Cannes Film Fest 1956: Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s ‘The Silent World’ Over Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’

Courtesy Everett Collection

Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle’s documentary offers a vivid underwater cinematography with the duo becoming the first non-fiction directors in Cannes history to earn the top prize.

Their colorful crowd-pleaser has reportedly inspired Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. (ironically, one of his weakest films)

But over the years, it is Ray’s Pather Panchali that is widely hailed as a landmark, introducing one of cinema’s great humanists.

The Cannes 1956 jury was majority-French (7 out of 12 members, including jury chair Maurice Lehmann), so there may have been a national bias.

However, for the first and only time in Cannes history, the festival created a “Best Human Document” prize to honor Pather Panchali, which helped put Ray and Indian neorealism on the global cinema map.