On leviathan

I’m a little late to the party, but today I watched Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. It was a wondrous cinematic experience. One of my favorite genres of documentary – the how it’s made film – done in the most immersive, breathtakingly beautiful way. It shows the ins and the outs of a crew of fishermen on the open seas off the New England coast. No words are spoken in the film, no frame is uncrooked and no shot is focus. It appears to be filmed with waterproof action cameras rigged in ways unbeknownst to me. There is no unifying perspective, no single narrative purpose to the piece. It does something I hadn’t seen up to now. I want to say that I felt like I was on that vessel with those nameless men and among the swathes of catch, but that’s not it. Nothing can convey the experience of working on that ship. When I said it was immersive I didn’t mean that it immersed me in being there but rather that it made me feel immersed in the unnameable something that belongs to cinema alone. Much has been said about the film, and I’m not here to delve into another review. The reason why I feel compelled to report on this experience is the context of my spectatorship. First of all, I wasn’t expecting to watch Leviathan today. But I was asked to read a long form interview with the filmmakers for a class on critical practice. I enjoyed the conversation and was struck by the relative unpretentiousness of these acclaimed researchers and artists. The buzzwords were kept to a minimum, and I appreciated their candor. If there’s one thing I’d say is most important, it’s that we don’t know what we’re doing, Vérena says. The way they spoke about starting from a point of not knowing and following a primordial intuition resonated with me. But what did rub me the wrong way was their elaboration on a certain truthful, documentarian, non-fictive instinct. At one point Lucien says that the images they are drawn to are those that go beyond the surface, and invoke the invisible. We resist beautiful images, he adds. I came to class ready to lambast this aesthetic position. Nobody can resist beautiful images; that’s the whole point of image making. Try as one may, the very act of photographing betrays one’s sensibility of beauty. Standardizing beauty is the problem. Playing along with the apparently common sense of what is beautiful and what is not, that’s how we got to the hypersuperficiality of our shared image culture. I feel the need to stress this because Leviathan is one of the most beautiful pieces of moving image I have ever seen. That it was not filmed in accordance with the hollow and wholly arbitrary modes of contemporary cinematography makes the film that much more of an aesthetic achievement. The images presented by Leviathan are the pinnacle of texture in film. Layers upon layers of texture. The way shadow plays with light within an extremely confined dynamic range reigns supreme over any technically “correct” exposure. The color palette harkens to the Old Masters. Despite their objection to beauty, or rather perhaps because of it, they managed to create a thing of almost unprecedented visual effect. Not to mention the sound, the immense and harrowing and crushing soundscapes in which ocean and diesel engine are intermingled in an ungodly symphony. Even when projected in the smallest theatre in the world, Leviathan towers over recent IMAX extravaganzas. And that makes me so very happy. It is a thing of true beauty and that is all right. We have every right to bask in that which we think is beautiful. No need to discredit the very concept in order to differentiate ourselves from the mainstream.