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.
Monsters, aliens, sci-fi and the apocalypse Humanity and the world around us War and historical adventure journey, scientific, humanity, documentary or earth disaster, exciting, boats, voyage or adventure monster, creature, dinosaurs, scientist or beast creature, aliens, monster, sci-fi or scary earth, sci-fi, space, spaceship or scientific Show All…
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…
Film Genre Challenge for January: Documentary #8
• If you really want to know what it must feels like to be working as a fisherman on a boat or even a fish (yes, a fish) in the middle of a deep, angry, cold, and gloomy ocean for an hour and a half, then look no further. A documentary film mostly shot in GoPro cameras, Leviathan, a harrowing take on the commercial fishing industry, has the power to immerse you in the lives of those in the boat by having these cameras strapped onto the fishermen and yes, even the fish themselves. What a hauntingly beautiful and intensely overwhelming sensory experience.
• No dialogue, no musical score, no storyline, no commentary,…
Succesfull and unique documentary about commercial fishing that miraculously results in an almost experimental horrorfilm. Although it’s not really informative, with no interviews or voice-overs, it’s (luckily) mostly focused on being an audiovisual experience, filled with dark, dynamic shots, haunting night scenes and lots of blood. Definitely not for everyone, it’s mostly cinema that grabs you by the throat, or doesn’t, but for me it was a great hypnotic journey. There seems to be a six hour version of this, but that seems like too much, after 80 minutes or so, I felt like I had experienced enough. This kind of abstract documentaries are always a pleasure to discover.
O, I earned my keep and I paid me way,
And I earned the gear that I was wearing;
Sailed a million miles, caught ten million fishes,
We were dreaming of the shoals of herring.
Directed by a duo from Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), "an experimental laboratory that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography ... [using] analog and digital media, ... to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world," it's no surprise that Leviathan is a visceral experience first, second, and third.
Starting with just audio as our guide to indistinguishable actions being carried out in nearly complete darkness, the film gradually adds more visuals to the mixed, but they're almost always experiential rather than contextual, or logical. And so the thrum of engines is joined by the butchering of fish, seen through a camera sloshing in a bin alongside their bulging eyes and protruding tongues; rhythmic sounds of…
wish i was curating the trippy visuals for the Electric Daisy Carnival so i could play this on loop on an enormous LED screen behind Tiesto while he DJs for 50,000 teenagers tripping on molly
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…
An experience in film and documentary filmmaking if there ever was one. Stripped away to pure binary information the lack of any interviews, commentary, or narration leaves one to decipher the bleak and beautiful imagary on their own. Witnessing nothing more than another day at work for the film's subjects in an emotionally devoid near hallucinatory technique comes to be a reflection igniting voyage that left me reckoning with the human spirit, man's effect on its habitat, and capitalism.
Absolutely recommend.
Non-narrative really means just that in some cases.
I was expecting more from this film. I was hoping for something to the tune of Ron Fricke. Some visuals that would compensate for the lack of plot. Instead I got cameras on a boat. The cameras film and the people on the boat do their jobs. It's just a voyeur film about people fishing in the Atlantic. I guess that makes it experimental and brilliant but it didn't do anything for me. I was bored. I didn't feel like I was watching something new. I have seen similar ideas fleshed out just not into a full 90 minute feature.
I learned more about myself than I did about the fishing boat.…
An aquatic Eraserhead. Watching it gave me the sensation of being an internal organ. Maybe a spleen. Insistent, exhausting, alive.
