A virtuoso experiment from two members of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), Leviathan is a disorienting journey into the abyss of the world of commercial fishing. There is no dialogue or identifiable characters. Instead, it is a chaotic whirlwind of a documentary that spends its entirety on a fishing vessel in the Northeastern Atlantic. It is something between a hallucination and a nightmare, like if Gaspar Noé directed Moby Dick.
This film is not recommended for those who get seasick, but those daring enough to watch men gut hundreds of fish will find Leviathan wrenching and reckless. A purely visceral ride, the filmmakers from SEL, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, attached the camera to the chains and the nets as the boat bounces through the waves. Be prepared for when schools of fish splatter on the deck, and their executioners come to do their dirty jobs.
Leviathan is a sickening trip but a remarkable documentary, one that plunges the viewer right into the world of commercial fishing with results both stunning and horrifying. Several cameras pick up the day-to-day work of workers, with many sequences – even those that fluctuate between on-deck and underwater – capturing the horror in one take. In one striking moment, the camera whips around a massive flock of seagulls cawing right above the water. The birds get so close to the camera, you feel that they will peck at the lens. It is a glorious piece of violent piscine pornography.
