One might say we’re currently in a golden age of the documentary.
Given the rise of independent cinema in the past decade alongside the widespread application of cheap digital technology, it’s become easier than ever before for both professional and amateur filmmakers to create documentaries—the documentary is a form that has actually been helped rather than hindered by the bare-bones approach digital technology offers.
Bowdoin has, just in the past few weeks, brought two phenomenal, widely-acclaimed documentary films, along with their filmmakers and subjects to campus; “The Central Park Five” (Ken Burns) and “How to Survive a Plague” (David France).
Both of these works examine heated historical moments of national notoriety during the 1980s. Each—with tremendous precision and raw, social power—employs a mixture of talking heads and archival footage to paint a sober and encompassing view of their significant events. They were fantastic and used the staple tools of the documentary form to tell a bold, new story.
But now here comes “Leviathan,” something that may vaguely be described as documentary (really creative non-fiction) but is surely unlike any piece of cinema I’ve ever seen before. It’s a behemoth of a visual work, showing us something real with style unmistakably uncanny.
“Leviathan” is directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, both professors at Harvard’s Senory Ethnography Lab. It follows the story of an 80-foot groundfishing boat embarking from New Bedford, Mass.
Naturally the film has a scholarly and contemplative feel to it, insofar as it completely and effectively defamiliarizes its audience to its environment—the North American fishing industry—with a suffocating degree of atmosphere. Castaing-Taylor’s previous credits include 2009’s “Sweetgrass,” a similarly experimental work examining modern day sheepherders in Montana.
The film contains one of my favorite scenes of the past decade, in which a lonely shepherd calls his mother to complain about his life as the camera does a slow 360-degree pan around a gorgeous mountain range.
The sequence adeptly captured the schism between man, his “unnatural” creations, and the vastness of the natural world that encompasses him—all while he stubbornly attempts to control it. More on this later.
Part of what made “Sweetgrass” so effective was the fact that it had been entirely shot a decade before its release on old-school, low-grade camcorders that lent the majesty of its images homely intimacy.
The use of technology in “Leviathan” similarly serves the overall stylistic effect. The film was shot on a series of small handheld, waterproof cameras (developed by GoPro). With this technological flexibility, the directors get to probe every corner of the ship.
If there’s one word that’s been continually surrounding this film, it’s “immersive.” “Leviathan” pulls a rare number in that it constructs its own cinematic language to examine its subject matter, rather than falling back on the tropes other nature-photography works (such as “Planet Earth”) have done in recent years.
Recent Discovery Channel works like “The Deadliest Catch” have made valiant attempts to transport viewers to a foreign world of fishing, but even then the final product employs the structure of reality television.
It is not that “Leviathan” lacks structure, but rather that it is composed in such a way that our normal lexicon for delimiting its constituent movements falls short. It is a hallucinatory work that feels both extraterrestrial and hyper-terrestrial.
One could call it a site-specific film language; from the intense ocean sounds to the ominous darkness, the environment determines the way the film is shaped, rather than the other way around.
“Leviathan” is overwhelmingly visceral, and as a result extremely foreboding, so much so that it at times has the feel of horror.
Ultimately, the film is chiefly concerned with a dichotomy between the natural world and the machine. The bridge between these two entities—the human—is for the most part thrown to the wayside for much of “Leviathan;” the animals and the inanimate come into dialogue with each other with only an implied mediation from human beings.
This dialogue recalls my beloved sequence in “Sweetgrass,” where the shepherd stands apart and unseen from the immensity of the world around him.
The effect is a strange and yet deeply meditative disjunction between majesty and metal, the origin and the result of human toil. Is this boat the antagonist? Is it the human?
Castaing-Taylor and Paravel are far too canny of filmmakers to presume to provide such an answer. What they do provide is stripped of exposition and narrative, but replete with a kind of surreal ethos that comprises all of the strongest of creative works.
“Leviathan” is playing at Frontier Café in Fort Andross through tomorrow, with showtimes at 2 p.m., 6 p.m., and 8 p.m.