Leviathan, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Veréna Paravel (France /U.K./U.S., 2012)

In Person/Lucien Castaing-Taylor

“Looks and sounds like no other documentary in memory.”—Dennis Lim, New York Times

A thrilling adventure both on the high seas and in documentary storytelling, Leviathanimmerses viewers in the waterlogged toil of fishermen off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the setting of Melville’s Moby Dick. While neither the novel’s white whale nor the titular sea monster of biblical lore appear in this singular work of experimental ethnography, formidable creatures of nature and totalitarian forces of industry nonetheless haunt the North Atlantic trawler on which nameless workers battle the elements. Utilizing a passel of portable video cameras that are handed off from filmmaker to fisherman, sent sliding across the ship’s slippery deck, and tossed overboard into the deep blue depths—all to achieve a constantly shifting, disorienting point of view that repeatedly rolls and roils into gorgeous abstraction—codirectors Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Veréna Paravel (Foreign Parts, SFIFF 2011) eschew standard doc aesthetics and withhold telltale details in favor of pure aquatic sensation. Remarkable sound design—a heavy-metal mix of clanging machinery, moaning pipes, indecipherable utterances, and the ceaseless swirl of stormy seas—further enhances this existential sojourn into the dead of night and the plight of labor.


• Photographed by Castaing-Taylor, Paravel. (87 mins, Color, DCP, From Cinema Guild)