How ethically charged cameras plunge into the world of a commercial fishing boat to challenge our perception of man, nature, and the world.
The viewer of Leviathan is plunged into pitch black, freezing cold waters and re-emerges, trapped in a net with several hundred fish before being dumped onto the deck of a commercial fishing boat. Later, having been washed, gutted and discarded by a rugged and weather-worn fisherman, they slosh around the deck of the boat in the company of several hundred fish heads, empty eyes radiating an eerie sadness.
Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, wrote in his 1919 Kino-eye manifesto: I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you, expressing his belief that his camera was an extension of his body’s visual capacity. If we were to update his declaration, having watched – or, perhaps more appropriately, participated in Leviathan – it might read, We are body, or even, We are fish head. For, in this film, Vertov’s eye becomes a whole body, be it man, animal or machine, and his auteurist I becomes a collective We. The audience does not simply watch the film, they experience it together, becoming a collective, embodied consciousness within the world of the film. And through this embodiment, our perception of this world, and the beings within, fluctuates radically.
The film was shot entirely on digital GoPro cameras. These become like the oscillating living bodies that gravitate around the boat. They inhabit fisherman, are thrown into the sea, attached to the boat, or fly high above, so that the cameras and the audience are in a constant state of becoming a being, together. For example, the seagulls that were viewed in the first sequence of the film as beautiful white spectres perpetually soaring around the boat, become a looming threat as the audience embodies a helpless fish stranded on the deck with hundreds of others. We look up to the sky, as we did a moment before, but now all we sense is our own mortality. The leviathan of Leviathan takes on many meanings throughout the film too, from the sea, to the birds, to the actual film itself. The film swallows us, says ethnographer Scott Macdonald, regurgitating us out of the theatre at the end of 90 minutes. This utter immersion within the world of Leviathan embraces the phenomenological, the philosophy of structures of experience and consciousness. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, wrote that we must plunge into the world instead of surveying it, and thus, only through the intertwining threads of perception, can we understand it.
The film opens in darkness, but we hear the distinct sounds of the ocean, birds and machinery. The filmmakers – Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel of the Sensory Ethnography Lab - here are disabling sight in order to heighten the sense of hearing. It is as if the film, as body, wakes up in a vessel, an avatar of sensory experience. It is in this case a fisherman. While at first we are disorientated - there are glimpses of light, blurred outlines of colour and movement – we slowly begin to become aware of the space and body we inhabit. An extended long take follows, capturing in real time the physicality of the boat and its men, as a net bulging with fish (our former selves) is hauled onto the deck. This shot, from seemingly within the fisherman’s body, could perhaps be seen as point-of-view, but rather, it is a greater point-of-experience. We have become an other being through embodiment, for the fisherman’s experience heightens our own. There is a lineage of sensory influence: the sea rocks the boat, the boat rocks the fisherman, the fisherman rocks the camera, and subsequently we are rocked as we experience this opening shot. Our experience exists within the many folds and layers of the film. All the while the process of synaesthesia – the neurological phenomenon of involuntary stimulation of one sense through another – heightens the connections of this world and our past sensory experience, lodged in the recesses of our memory. A Proustian involuntary memory, not just across time, but across senses. Here, taste doesn’t beget a memory of taste. Rather, an image begets a memory of smell – the image of a fish on the deck of a fishing boat, surrounded by the sea recalls those moments in our history in which we smelled salt lingering potently in sea air.
It is this contact that forms between the film world and our own that allows multiple strands of subjective perception to arise. As we inhabit the different bodies throughout Leviathan, our perception of the same entity alters many times. As previously mentioned, the seagulls transcend human perception and become a predator through the film’s embodiment of the vulnerable fish. We are, however, then forced to empathise with the bird as it struggles to navigate the boat’s machinery – the camera holding focus so close to the animal that we share its experience. Perception of the film’s two entities that change most, however, are water and the human being.
The sequence following the experience of the fisherman begins similarly, with disorientation and a kind of awakening. It is again dark, but this time the sounds of the ocean are ferociously loud and claustrophobically close. Tiago De Luca, author at Senses of Cinema, suggests that sounds are sensory components whose heightened physicality stands out in their own right. Indeed, here, as the camera and subsequently the audience becomes aware that they are submerged below the surface, water takes on a daunting and monstrous quality. As cinema theatres would have shown Leviathan in surround sound, the physicality of the gargled noises would have been consuming – it is again as MacDonald stated, that Leviathan swallows us. The camera doesn’t necessarily inhabit a body yet in this scene, rather, it embodies a sense of claustrophobia, panic and pure fear. In the same shot, however, perception of the ocean and its ability to submerge is radically transformed. Momentarily, the viewer is witness to a flash of white light, a seagull swooping down towards the surface from which we have re-emerged. It is in this cinematic moment in which the camera once again inhabits a body, that of fish. We are not only in a state of being-in-the-world, but we are a being in the world of the film, occupying a lived moment. Here, what once was perceived as danger becomes comfort and vice versa. The bird becomes the danger and the water becomes comfort. As the camera floats just above the surface and more seagulls begin to descend, our perceptual and bodily response, is to yearn for the submerging depths of the sea, rather than fear it. As our point-of-experience shifts, as does the affect; the physicality of the sounds of the water become almost cathartic rather than chaotic.
