Critics

Cinema & TV

Baywatch

Documentary

Jordi Montaner | 16 june 2010

Title: The Cove
Genre: Documentary
Length: 92 minutes
Year: 2009
Country: United States
Address: Louie Psihoyos
Screenplay: Mark Monroe
Music: J. Ralph
Photography: Brook Aitken
Cast: Brook Aitken, Joe Chisholm, Mandy Rae Kruikshank, Dan Goodman, Charles Hambleton, Simon Hutchins, Kirck Krack, Isabel Lucas, Richard O'Barry, Hayden Panettiere, Roger Payne, John Potter, Louie Psihoyos, Dave Rastovich, Paul Watson Greg "Moondog" Mooney
Executive Producer: Jim Clark
Montaje: Geoffrey Richman
Artistic direction: Arnaud Le Roch
Sound: Glenfield Payne
Official website: www.thecovemovie.com

It has already harvested two major awards by winning the Oscar for best documentary and being voted the best U.S. documentary by the audience at the Sundance Film Festival. No doubt this is a risky film. Its development lies in its structure, following a pattern typical of a thriller, taking apart piece by piece a macabre scenario that has pitted Japan versus the world’s public opinion. The Cove unveils a “theme park” that, in reality, is used as a farm to regularly slaughter whales and sell their meat on the market. In the morning, dolphins receive herring and applause, while at night, bullets dye the sea red and animals are butchered in a gloomy cave that lends its name to the documentary.

Psihoyos is not exactly a rookie. His experience and that of the whole team of National Geographic filmmakers makes them the “A Team” of nature documentaries, even though, if one wants to look for a more fitting TV series, perhaps “Baywatch” is a better choice.

The beach at Taiji, Wakayama, in Japan, was the scene last year of the killing of 23,000 dolphins. Psihoyos knew this really touches a sensitive taboo in the Japanese government, which tries to hide it at all costs, and decided to challenge the seemingly inevitable with an overwhelming attack of truth, evidence, protest and commitment. Using sophisticated and well-camouflaged recording systems, The Cove starkly recounts the Holocaust that periodically takes place on a beach in Japan. Ralph's music and Aitken photography also offer an emotional counterpoint that raise the report to the realm of art.
The dolphin, a cultural icon

Can a sense of responsibility for part of art and cinema towards the dolphin be considered to have intellectual grounds? Not only can it, but it must be so. Psihoyos’s surveillance of the Taiji beach has a background of historical and cultural justice. For Westerners, killing dolphins is not exactly the same as hunting foxes or bullfighting. A Pythian hymn tells of how Apollo climbed Parnassus to slay the dragon Python, who pronounced oracles and harassed his mother, Leto. Thus a god took charge of the oracles at Themis and appointed Cretan sailors as the first priests of the new sanctuary. Apollo, when he saw the ship of these sailors, became a dolphin and led them to the Gulf of Crisa, on the north coast of Corinth. The newly endowed priests called the city Delphi because Apollo took the form of a dolphin to characterize that sacred place.

Both the most ancient Greek and Roman chronicles often refer to the survivors of a shipwreck being “rescued,” saved from death, by dolphins. So much so that early Christianity adopted the dolphin as the symbol of salvation, then represented as a fish, before Constantine formalized the cross.

It is poetic justice, possibly historic, to protest that on the other confines of the Earth dolphins nightly face a pitilessly slaughter hidden from the world’s view. Psihoyos and his team should consider their effort well spent, and those who see the documentary should consider their protest as not only environmental but cultural as well.

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