Fishing for New Forms of Communication

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about the upcoming documentary, Leviathan. The film explores life on a commercial fishing boat through the lenses of small digital cameras, tossed in the water along with the nets, affixed to the helmets of the crew and dragged across the deck. There is little dialogue and no voice-over narration. In full disclosure, I haven’t seen the film yet. I’m still waiting for it to show locally. But while reviews suggest that this view of fishing life is disorienting, critics are also buzzing over the unconventional narrative and visceral perspective.


What really intrigues me in all of the hype is the unique point of view of the film’s directors. You’ve got Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s avant-garde approach to communication, mixed with and Véréna Paravel’s experience documenting the lives of people on the edges of society. The result is a film that explores a perspective rarely represented in the media, through the sounds and sights that make up their daily jobs. In an interview with Gawker, Castaing-Taylor explains:


“I hate most documentaries. The moment I feel like I’m being told what to think about something, I feel that I want to resist the authority of the documentarian. We’re more interested in making films that are more open-ended, that ask the spectators to make their own conclusions.”


Castaing-Taylor heads up Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), which provides “an academic and institutional context for the development of creative work and research that is itself constitutively visual or acoustic — conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems — and which may thus complement the human sciences’ and humanities’ traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word.” In simpler terms, the lab promotes creative works that favor sensory communication over spoken word. Prior to Leviathan, Paravel, who also works with the SEL, directed 2010’s Foreign Parts, a critically acclaimed documentary about a subculture of people living amid the auto shops and junk yards of Queens. The film was hailed for “its courage of questioning the traditional approach of anthropological research.” In his review for the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “The filmmakers are not concerned with rigorous obedience to the conventions of cinéma vérité. But they are more interested in observation than in interpretation, and in preserving above all a visual and aural record of the texture of life in a place that might well be destined for oblivion.”


At AC, we believe that a documentary should be driven by the reality of a subject, rather than a documentarian’s personal style or agenda. And we admire Castaing-Taylor’s philosophy that audio and visual details can communicate just as much as words do, and that each piece of a film makes an important contribution to its overall message. I love that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel are pushing the limits of the genre, paving the way for new filmmakers to further explore how to communicate various truths through film.


I like the idea that Leviathan communicates what it’s like to live and work on a commercial fishing boat through a visceral experience, unique for each viewer. I’m looking forward to experiencing this film for myself, since that seems to be the only way to fully understand it.


Have you seen the film yet? If so, what are your thoughts?


– Ali