The greatest shark film ever made came 4 years before JAWS — and it’s a documentary.

“In April, 1969, a movie crew arrives in South Africa determined to find the great white shark and to film it underwater,” so begins the expedition that would become one of the greatest wildlife documentaries ever filmed — and the best shark film ever made: BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH.

The film follows Peter Gimbel, a wealthy diver, and adventurer who has enlisted a crew of divers and cameramen to find what he considers to be “the most dangerous predator still living in the world, the great white shark….” With him are Stan Waterman, a diver and lecturer, and Ron and Valerie Taylor, an Australian couple and both champion spearfishermen. Ron acts as a guide for the expedition, being the only member of the crew to have seen a great white shark in person. Also with them is Tom Chapin — Tom is a folk singer. The team convenes in Durban, South Africa to begin their five-month voyage at sea aboard the rusty steamship, the Terrier VIII.

Ron and Valerie Taylor

As the ship departs, Chapin’s moody folk ballad over the soundtrack creates the atmosphere of an epic quest beginning, as though the crew are not in search of any recognizable animal of this earth, but something more mythic and terrifying. It’s at this moment that BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH ditches the humdrum tropes of educational wildlife documentaries and adopts the tone of an adventure film to rival even today’s biggest Hollywood blockbusters.

The audience is placed on the deck of the Terrier VIII and taken on this voyage with Gimbel and his crew by a brilliant use of documentary vérité techniques (also known as observational cinema). Relying very little on a narrator, the filmmakers pull the viewer into the water with them during intense diving sequences — sometimes involving thousands of feeding sharks.

The crew begins by following a whaling ship in the hunting grounds off South Africa hoping to use the massive corpse of a harpooned sperm whale as bait for a passing white shark. Nothing is held back from the viewer: whales are harpooned, blood spurts from blowholes, their massive carcasses are left buoyed in the water. The crew lash their cages to the dead whales and watch as sharks swarm to feed on the fatty carcasses. But no great white.

When the shark fails to appear by day, the crew perform a night dive in their cages, making for a terrifying underwater sequence. The gaping death maw of the sperm whale. Huge chunks of bloody meat drift through the water. Thousands of gliding sharks can only be glimpsed in the filmmakers’ swinging camera lights cutting through the pitch-black water, 100-miles offshore, six-thousand feet to the bottom.

Shifting weather, poor underwater visibility, and days on end without any sight of marine life — shark or otherwise — keep the explorers moving in search of ideal conditions to film. But out of this journey, BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH develops a sense of adventure and the film never becomes dull for the viewer. In the Mozambique Channel between Africa and Madagascar, Gimbel and Co. venture ashore scarcely populated islands, crossing smooth sand bars between crystal-blue waters, and walk among tall mangrove swamps. They dive colorful coral reefs and the wreck of a sunken World War II British carrier. At night, the explorers fish for their supper and play music on the deck of their ship, teasing nostalgia for the tales of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson. All the while chasing the myth surrounding the “white death”.

From left: Peter Gimbel, Valerie Taylor, Ron Taylor, and Stan Waterman.

The great white proves more difficult to find than anticipated and the crew only has sparse information and rumors to follow. In India, Gimbel hears of a 10-man fishing trip returning with only three survivors after encountering a 16-foot shark that “put its head out of the water and attacked” — behavior uncommon among other species of sharks. “Only a white can be that mean,” Stan Waterman concludes. This intrigue creates a build-up of suspense in the viewer that leads to a satisfying payoff that’s hard to find in even the best-scripted mystery/thrillers.

Ron Taylor eventually guides Gimbel to the other side of the globe, to Dangerous Reef in South Australia. There they are introduced to Rodney Fox, a diver and one of the few men to survive an attack by a great white shark. Gimbel immediately recruits him to build a makeshift whale carcass out of old horse and goat corpses, whale oil and canned blood as bait to lure a white shark into the bay.

And it works.

The Great White Shark. Dangerous Reef, South Australia.

The final sequence is all gliding monsters and teeth showcasing some of the first and most comprehensive footage of the great white shark ever filmed. The massive sharks cut through bloody clouds of chum to surround the boats, their size dwarfing the filmmakers in their cages. The sharks bump them with their snouts and test the aluminum bars with their razor-edged teeth. Peter Lake, a still photographer for the crew, has to cut his way loose when a 16-foot white shark becomes entangled in his cage’s line and begins thrashing in panic. A gripping sequence that would be echoed four years later in Steven Spielberg’s shark summer blockbuster, JAWS.

Completed and released in 1971, at a time when wildlife documentaries had little appeal outside of high school biology classes, BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH polarized audiences with an engrossing real-life adventure at sea and became a staple in scientific communities for its immersive and unobstructed view of sharks thriving in their natural environment. The film also placed sharks in the public consciousness, making it plainly apparent the necessity these creatures have to our ocean ecosystems. In the following years, footage of the film would reveal the devastating effects human interference has had on the populations of certain species.

“At the time, there was a saying: ‘The only good shark is a dead shark.’” Rodney Fox, in a retrospective interview on the film.

Apart from its footage of the great white shark, BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH is also famous for its free diving sequence, in which the divers leave the safety of their cages to swim freely among feeding sharks — the first time such a dive has ever been filmed. The sequence shows thousands of oceanic whitetip sharks tearing into the whale carcass and surrounding the divers. There are so many that Valerie Taylor flails her arms and punches through the water to drive the sharks away and maintain a safe distance. “There were thousands of them. You can’t possibly count them,” Gimbel tells the crew on the deck.

Oceanic Whitetip Shark

Today, this sequence could never be recreated in the real world as the oceanic whitetip shark has been hunted to near total extinction by commercial fishing. At one time the most numerous of the open ocean species, sightings of the oceanic whitetip are nearly as rare as the great white, and never in groups as large as those depicted in BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH.

“At the time, the sea was a dark and mysterious place. We now have realized that we need to become the protectors and not the predators.” Artist Scott Wyland on the impact of the film.

July 23 marks this year’s return of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Many Walmart retailers have included DVD editions of BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH in their promotional displays for Discovery’s annual event. This will afford new viewers the opportunity to experience an immersive, entertaining, and well-crafted documentary on sharks without the distracting compilation editing and pop of reality TV.

The voyage of the Terrier VIII explorers remains relevant to this day as BLUE WATER, WHITE DEATH continues to entertain new viewers in the beauty, terror, and mystery of the ocean and its most misunderstood predators.