The next chapter in our river odyssey is a piece plucked from the corpus of one the most illustrious oceanographer-cinematographers of all time: Jacques-Yves, “The Commandant”, Cousteau. 72 years old and still aboard the famous Calypso, he is seen here paddling through St. Lawrence River alongside his son Jean-Michel, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. The old-fashioned tone of the narration and the simultaneous translations are guaranteed to make you smile, but it won’t be long before you find yourself swept away by the adventurous and exploratory spirit of the production. For it is indeed an adventure documentary, at once scientific and historical, to which Cousteau and his team invite us. This spirit of exploration awakens the child within us, the one who wants to travel and discover the world. Cousteau, a pioneer of underwater filming techniques, develops a language in which the camera flies like a helicopter, and sails on the waves before eventually diving underwater. We certainly are not in the presence of his many imitators and emulators, but of the master himself, and it is well worth it. The soundtrack is as epic and as powerful as one can imagine, yet it is also of unparalleled efficacy when it comes to evoking the mysteries of the deep, those of The Silent World (1956) and World Without Sun (1964), which influenced the history of world cinema. An eco-film, before the genre was in vogue, that willingly adopts the perspective of a nature superior to man, and whose accounts of shipwrecks have been a boundless source of storytelling.

 

Jean-Philippe Catellier
Programming and Broascasting Manager
Paraloeil

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