Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Shot using multiple unmanned digital cameras on an Atlantic Ocean fishing trawler, Leviathan plunges us directly into the ship’s chaotic machinery, revealing a dissonant, alien world. The latest collaborative work from anthropologists and filmmakers, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, is a profoundly original documentary and a staggering, hallucinatory piece of cinema. There is no narration and no interviews; from the outset, we are thrust unaided and disorientated into the cacophony, bombarded with anarchic point-of-view shots and haunting, discordant sounds.

We’re cast right into the clanging of metal and the harsh winds of the North Atlantic. Though ostensibly advertised as an immersive look into the commercial fishing industry, our viewing lens is at first murky and dim. This sort of visceral thrust is at once foreign and familiar, a transporting non-linear journey keen on the laborious modes of living at sea.

Leviathan Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel France/UK/USA, 2012 It’s impossible to discuss the documentary Leviathan without comparing it to co-director Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s previous film, Sweetgrass. Sweetgrass was a documentary about sheep herders in Montana, but it eschewed all of the typical tropes of a documentary: no talking heads, no narration, no soundtrack. It …