I was lucky enough to get into that surprise screening of Leviathan this weekend, with some of my
classmates (and a big thanks to Richard for letting me know about the screening!) – I’m thrilled that it came back to Montreal! I missed it when it
was here a few months back. This “documentary” (a term I use with hesitation as
even the filmmakers seemed ambivalent about its value) focuses on the
industrial fishing industry off the coast of New Bedford, yet provides a
radically non-narrativized, strangely intimate yet visceral glimpse into a
oft-romanticized (think Moby Dick) or
masculinized (think Deadliest Catch,
or, well, Moby Dick) line of work.
Leviathan was filmed primarily on small
extreme-sports cameras, the kind that are often attached to a human body, yet
not held up as a fetishized extension of the filmmaker’s ‘eye’ –as is typical
with filmmaking or photographic work. Attached to the bodies of fishermen, or
hung off the sides of the ship, these cameras weave in and out of the ship’s
giant, ambiguous body; splashing in and out of water tainted red with the gory
remains of bycatch and other fishing waste, traveling along large tattered
nets and clanking chains, or lingering on the splattered and weary limbs of
fishermen at work. If Donna Haraway imagined the deeply relational evolution of
dogs and humans as a “nature-culture,” or alternatively, as training practices
as “a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh,”
(Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto,
62), then the nature-culture depicted through Leviathan involves an equal level of mutual relationality between
“man”/industry/marine life, yet resulting in a very different form of fleshly
response. Leviathan’s portrait of a
nature-culture is one that leaks residue and viscera: as they interact, all of
the varied bodies (human, mechanical, animal) leave traces of their presence
upon each other, refusing full eradication. The men are spattered with
seawater, grime, and fish guts, and the boat leaves a trail of smoke and
bycatch in its wake, as an ever-present group of seagulls follow suit, infiltrating
the ship and searching for scraps to eat. If nothing else, Leviathan is a portrait of deeply intersecting worlds.
Yet getting
to vision: what struck me immediately about the filmmaking used throughout Leviathan was its evident “camera-ness.”
This was not a disembodied and steady camera “eye” that works to depict the
scene as neutrally and clearly as possible, disavowing its own existence in the
name of a consistent and coherently communicated narrative. Its physicality as
a camera was always evident, from jerky movements, to the splatters of water
and viscera that occasionally blurred its “screen,” to even a muffled and
distorted soundtrack. Ultimately, the assumption that the clarity of the senses
(namely, sight and sound) works to effectively communicate a narrative has been
abandoned here. What happens when the camera “eye” doesn’t attempt to “see” in
a naturalistic way, but embraces the specificities of its own mechanical body?
What kind of sensory and affective experiences are offered up by this
alternative way of seeing? Additionally, this way of seeing can’t be entirely
attributed to the mechanical, as many of these cameras were still attached to
human bodies as they went about their daily work. It could be interesting to
think about how Leviathan is a
portrait of labour, of depicting the
physicality of fishing in an alternative way. Do these cameras capture the
affects of repetitive work, of sore muscles, of exhaustion, of human bodies
submitting themselves to the larger body of the ship, which acts as a strange
assemblage of mechanical, environmental, human, and animal matter?
In the Q&A after the film,
Lucien Castaing-Taylor took a hands-off approach to the interpretation of Leviathan that I found to be somewhat
disappointing. Indicating that he wanted the film to be “authored by the
world,” he indicated that the film couldn’t be ascribed as either a documentary
or a fictive project, allowing it to remain open-ended instead. While I
understand his aversion to over-determining the message of a beautifully
ambiguous and complex project like Leviathan,
I still wish he took more of a stance on some of his artistic choices. Instead
of understanding his project as “authored by the world,” could it be thought of
as authored by labour itself, as the product of attempting to see with
labouring bodies in a different way, or allowing labouring bodies to articulate
their experience without relying on narrative or objective vision? Instead of
settling into a simplistic binary distinction that posits his film as either
the product of his “intentionality” as a filmmaker (with Véréna
Paravel) or as totally hands-off, as “authored by the world,” I think this could
be the beginning of a productive middle ground.
And finally, there was a large
discussion during the Q&A regarding one of the film’s most memorable
scenes, an extended shot of a fisherman slowly falling asleep while watching The Deadliest Catch in the ship’s eating
area. While this scene is clearly important as a keystone for the film at
large, I’d like to conclude by turning to another shot I found to be just as
valuable. A few minutes earlier, the same worker was seen dismantling clams
(shucking? Yikes I clearly have no fishing terminology). The camera travelled slowly
along the back of his neck before finally settling in on a large tattoo of a
mermaid on his left bicep. As the camera lingered on this tattoo for an
extended period of time, I found myself wondering: does this mermaid stand in
as the opposite of the vision of the ocean put forth by Leviathan at large? Her body is contained, coherent, and easily
consumable, a fetishized image of the ocean as an object of desire – fake breasts
and all. Alternatively, the ocean-ship nature-culture provided by Leviathan is impossible to comprehend in
its totality: its ambiguous and monstrous shape takes the ocean into its metal
belly while leaking out the wasteful excess of its destructive practices (namely,
trawling). Organic and inorganic, living and dead, human and animal, metal and
flesh, Leviathan’s monstrous body
sees the intermingling of all forms of matter. This is not an idealized vision
of the ocean, but one that embraces its own ambiguities and excesses. Ultimately, it makes for extremely evocative
(and queasy) viewing.
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Others, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
