LEVIATHAN (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel) For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NNNNN
Ever wonder what a documentary about the commercial fishing industry would look like from the product’s point of view? Leviathan is that documentary, or the closest we’ll ever come to it – an immersive, almost assaultive piece of subjective cinema designed to literally plunge us into the deep, experiencing the catch of the day from inside the nets.
In collaboration with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Foreign Parts) strapped HD cameras to fishermen on a series of voyages. They’ve assembled the footage into a narrative of sorts, recreating a single night’s fishing off the New Bedford coast, where some of the action of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick took place.
The result is a powerful, unflinching and ultimately thrilling work of 21st-century cinema. See it.
