Leviathan

By my estimate, less than 10% of "Leviathan" is scaled to human proportion or human perspective. The movie is about ninety minutes long. We first glimpse a man, clad in brilliant orange cover-alls about five minutes into the film -- but the camera angle is severely canted and the man's activities are inscrutable and, indeed, the distortion in the image is so extreme that we can't tell if its midnight or dawn: pitch-black water erupting into a phosphorescent wake surges underneath some kind of grim-looking scaffolding and there are sea-gulls occasionly flung out of the torrent like soot or ash and a vast fibrous, pulpy tentacle twists and turns while the soundtrack roars like a waterfall; periodically, purplish and red bubbles, like clots of blood emerge from the inky darkness and, sometimes, we see a distant horizon turned on its side showing a faint radiance of pinkish-blue sky. The colors are all over-saturated and bleed into one another and you literally can't tell up from down. Long passages in the movies resemble Stan Brakhage's experimental films: blobs of intense color trembling against ribbons of light, a pictorial field always splashed with globular drops of water and frayed into darkness at its edges. At one point, we see a pinkish-grey landscape, porous with gravel depressions and, then, boulder-shaped protrusions on which a greenish-moss seems to be growing: it turns out that we are viewing parts of the body and face of the captain of the New Bedford fishing vessel on which the documentary was filmed. From this angle, the man looks like a sad-eyed walrus, scarcely human at all. Later, we see the torso of a man taking a shower, but the image is filmed through a red shower-curtain, blurred by the water pouring over the man and so it looks like he is bathing in blood. Actual blood gushes from the side ventricles on the fishing craft and the high-def video camera is placed on the surface of the water to participate in the high-velocity, wind-blur of the gore pouring off the ship. Many shots are filmed under water -- they give the impression that the vessel is racing through the turbulent black seas like a motor-boat, almost hydro-foiling, a savage mill-race of bubbles and star-shaped debris (fractured shells and fish-bones and actual star-fish) whirling past the lens. Vast flocks of sea-gulls whirl around the boat but the perspective from which they are filmed is so bizarre that the birds read as fragments of a black jig-saw puzzle inexplicably spinning in circles, the birds' feet and rumps sometimes crashing through the vortex of spinning water when the camera is yanked beneath the seas. Many of the images can't be deciphered at all -- you have the sense, inaccurate I'm sure, that the footage was printed color-reversed, upside-down, and, then, projected backward. The film is intensely beautiful, a symphony of water hurling in all directions, and we get a powerful sense of the boat heaving on heavy seas -- in one sequence, the camera is placed ankle-high in a steel chamber full of dead fish and the incarnadine water in which the battered, blubbery fish float sloshes back and forth as the camera rocks to and fro with it. The movie is startling but not revelatory -- we have no sense for what the men are doing or how their fishing tasks are performed. The key to the film is a long static sequence in which the walrus-faced captain stares at the camera -- actually he's watching TV -- and repeatedly falls asleep. The sea-captain is watching "The Most Dangerous Catch," a reality TV show about crab fishermen in the Bering Sea, and once a very popular show. "The Most Dangerous Catch" is the opposite of "Leviathan," a scripted narrative documentary that shows us exactly what the fisherman are doing, establishing novelistic motives and characters for its burly, foul-mouthed seamen. Clearly, the film makers who produced "Leviathan" did not want to compete with reality TV and so their film is impressionistic, a welter of fantastically kinetic and beautiful images that really don't communicate much of anything at all. From the way the movie is made, one perceives commercial fishing to involve fantastically swift vessels roaring at impossible speeds through turbulent seas -- is this what it is like to be on a commercial fishing vessel? Is it really complete and abstract chaos? The film creates powerful impressions but I have the sense that they are distorted and don't represent anything but an abstract sense of speed, pouring water, and vast, sinister machinery. Whenever I have been on a vessel crossing a large body of water, my visual field has been defined by the horizon, the place where sea meets sky -- I don't think the horizon is visible in any of the shots in this film except for a few seconds in the opening sequence. The film is by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Parvele of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab and the "auteurs" of "Sweetwater," (2009) a brilliant documentary about a last sheep-drive over the Bearpaw Mountains on the Wyoming and Montana border.