Hell Must Be Missing a Demon: Castaing-Taylor & Paravel’s LEVIATHAN [8/10]

Leviathan
Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel

“It is not a piece of fine Spitalfields silk — but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book — on risk of a lumbago & sciatics.” – Herman Melville, letter to Sarah Morewood, September 1851.

Melville was writing about an upcoming novel of his – entitled Moby-Dick, or, The Whale – in which the eponymous cetacean is referred to more than once as a Leviathan, the biblical catch-all name for monstrous seagoing creatures. The Book of Job is especially good on Leviathan stuff – especially chapter 41:
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?
Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?
Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?
Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?
Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed iron? or his head with fish spears?
Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

More than a century and a half after Moby-Dick, a new film called Leviathan is among us, an experimental documentary of such brackish, clammy intensity, such bracingly uncompromising directness, that it might even give Melville himself a moment of pause. The directors are Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel – he British (from the great port of Liverpool), she more international (“born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to French parents, and grew up in Algeria, Portugal, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, the Soviet Union, and France”).

The pair are key members of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University in Massachusetts, whose website describes it as “an experimental laboratory that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. It uses analog and digital media to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world. Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and natural sciences, the SEL encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with difficulty, at all, be rendered with propositional prose.”

The resulting works, so far mainly films of varying lengths, thus are much more concerned with sensory impressions than with dialogue or text. Leviathan prefaces its ‘action’ with a portentous-sounding quote from the aforementioned Book of Job, but audiences must pay close attention to the end titles if they seek illumination about what they’ve seen and heard in the intervening 80-odd minutes.

Deploying what seem to be dozens of miniature cameras, the directors take us on board the fishing vessels which ply their hazardous trade off the Massachusetts coast – specifically, those sailing out of the port of New Bedford, whose former residents include Herman Melville himself (the settlement figures prominently in the landlubbing segments of Moby-Dick). In cinematic terms, these are the waters previously explored by Wolfgang Petersen in Warner Brothers’ The Perfect Storm (2000), a picture which leavened its worse-things-happen-at-sea sturm und drang with more than a token acknowledgement of the economic hardships suffered by New England fishermen, prey to the depradations of exploitative bosses.

And while Leviathan does not explicitly verbalise such concerns this film plays much more of an indictment of a wasteful, even barbaric system of fishing rather than any kind of celebration of same, though it’s impossible to come away from the picture without an increased admiration for the working men who can endure such horrendous conditions on a daily basis. Their environments are claustrophobic and cacophonic, their graft a seemingly endless ordeal of hacking and slashing of their finny prey – although of course the fish themselves get an even rougher deal.

Strong meat for vegetarians and seafood-lovers alike, Leviathan is on one level a grim chronicle of dismemberment and bloody slaughter, a compendium of piscine mortality in which the prevailing liquid medium is often blood as brine – recalling Vittorio de Seta’s short Peasants of the Sea (1956), in which Sicilian blokes messily wrestled man-sized tuna-fish to their doom.

It’s Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s achievement, however, to transform such quintessentially harrowing raw material into the stuff of art – and Leviathan in its visual and aural textures constantly seeks to strike out in new directions, juxtaposing the grimly quotidian with the exquisitely abstract. A sky is filled with thousands of vigorously flapping seagulls – and then down down down we plunge, a journey into the black depths that spins us past fleetingly-illuminated starfish and all manner of hideous/glorious undersea thingies.

The nature of the cameras used (many of them strewn around the ship, dunked in the water or operated by the fishermen themselves) makes the film’s soundtrack a strange, disorienting, counter-intuitive element – the seagulls’ earsplitting raucousness becomes gently muffled to the point of being dream-like. The fishermen’s sparse dialogue becomes a matter of scratchy grunts, barked commands and responses. Courtesy of Ernst Karel’s sound-design, these come together to form a kind of irresistibly abrasive Musique concrète.

Just a shame that the directors couldn’t find room for a track or two from the two bands which have, in very different ways, preceded Leviathan by putting little New Bedford on the cultural map: 1970s R&B sensations Tavares (“Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel”), five brothers of Cape Verdean descent, and the current hardcore punk legends A Wilhelm Scream, pound for pound probably the best live band in North America. All told, and Leviathan included, not bad for a city of 95,000 people. There must be something in the water.

Neil Young
20th November 2013
written for Tribune magazine