Leviathan (2012)
Leviathan (2012)
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | 01:28:09 | 1,92 Gb
Audio: English AC3 5.1 @ 448 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Documentary
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | 01:28:09 | 1,92 Gb
Audio: English AC3 5.1 @ 448 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Documentary
Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel
One of the most highly anticipated films of the year, from the directors of Sweetgrass and Foreign Parts, LEVIATHAN is a thrilling, immersive documentary that takes you deep inside the dangerous world of commercial fishing. Set aboard a hulking fishing vessel as it navigates the treacherous waves off the New England coast-the very waters that once inspired Moby Dick-the film captures the harsh, unforgiving world of the fishermen in starkly haunting, yet beautiful detail. Employing an arsenal of cameras that pass freely from film crew to ship crew, and swoop from below sea level to astonishing bird's-eye views, LEVIATHAN is unlike anything you have ever seen; a purely visceral, cinematic experience.
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Leviathan is a fantastic audio-visual experiment, presented as by the Sensory Ethnography Lab. The emphasis is on the sensory, so to get the other out of the way, it is filmed entirely on and around a commercial fishing vessel and yes, it’s a hard life for these fishermen, with much of their work machinelike in its mindless repetition, and mostly at night (happily the fish-gutting is filmed with some discretion; the removal of ray wings less so).
Leviathan (2012)
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The film’s real power is purely aesthetic, however, and the men are treated more or less as one more component of this world comprised of water, wind, sea life and machinery. Director's Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel took a load of cheap digital cameras and suspended them off the boat, hoisted them in the air amidst the following gulls, stuck them on the fishermen’s helmets, and juddered them about handheld in a fashion perfectly mirrored by the perpetual motion of the undersea eddies; when the camera is still, movement is provided by the incessant roiling of the ocean; and even in one cherishable, long-held static shot of a fisherman trying in vain to stave off sleep before a banal television in the perfectly prosaic break room, the low grade image makes the patches of color in a mayonnaise jar or a packet of crackers convulse with pixels.
Leviathan (2012)
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This is certainly a film that looks for beauty in the less-than-perfect image, and overwhelmingly it succeeds. The spell is rather weakened when one can actually tell what is going on, but when one cannot, or when nothing is actually happening but the ocean’s perpetual reconfiguring of itself, or the silvery dead fish eyes exert their surreal power, it is mesmerizing. Crazy flashes of color and light gradually dance across the immense black screen for the opening, deep in the chain hold, looking like nothing so much as an abstract, hand-painted film; the ocean flings its near-microscopic flotsam in gorgeous unfocused aureoles of color; the camera is hurled into and out of the waves to reveal a dizzying tessellation of gulls; or the cast-off debris, entrails and blood stream past the submerged camera like a no-budget, real-world stargate.
Leviathan (2012)
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The superlative sound design plays an great part in this, a bombardment of ocean, wind and machine noises. The implication of diegetic thrash metal for one shot is another spellbreaking diversion into ethnography, but subsequently echoed in the clanking of the machinery above decks. Elsewhere, winches sound like Persian chanting and one wonders at the extent of manipulation (also in a couple of places where the waves are disconcertingly visible but inaudible). Mostly, however, one takes the soundtrack as apparently realistic camera-captured audio, with all the limitations that entails, and the tinny, underwater tinge of noise-reduction marries perfectly with the submerged image. Otherwise, the realism of the soundtrack allows us to visualize the chains we cannot make out on screen, and provides a thrilling sense of immediacy, as the cameras rise and fall beneath the waves.
Leviathan (2012)
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There are many things formally fascinating about this film – the long opening sequence, for example, renders editing meaningless as one may try in vain to spot the cuts between the abstract images or the constantly reconfigured camera view on deck – but it is at its most effective when the grotty digital image captures colors and dancing swathes of light above and below the ocean in ways that make them both recognizable and surreally decontextualised, and ends with the wonderfully simple but hypnotic device of upending a suspended camera, so that gulls fly upside down beneath white flashes of seafoam. The credits commemorate various ships lost in these waters off New Bedford and the sense of the hard work being done in a world of violent motion and unemotional slaughter is ever present, but it plays second fiddle to the leviathan’s boiling cauldron of color, light and sound.
Leviathan (2012)
Leviathan opens with a passage from the Book of Job, an Old Testament chronicle of the suffering endured by the titular everyman, who's tumultuous relationship with his faith is documented in roughly 39 chapters of poetic inquiry. Concerning Job's allegorical inquisition into the relationship between human nature and that of our earthly environs, Chapter 41 of the Book of Job provides a metaphysical foundation for the latest documentary from Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab, who's cinema division has given us some of the most impressive recent work in the field of nonfiction cinema, including Castaing-Taylor's own Sweetgrass and Véréna Paravel's Foreign Parts. These two luminaries collaborated on Leviathan, a staggering anthropological account of an industrial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast of Massachusetts, where an untold number of ships have gone missing over the years as crews tend to a seemingly mundane vocation. Yet their workaday grind is anything but routine, and the results of Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's fearless documentation of the enterprise is the heart-stopping cinematic analogue to the crew's real-world peril.
Leviathan (2012)
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Shot with impressive resourcefulness with multiple mini DVs strapped to everything from members of the crew to ropes tethered to the ship's hull and thrown overboard to dead fish floating on the deck itself, Leviathan is one of the most uniquely fashioned films ever produced. It simply couldn't have been made in any other era but the here and now, and Castaing-Taylor and Paravel take appropriate measures to put the audience directly in the proverbial line of fire. Only observational by association, Leviathan is instead an action movie par excellence, careening from kinetic would-be set pieces to tense moments of reconciliation between man and nature, a push-pull that lends the experience a gripping sense urgency. To that end, if Sweetgrass was the most exciting end result of what was ostensibly a documentary about sheep, then Leviathan leapfrogs its own classifications, arriving somewhere between detailed procedural and high-art drama.
Leviathan (2012)
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Beginning in media res, the film swiftly finds crew members mobilizing pulley systems, grinding gears, and fastening nets for the day's cast, quickly establishing a dynamic tension between the mechanical and the ethnologic, pivoting between industrial repetition and the nascent folly of the human body. At no point does anyone aboard the ship feel completely above hazard; even a common boatswain, after a typically draining day at work, can't escape the din, as he's audibly attacked by outside currents battling the sidewall of his cabin as he unavoidably nods off. The images the duo capture here are without question some of the most bracing this field has produced (two sequences where the camera is left clinging portside as the ship dives amongst the currents, alternately revealing a school of seagulls overhead and torrents of stingray blood pouring off the hull, already feel like classics), but the sound design is equally as crucial, suffocating and soothing in equal measure. The combination of the two adds up to one remarkably sensory experience.
Leviathan (2012)
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Leviathan organizes many entities, both concrete and intangible, as opposing forces—first and foremost the communication between man and nature, but also the battle between the vulnerable and the impervious, the recurrent and the unchecked, and the fine line between heaven and hell on Earth, aggravated and antagonized by human interference or not. Throughout a lifetime of labor (or, in a more micro sense, on a day-to-day level amid life's many universal concerns), there's no escaping certain inevitabilities, and Leviathan enshrines both the forces of the environment and the men and women who attempt to physically interrogate the component parts of such a god-like fury—appropriate for a work of such Biblical proportions and consequence.
Leviathan (2012)
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