and killed the whale, not the sharks ! Second, the sharks came to feed. That's what they do. That's what they were designed to do. That is their job in nature. So seeing Cousteau's men bash their brains out with shovels and axes to "avenge" the death of the whale put Cousteau's comments about the conquest of the sea-shelf into an entirely different light. He began to sound less like the wide-eyed adventurer in a world of wonder that Disney would have depicted, and more like a Western frontiersman, looking to "tame" the wild through brute force. It even made me rethink another episode in the film, in which Cousteau's divers feed scraps of meat to a giant grouper, and then "imprison" him in a shark cage when he becomes too aggressive, dominating the feeding and preventing other fish from getting their hand-out. The divers even name him - "Ulysses." It's this weird effort to anthropomorphize the fish that seems jarring to me. These guys are supposed to be marine researchers. How can they learn anything if they are projecting all these human traits and biases and expectations on to the creatures they are studying? Suddenly, Bill Murray's dynamite-fishing Steve Zissou character begins to look less like a comedic caricature and more like a biographical commentary with his mission to "find and kill" the shark that ate his friend.

When the curtain closed, there was boisterous applause, despite the fact that many people were looking at each other with uncertain half-frowns on their faces. I'm sure people expected to find some humor and fun in the source of their beloved Bill Murray movie, and the movies were a lot of fun, and were executed with a kind of playfulness and humor that kept you engaged, not to mention the stunning underwater photography. In one brilliant sequence, plankton was shot with macro lenses to show the huge variety of organisms found within it. Another creature brought aboard was said to eat sand, digesting all the bits of plankton within it, and disposing of the indigestible grit. When turned upside down on deck, several living, symbiotic fish tumbled out. Things like this made my mouth drop open in wonder, and I am a diver who has watched many marine documentaries inspired by Cousteau and his team. I can only imagine how jaw-dropping these films must have been in the 1950s and 1960s. That said, the films are now artifacts from the past that must almost be presented with the all-too-familiar disclaimer of present-day political correctness. Just the other day, I was talking with a co-worker about Hergé and Tintin, asking her if she had ever read or heard of the infamous "Tintin in the Congo." (That book, in addition to it's racist depictions of Africans, also has a scene involving the dynamiting of animals, coincidentally). Watching these Cousteau films reminded me of that discussion because with such works you are forced to take the bad with the good. You cannot deny Hergé's talent or influence on the world of graphic line-art. Just as you cannot deny Cousteau's influence on future generations of oceanographers. But neither can you dismiss either man's callous big-headedness. Hergé can be said to have evolved, going back in an attempt to revise the content he considered shameful in some of his earlier work, and showing some degree of open-mindedness in work he completed toward the end of his career. Cousteau must have worked hard in the succeeding years to create a more positive legacy on film - films that can be shown without any need for contextualizing disclaimers about the "different attitudes" people had in the past - or I'm sure, despite his contributions to dive science, he would not be remembered as fondly now. Watching that shark slaughter made me realize why it is that this film is probably so hard to see - I imagine it has something to do with the Cousteau estate being less than flattered by it. For that matter, I was a bit surprised given Louis Malle's involvement - how much was he a party to the objectionable bits? Again, I do not know his work in great detail, but I have been drawn in by his documentaries and through them sensed a man of great sensitivity. Perhaps he filmed the Cousteau crew's wantonness unsparingly, as exposé - or maybe merely as verité, simply existing as a fly-on-the-wall to events on the ship and below the water.

I do know that films of this type have been considered good educational material for kids - at least when i was growing up. But they present some difficult questions to answer since it seems clear that the ideology behind today's Cousteau Society was not yet fully formed. Cousteau ends "Le Monde Sans Soleil" in an undersea cave, hundreds of feet below the surface. His submersible vehicle surfaces in a lake, the hatch opens, and for a moment he and his co-pilot breathe in the thousand-year-old air and shine their lights around the stone walls of an environment never seen before by man. It is a wondrous moment, and makes me wish we could be spending more money to explore the oceans, just as others wish to explore space. Perhaps if there was more extensive and better funded research on-going, we would develop deeper understanding and respect, not simply treating the oceans as our waste dump. I believe Cousteau began his mission as a seafarer of old - out to tame the sea, and claim his portion of it. But I would suppose that anyone spending such an amount of time as he did at sea would eventually have to develop a conservationist attitude. He is quoted as saying, "One protects what one likes," and maybe it is the hunters and conquerors who first become aware of the need to protect nature, as they see the ravages of man firsthand, before the rest of us even notice.

While standing in line to get in, the man in front of me mentioned mistakenly that Le Monde du Silence was co-directed by Jean-Pierre MELVILLE, rather than Louis MALLE. My God, I thought, leaving the theater. Could you imagine the film that THOSE two would have made together?