Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the lanky man who smoked Gitanes Bleues and wore a red bobble hat, was the hero of my childhood. I probably shared my enthusiasm for Cousteau with an entire generation. Diver, captain, explorer, storyteller – every child would have loved to have an uncle like him. His travel stories were the most exciting thing to watch on television. Images from all the world’s oceans and the underwater world.
Sunday afternoons during my childhood were devoted to the series ‘Secrets of the Sea’. We’d gather at someone’s house who already had a TV – back then, there were only a few – and set sail aboard the ‘Calypso’, side by side with Cousteau and his crew on an adventure.
With wide eyes and jaws dropped in amazement, we devoured Cousteau’s films, trembling with rapt attention and a thirst for knowledge, eager to learn in a way no teacher ever managed to achieve. It was action cinema and educational television rolled into one, long before either existed. No one broadened our world view more or awakened our environmental awareness earlier than Cousteau with his films. He showed people a new world for the first time – the one beneath the waves. And we watched – all of us, spellbound.
The world had never seen images like these before: We swam with dolphins and whales, dived among reefs and wrecks, explored coral banks, watched manatees mating and peered into a shark’s gaping maw, discovered strange fish, plunged into endless blue depths, became trapped in Arctic pack ice, drifted amongst shoals of sub-Antarctic squid and krill, fret over an injured baby whale, crawled alongside Cousteau towards angry male walruses, glided beneath icebergs… Wherever the ‘Calypso’ was, whatever the men were doing – we were right there. Up close. On deck, underwater, at the table and in bed, as part of the team of wiry daredevils.
To achieve this, Cousteau (1910–1997) came up with all sorts of ingenious ideas. Many of his countless inventions relating to diving and filming were pioneering achievements. In 1936, Cousteau presented the first underwater film, for which he had developed a waterproof housing for the camera. In 1946, he unveiled his self-regulating breathing apparatus, which was to revolutionise diving as a whole. He devised the underwater scooters – high-speed, propeller-driven flotation aids – which were later featured in Bond films. And beneath that famous red bobble hat, which later flew into space, the idea for a diving saucer was also hatched. Back then, we techies were less interested in all the technical details than in the fantastic films that were made possible by them.
Cousteau simply had a knack for telling good stories – half the battle when it comes to making a good film. He paired these stories with the most spectacular imagery imaginable. He commissioned screenplays from masters of cinema (including Louis Malle) and, as the icing on the cake, accompanied them with bombastic orchestral scores and subtle music.
It was not just the public but the film industry too that revered Jacques-Yves Cousteau; he won every major award: three Oscars, the Palme d’Or and a Bambi. The son of a lawyer had found his element – water – during the Second World War, when he served as a corvette captain and was a member of the Resistance – an achievement that earned him the Cross of Honour of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order. As well as being revered worldwide by several generations of children, Cousteau also received honorary doctorates, UN recognition and the respect of governments. Even back then, the term ‘cult figure’ could have been coined for this all-round genius.
Thanks to the film “The Deep”, starring Bill Murray, we know quite a bit about the man we usually saw wet and always wearing a bobble hat: his ego was every bit as big as his charm; he was the guiding star in the universe of the “Calypso”, a dictator in skimpy swimming trunks. When it came to environmental protection and image-building, Cousteau was the original U2’s Bono.
Greta Paulsdottir