2012 Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel
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.
Leviathan, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s experimental documentary following a nocturnal commercial fishing trip in the North Atlantic, has received near-universal critical praise for its immersive, visceral and haunting quality. Based on the gushing hyperbolic reception I was expecting a work of earth-shattering brilliance but unfortunately I struggled to share in the enthusiasm.
Maybe my tastes in cinema are far more conservative than I had originally thought but I was disinterested throughout this murky, repetitive and disorienting trip. Whilst I appreciate the filmmakers’ intent - such as the way the cameras move with the motion of nature and the toil of the fishermen - I was left nonplussed by the experience. Perhaps something is lost when watching it on the…
73/100
Not as brilliantly composed as the first half of Sweetgrass, but it doesn't much matter—the images picked up on the fly are among the most astonishing ever captured. Still, I do think claims have been a bit overstated, in that this is really just a much artier (which is to say, more abstract) version of unmediated nature docs like Microcosmos and Winged Migration, with some human labor thrown in to excite the left. Personally, I find that allowing people beyond the periphery of the frame—I'm okay with the bravura opening sequence and its briefly glimpsed arms and shoulders—breaks the spell, if only because we're so hard-wired to study the faces of our own species in search of behavioral clues;…
Whenever you call any work of art unique, time is bound to catch up on you and make you take back your words. But I'm going to go ahead and call Leviathan unique anyway.
Documentary makers Castaign and Paravel create a haunting and estranging vision of the harsh life on board a fishing vessel. In dark and grim colours they paint pictures so alien and bizarre that they come across more as surreal than grim reality. With muffled and muted sounds from the real world trying to break through in the background the pictures we are shown bob and weave from abstract surrealism to tangible realism, creating something akin to a fisherman's waking dream.
There is method in this madness…
Some systems, for all their ruthless efficiency and invisible control, seem guided only by chaos, like an anthill teeming with activity, its scurrying agents adhering to patterns we can’t perceive. Leviathan, an experimental documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, concerns a system whose very functionality seems incomprehensible: here we bear witness, with an unprecedented degree of intimacy, to a commercial fishing operation so wholly in thrall to the churning agitations of its environment that nature itself has not only the power but the will to topple it. Fish are not so much heaved the sea as they are wrenched from it, jerked with the force of market pressure, the hulking mass of bodies at work made as much a…
Leviathan is a Total Recall fantasy life made real: only instead of a secret agent you're a central member of a fishing crew ala The Perfect Storm. The film places you right onboard a vessel at dawn, its machinery groaning and surrounding ocean relaxing. With a series of small, clear cameras the film displays the minutae of this life using extreme, often uncomfortable close-ups and natural sound that immerses, disorientates & hypnotises. There is no narrative, no reason, no explanation of anything. You simply are just there.
As an experience of something real it's unmatched and you can be haunted by these images if you let them but Leviathan is not for the impatient or those prone to motion sickness.
Memorable yes, rewatchable probably not.
For all the talk about consciousness, environment, and labour that is getting tossed around with this one – all of which, don’t get me wrong, are among the major themes here – the project seems to be first and foremost an attempt at recalibrating viewers’ sense of gravity. Functioning as a quasi-sequel to Michael Snow’s landmark (pun kind of intended) La région centrale, Leviathan thrashes the camera erratically in any and every which direction; space is spun, flipped, and exploded to often vertiginous effect, to the point where I felt like I was going to fall out of my seat on a few occasions (oh how I would kill for an IMAX screening). One could even say that Castaing-Taylor and…
well i did not expect that.... nightmarish, alien, abstract -- it took cues from the fly on the wall style documentary that can be seen in something like Tie Xi Qu, but then experimented with that and made its own fish on the ground style documentary with go pros. Super unique and memorable. Probably one of the best experiments I've seen in film from this decade? Maybe?
As always, a very gripping and gruesome tale of fishing in all its gory glory. Strangely hypnotizing and definitely disgusting. This is a great silent documentary for anyone interested in film to check out.
Most of the time this made me feel like I was drowning. Incredible visceral documentary showing what it’s like on a fishing boat, but it made me feel panicked basically the entire time watching.
Moderately superior to the Peter Weller movie, though I'm not entirely sure which I'm more likely to lazily put on when I'm drunk. At any rate, there was a point about a third of the way in where I decided I found its extreme close-up disorientation technique just kind of exasperatingly affected, but I pushed through and its persistent evocation of tired-unto-terrifying dislocation came to feel both moving and edifying even while I continued to hold onto many of my reservations. Favorite moment: falling asleep in front of the TV, which is probably the scene that most resembles a Frederick Wiseman take on the whole ordeal.
A formal triumph, the strikingly original technique resonating perfectly with a subject so eternal that one suspects the only modern element is the urgency imposed by a metastasizing capitalism. The multitude of unmanned cameras seem to converge on one perspective: Nature, bewildered by our single-minded exploitation.
Loved every shot of birds, didn't care for the death metal typeface that reduced the film and almost rendered the clever credits illegible
Nicconoh 100 films
Based on this article by Indiewire.
(just wanted to check how many of them i've watched already)
Malaine 1,988 films
Replicated film poster designs. A (never-ending?) work in progress.
This list is getting long so I moved some sections to…
Thomas Stautland 1,636 films
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