The jaws of history

The long-awaited DVD release of Peter Gimbel’s seminal documentary Blue Water, White Death will be of interest to divers for several reasons, but above all it shows how much the world has changed. Hailed as a masterpiece on its theatrical release in 1971, the film has until now only been available on pirate video, its distribution prevented by studio politics and legal disputes.

At the time of filming, the great white shark was still a mystery to the public, but Gimbel had realised the fascination such a creature could inspire, and raised funding for an expedition to track down and film the elusive shark off South Africa. Unfortunately, no one knew much about great whites back then, so instead of going to the Cape, the ship heads west and chugs up the Indian Ocean coast towards the Seychelles, where the water is too warm for white sharks.

It’s a team documentary, with the various divers and cameramen in the starring roles, reflecting in part the style popularised by Cousteau’s Calypso expeditions of the same era. Included in this team are Stan Waterman – now the beloved elder statesman of US diving – and a youthful Ron and Valerie Taylor, who went on to forge a career making films about sharks and the marine environment in their native Australia.

The film is edited in a sparse manner and there is very little commentary, an economical style that led an overexcited critic from the New York Times to declare it ‘so pure that it’s as poetic as anything I’ve seen in a long time’. The opening titles are certainly arresting, as shark silhouettes drift through blood-red water while humpback whales provide a baleful soundtrack. It reminded me of the muted opening sequence of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a notorious exploitation flick made three years after Blue Water, White Death.

Gimbel’s film is unquestionably influential, but ‘poetic’ is pushing it. In parts, the staged reactions come across as a little theatrical, and the meandering narrative is crying out for a more disciplined edit. Worst of all, some soundtrack is provided by a folk singer, Tom Chapin, whose acoustic contributions seem completely at odds with the feel of the movie. In many ways, the film is amateurish and dated, but for pre-Jaws audiences, this was the first celluloid encounter with the great white.

You don’t actually see a great white until the last section of the film, but the Indian Ocean sections do contain some remarkable footage of oceanic white-tip sharks massing around the corpse of a sperm whale in numbers that would never be seen in the modern era. This is also where the film shows its age in shocking scenes that show the harpooning and processing of sperm whales off Durban.

As a whale is captured, Val Taylor cries ‘they shot him, they shot him!’, and Waterman laments that ‘they’ll be extinct before we can really understand them’. But a whale corpse is then used as bait for the sharks, and it is hard to imagine that this could have been done without some form of collusion with the whalers. Scavenging on whale corpses has been filmed in the modern era, but in every case the cetacean died without the involvement of humans.

I showed my preview DVD to various friends, many of whom thought the use of a harpooned whale was cynical even by the standards of the time. This problem is compounded by the killing of an oceanic white-tip by a diver wielding a bang-stick (essentially a shotgun cartridge on a pole). The killing is not justified by any comments in the narrative, and my suspicion is that it was staged to create a dramatic scene.

Having waited for years to see this film, I now regard it as a curiosity rather than a classic. Still, if you’re at all interested in the history of shark diving, you really have to see it, and there are some genuinely dramatic underwater sequences. Its iconic moments come when the team decide to go free-swimming with the oceanic white-tips and the final, violent cage-diving encounter with a great white off Australia.

It is hard to know what to make of the enigmatic Gimbel, who died of cancer in 1987. He must have known that great whites could be found off his native Long Island, and crewmembers have speculated that the whole Indian Ocean travelogue was little more than a jolly for the cameras. In the film, his persona alternates between a sort of hipster (he calls everyone ‘kiddo’) and the brooding, argumentative expedition leader. Stan Waterman, meanwhile, comes across as an affable jock with a bizarre 19th-century turn of phrase. Of all the famous figures portrayed here, Ron Taylor is perhaps the most impressive – down to earth, authoritative and, when it comes to sharks, usually in the right.