Jacques Cousteau: World Without Sun ...
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This is Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle's exquisite documentary about the first manned undersea colony.
It won an academy award in 1964.
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World Without
Sun,
a documentary produced and directed by Jacques Cousteau in 1964
chronicles Continental Shelf Station Two, or
"Conshelf Two", the first ambitious attempt to create an environment in which
men could live and work on the sea floor. In it, a half-dozen oceanauts lived 10
meters down in the Red Sea off Sudan in a star-fish shaped house for 30
days. The undersea living experiment also had two other structures, one a
submarine hangar that housed a small, two man submarine referred to as the
"diving saucer" for its resemblance to a science fiction flying saucer, and a
smaller "deep cabin" where two oceanauts lived at a depth of 30 meters for a
week. The undersea colony was supported with air, water, food, power, all
essentials of life, from a large support team above. Men on the bottom performed
a number of experiments intended to determine the practicality of working on the
sea floor and were subjected to continual medical examinations. The documentary,
93 minutes long, received wide international theatrical distribution, and was
awarded an Academy Award
for Best Documentary,[1] as well as
numerous other honors. It was Cousteau's second film to win Best Documentary,
the first being "The Silent World" released in 1956.
Funded in part by the
French petrochemical industry, the Conshelf Two
experiment was originally intended to demonstrate the practicality of
exploitation of the sea using underwater habitats as base stations. In
the end Cousteau repudiated such an approach, turning his efforts instead toward
conservation. The lyrical and dramatic
underwater sequences also, ironically, likely contributed to the beginning of an
era of ocean conservation as well as incidentally promoting sport diving. Memorable
sequences involve men cavorting with fishes, an underwater chess game, and the
diving saucer reaching depths of 300 meters, encountering new and unique forms
of life.
Reviews of the film were
overwhelming positive, although the film did come under some criticism around
accusations of "faking" footage, most notably by New York Times reviewer Bosley
Crowther who questioned the authenticity of two of the film's more dramatic
scenes. Crowther stated in his 1964 review, "Oceanographers consulted here
yesterday said it was highly unlikely that a deep-sea cavern, containing a
"bubble," or pocket of air, at its top, could exist. If it did, the atmosphere
in that bubble would surely be noxious, they said. It would be methane or marsh
gas. And the pressure in it would be intolerable for man." [2] The confusion came
from Crowther's assertion that the footage was filmed at great depth, an issue
not clearly addressed in the film. His other complaint was a long tracking shot
moving out from the window of one of the underwater structures, which Crowther
claimed could only have been produced in an aquarium. Cousteau later
demonstrated how he and his son Philippe produced the shot with a combination of
ropes and small underwater motorized vehicles. Cousteau took great offense, and
continued to describe and defend the difficult and innovative techniques used to
create the film.
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