The new National Geographic documentary, “Becoming Cousteau,” directed and produced by Liz Garbus, provides a fascinating account of Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s achievements as an explorer and environmental protector.
In 1942, Cousteau co-invented the aqualung, which enables scuba diving. By 1951, he acquired a 140-foot British minesweeper and refitted it to be his floating research lab and base of operations.
Cousteau then turned to photography and cinematography to document and share his adventures through waterproof cameras. He started shooting in the Mediterranean in 1943 and crisscrossed the globe aboard his ship—the Calypso—for more than half a century, directing and producing films and television programs until he died in 1997 at the age of 87.
Onscreen, Cousteau eschews the word “documentary” in relation to his productions, which he considered to be “filmed adventures.” Regarding Cousteau, Louis Malle, who shot films with Cousteau and whose features include “Lacombe, Lucien” and “My Dinner with Andre,” says “He is a filmmaker.”
Though ABC cancelled his television series in 1976, Cousteau remained one of the 20th century’s most famous and acclaimed individuals. In 1992, Cousteau was the only non-head of state included in the group photo of world leaders at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—a.k.a. the Earth Summit—in Rio de Janeiro. He was invited due to his observations of the decline and even disappearance of the nautical cosmos he’d traversed, filmed, and loved.
According to “Becoming Cousteau”’s press notes: “He and his crew experienced firsthand the catastrophic changes—warming sea waters, dying coral reefs, and glaciers cracking before their eyes—that we now know are evidence of the planet’s worsening climate crisis. He was determined to alert people to the dangers by forming The Cousteau Society in 1974 as a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, successfully altering policies toward Antarctica and creating momentum for the historic first Earth Summit in 1992.”
Despite its strengths in telling the story of Cousteau’s environmental advocacy, Garbus’s film makes a grievous omission by failing to mention Cousteau’s stance regarding France’s extremely controversial nuclear testing program at its overseas colony of French Polynesia.
As Cousteau wrote in a 1989 Los Angeles Times op-ed, “In 1987, I received permission from the French Ministry of Defense to observe an explosion at Mururoa, and afterward, sample the seas and its sediment for radioactivity. Our results showed the waters of the lagoon had negligible traces of radioactive elements, mainly cesium. My fierce opposition to nuclear weapons and their testing is based on a moral principle that remains unchanged.”
Written by Mark Monroe and Pax Wassermann, “Becoming Cousteau” is an entertaining film about an argonaut’s odyssey from adventurer to activist. The picture is enlivened by Cousteau’s own peerless underwater cinematography—something that is always a joy to behold.
Becoming Cousteau was theatrically released on Oct. 22.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2021
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