A row has erupted over the legacy of revered French ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, after a respected critic accused the captain and his crew of “disgusting” animal cruelty in his Oscar-winning film The Silent World, reports The Telegraph.
The adventures of Captain Cousteau, who became a household name sailing the world’s seas in his red bonnet and British-built ship, Calypso, were immortalised in a 1954 film shot by French director Louis Malle.
The film won the Golden Palm in the Cannes Film Festival as well as an Oscar for best documentary and is attributed with raising awareness about the wealth and fragility of marine life.
But more than six decades later, and almost 20 years after Cousteau’s death, Gérard Mordillat, a novelist and film maker, has sparked disquiet in France by slamming the film as “naively disgusting”, saying its main aim was to “p--- off fish and all marine life”.
“It’s horrible, it’s repulsive, it’s something unbearable,” he said.
Speaking on nternet-based programme Là-bas Si j’y Suis (Over There If I’m There), Mr Mordillat aired an edit of scenes in which Cousteau and his crew appear to torture a turtle by riding on its back until it is out of air, blast a coral reef with dynamite, ram a sperm whale and another baby, fatally wounding both, and then kill sharks that feast on the dead marine mammals.
After the dynamite incident, Cousteau can be heard saying: “It is an act of vandalism, but the only method enabling us to list all the living species.”
Mr Mordillat said the crew had acted “like the worst kind of butchers who today massacre sharks for their fins and throw them, dying, back to the sea full of blood”.
“It’s fitting they called it the silent world, as today the massive destruction of coral reefs, the extermination of marine animals, hunting, pollution, the cynicism of all governments in the name of science, research and profit goes on in silence,” he said.
“When you see the film today, you ask how could we have been so blind?”
As for Cousteau, he said he acted like a “pasha who didn’t know his port from his starboard”.