The Sea is Lovely, Dark and Deep

Leviathan

***½ out of ****

Directed by: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel

Running time: 85 minutes

Leviathan is a documentary that looks like something in between a hallucination and a nightmare. The entire film, directed by two members of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), is a disorienting journey into the abyss of the commercial fishing enterprise, set on a fishing vessel chopping through stormy waters off the coast of Massachusetts. A chaotic whirlwind of an experience, it is Moby Dick as directed by Gaspar Noé.

If you thought the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove was too distressing and disturbing, Leviathan is bound to make your insides wretch up some seasickness. On the flip-side, if you can stomach watching fisherman slit the throats and rip out the guts of defenceless fish, you are not only brave but in for a reckless, unforgettable trip.

After beginning with quotes from the Book of Job in Spinal Tap’s font base, the camera rattles forward onto the vessel. The water is so dark and deep, you can hardly see the depths that the chains, which hold a massive net, are pulling at. Heading out into stormy weather, the boat bounces through the waves. The wind whips so much that you can hardly make out the mutterings of the crew tossing around the boat. After a point, the camera becomes bleary-eyed, awash in spray and foam. 

The net pulls up a school of fish. They splatter onto the deck. Some are shaking, quenching for air. Those who have already died lie still. Before long, their executioners with red gloves rip out their insides and clean their remainders. It is hard to tell if the gloves are originally red or if the rubber has been bathed with the inky red of fish guts.

For a couple of minutes, the camera returns to the floor of the boat, lying in soupy red water. The eyes on a slit-off fish head stares emptily back.

Leviathan is one of the first feature-length projects from the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard. The program offers students interested in film, media and photography the chance to tell stories that show, as their website states, “the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence, and the aesthetics and ontology of the natural world.”

It is a virtuoso experiment that makes its point often about the harsh and sickening world of commercial fishing, but does so with stunning, horrific beauty. Leviathan was shot on several cameras from both the filmmakers and the fishermen, with many of the moments fulfilled in one long take.

The camera is sometimes tethered to a chain, tilted toward the sea. In an especially striking scene, the camera whips around between the depths of the ocean and a massive flock of seagulls cawing, moving frequently above and then back under the water. The birds get so close, one starts worrying that they will peck at the lens.

The ethnographic documentary also eschews all known conventions of non-fiction filmmaking: no talking heads, no graphs or onscreen diagrams, no voice-over narration. Instead, violent piscine pornography.

When the camera pans away from the waters, the filmmakers use it with a fly-on-the-wall approach, watching the vessel’s occupants clean pots, watch television and, in a dark reminder of their dirty jobs earlier, shower. Even though the filmmakers linger a bit too much on the humans, Leviathan is a riveting and immersive ride into the abyss of the sea.