Red, Red Lobster

Life at sea in Leviathan.

««« Leviathan. Written and directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel. Available on Netflix.

         

The only thing our media tends to romanticize more than love is work. The face of Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships, but Miller Time has launched ten thousand beer commercials. So we approach Leviathan---Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel's experimental film about working life aboard a north Atlantic fishing boat—with a certain set of expectations.

          What this film actually offers lies in a different universe entirely. There is no narration, and no musical cues beyond what the fishermen themselves play on their radios. Eschewing conventional equipment, the filmmakers shoot with compact GoPro cameras, hanging them from the workers' jackets, suspending them from lines, dunking them underwater, dragging them through vats of dying fish. In addition to being cheap, these cameras can be turned to such versatile uses they provide almost a God's eye view of their subject—a cut-rate panopticon.

          The result is an overwhelmingly sensual experience. We hear the wind screaming through the chains, and a cacophony of clanging equipment. Hooded figures glower like malevolent monks in the gloom. The boat's scuppers paint the sea with fish blood, and gulls hover and dive for scraps. Fish, eyes bulging and gills yawning, hang on in some twilight state between life and death. As the GoPros flit in and around, the whole thing might be taken for an out-of-body experience for the "catch"—but just as well for the boat itself.

          Belching smoke and offal, the trawler comes off as some kind of death-dealing anti-Ark. Certainly, Leviathan paints a far different picture from typical commercial images of seafood, landing bloodless and breaded on plates at Red Lobster. Yet the filmmakers are not interested in anything so obvious as an exposé on industrial fishing. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel run a media lab at Harvard called the "Sensory Ethnography Lab", a name that consciously evokes an anthropological tradition of "participant observation". To do ethnography is to watch and listen, but not to judge—at least in theory. And indeed, along with the names of the fishermen, the ethnographers credit the other "informants" in their film, including Asterias vulgaris (a starfish), Callinectes sapidus (blue crab), and yes, even Fulmarus glacialis (a sea bird).

          Like many of its stars, the film seems a bit undercooked. Though evocative, the images are sometimes unreadable, which wastes time. Fishermen at work can be a chatty bunch, but the cameras in their faces here appear to have silenced them. But there's no question Leviathan is a powerful and unique experience.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro