A tribute to Taylor, Playing with Sharks brings together archival footage from seventy years of ground-breaking underwater cinematography (produced by Valerie and husband, Ron) and contemporary interviews with Valerie, who, at eighty-five, after seventy years as a diver, scientific researcher, and advocate for marine conservation, is still diving with bull sharks.

Dancing around the relationship between danger, fear, and familiarity is stock in trade for shark cinematography, and spectacular shark footage was the currency the Taylors traded in. Valerie has said that television shows wanted drama and wouldn’t buy any footage other than ‘dangerous marine creatures’ – and the Taylors delivered. Sharks are photogenic from any angle, but the money shot of shark photography is the point of view shot straight into the open jaws of a great white shark, the frame of the image serrated by rows of jagged teeth. Add a moving camera and a fearless cinematographer and you have a ‘submarine with teeth’ accelerating up ‘like a freight train coming out of the mist’. In Blue Water White Death (1971), directed by Peter Gimbel and James Lipscomb, there is astonishing footage of the Taylors in a dive cage in Port Lincoln, South Australia, with a great white repeatedly barging the cage, teeth first, trying to bite through the bars. Entangled in a rope, it thrashes the full force of its enormous body against the aluminium cage with the divers dangling helplessly inside. This adrenaline-pumping footage does not make its way into Playing With Sharks, perhaps because of its potential to exacerbate shark phobia, but it led Steven Spielberg to contract the couple to film all the footage of great white sharks for Jaws (1975). Jaws provoked mass terror among swimmers, and the Taylors deeply regretted the full-scale slaughter of sharks that ensued.

The first time Valerie and Ron decided to leave the protection of a cage to film among a hundred oceanic whitetip sharks in a feeding frenzy, Valerie thought, ‘Now we die … never for a second did I think of not dying.’ The oceanic whitetip is responsible for more human fatalities than all other sharks put together, but the pair watched the hunting behaviour of the whitetips closely and realised that, before biting their prey, they would approach and bump it a few times. They figured that if they bumped back hard they could establish themselves with the pack and the sharks would respect them and leave them alone. In Blue Water White Death, as they swim out of the cage, Valerie armed with just a stick and Ron holding a cumbersome underwater camera, huge sharks circle, charge in repeatedly and then abruptly turn and shoot off as they encounter the unexpected resistance of their intended prey. As the camera spins around with the pack, freed from its rigid grounding in the cage, we experience with it the magnificent, streamlined movement of these sleek, seamless turbines slicing through the water, this sublime footage fires up mirror neurons, so that we feel the movement resonate in our own bodies, as if we too are gliding effortlessly through the water.

The Taylors were also the first to ever dive with great white sharks without a cage. With Ron on the camera most of the time, it was Valerie who got close to the sharks. As she says, ‘If there was a blonde girl in a bikini swimming among sharks, well, that was a seller, so that’s what we did.’ She was often trivialised by commentators who focused on her long blonde hair and hot-pink wetsuit, but when the Taylors decided to challenge the received scientific wisdom that sharks tore through their prey with the crush strength of their jaws, it was Valerie who donned a chainmail suit, strapped tuna to her arm, and dived in among oceanic blue sharks until eventually one bit on her arm. She came out of the encounter completely unscathed, proving that the shark ripped apart its prey with a side-to-side sawing motion rather than with crush pressure – a hell of a hypothesis to test by trial and error.

‘See how he smiles,’ Taylor says of a great white. We watch her stand on a narrow platform at water level, handfeeding fish to a huge great white (‘a very sweet shark’) and patting the shark’s head as it swims away. At this moment in the film, the question inevitably arises: is this woman stark raving mad? This is a moment of great doubt for the viewer: is she a reliable witness? Great whites have been known to jump nearly three metres out of the water, and it is hard to compute the gaping abyss between Taylor’s fearless behaviour and the shark’s lethal reputation. And yet, Taylor has dived with and studied sharks for seventy years; her knowledge is up close and personal, and marine scientists and peers like David Attenborough hold her in high esteem because of her contribution to scientific research into shark behaviour. Marine biologist Jeremiah Sullivan says that, in the all-male diving world of the 1950s and 1960s, Valerie was the only one who was never afraid. She says, ‘Fear is not part of my nature.’

Taylor is a passionate and influential advocate for marine conservation, but to listen to her saying sharks are not that dangerous, to see her treating them like pets, leaves me hanging on a hook, wanting a more interventionist style of documentary, an interlocutor who would tease out some of her more confronting statements. This would make her advocacy for shark conservation more convincing. Valerie can navigate this carnivorous world because of a lifetime spent studying shark behaviour and learning the differences between sharks. When I go in the water, I go in as a naïve intruder.

For anyone who, like me, is an ocean swimmer, sharks are the business end of the conservation debate: we have skin in the game. I know that, as an apex predator, sharks are a vital part of marine ecosystems, and can admire and respect them as a perfectly evolved machine, but this is my rational brain thinking. Sharks use their teeth as mechanoreceptors – they feel with their teeth in their infamous bite-and-spit technique. The image of diver Rodney Fox after he was ‘felt’ by a great white, his torso gouged along its entire length with deep puncture marks and his abdomen gaping open with organs exposed, sears its way into my emotional memory more profoundly than any rational discussion about shark conservation, triggering my amygdala and short-circuiting my frontal lobes. To learn to coexist with sharks, to keep my prefrontal cortex fully engaged, I need more knowledge and strategies for survival. Playing With Sharks left me with many unanswered questions, wanting more.

Playing with Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story (Madman Films), 90 minutes, directed by Sally Aitken. In cinemas now.