The intentionality of the filmmakers is apparent, it is in the use of the numerous cameras and their placement, and subsequently, the openness of the film. Their intention, perhaps, was to provide the apparatus; inviting the multiple strands of subjective perception to assemble the film. Even though most of the cameras are left to record their images via the movement of the world they are attached to, they still wildly collect subjective meaning – through their initial placement and through the affect that the viewer connects to them. The character of Leviathan illustrates this connection between filmmaker and viewer, with perception and experience intertwining in a dance which transforms its cinematic meaning with every shot.
Intentionality is indeed behind the camera’s position in the world, attempting to capture, as Vertov wrote, life caught unawares. Deep into our experience of Leviathan we witness a shot that furthers the dance between the perceptions of water and the human being. After becoming chaotic again - as a four minute shot illustrates the severity of the pounding waves against the side of the boat - water transforms once more. The fisherman the camera embodied earlier is shown showering. Here, water and the steam emerging from the shower are bliss, a luxurious comfort totally juxtaposed from the waves in the previous sequence – the therapeutic sounds of the shower creating a sense of comfort in ourselves. This scene, however, is more significant for the way it begins a moralistic study of the men on board the vessel, and of us as human beings in the world. We suddenly become ethically invested. Primarily, in the shower scene, we are made to question ourselves. Our Kino-body is inhabiting a space in which we are a voyeuristic intrusion into the film-world. We are shown what we shouldn’t be shown. However, it shapes our perception of the fisherman, our ethical stance. The fisherman transforms like the birds and water before him; and we, as perceiver, feel a range of emotions towards him, from sympathy to seeing him as brute. The film’s emotional centrepiece takes the form of a four minute long shot of the same fisherman, within the interior of the boat, watching television and slowly falling asleep from exhaustion, still swaying with the perpetual rock of the sea. We could simply sympathise with this man, but rather, we are able to empathise with him, for as he has endured a punishing and overwhelming experience, a sensory overload, as have we. Ernst Karel, who is responsible for the emotive sounds in Leviathan, believes, Human meaning does not emerge only from language; it engages with the ways in which our sensory experience is pre or non-linguistic, and part of our bodily being in the world. This scene, in which non-linguistic language – rather, the pure language of the body – is shown in an uninterrupted moment of raw experience, enables the perceiver to see a strong sense of nobility in the fisherman’s hardships.
As the moralistic journey continues, however, the same fisherman’s nobility is questioned. Vertov called for a juxtaposition of asynchronous perspectives to reveal underlying connections and, more importantly, contradictions. Embodiment, again, becomes the catalyst of these competing perceptions. The following scene contradicts the connection between the fisherman and our empathy; it undermines our former perception of nobility. As two fisherman brutally lift what appear to be Stingray and cruelly dismember their fins, the camera occupies a space of unease and vulnerability, as close to the hook and the knife as is possible. As more and more Stingray are lifted and butchered, the camera’s embodied presence develops a sense of danger as it draws nearer to the knife. It is as if we have become a being in the world again, that of Stingray. By inhabiting a space of danger at the hands of men, this intimate close-up shot transforms our perception of the fisherman once more. Just as the birds had become a danger, now the fisherman – a formerly sympathetic figure - has too. Within the layers and folds of this scene we again reach the question of us, the audience, as human, and our relationship with the world.
The official website of the Sensory Ethnography Lab declares that their primary subject is the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence. The overriding thematic and ethical concern of Leviathan is human relationship with animal and nature. Merleau-Ponty places great emphasis on how phenomenology exists in order to transport us into the living flesh of the world, stating, The Earth draws us out of ourselves not just to explore the terrain in order to dominate it but to learn from our contact with it, and from the resistance it offers us, what is the meaning of our world. Indeed, it is his stress on the idea that we must leave our own body and put aside our preconceptions that could lead to an existential experience. In one of the last scenes in the film, the camera shoots from the peak of the boat’s machinery, we look down at the chaos we were formerly living through. It possibly appears in order to allow the audience space; space to reflect, space to return to our own bodies – to our obsessive selves - and comprehend the many strands of perception we experienced during the film and re-evaluate an ethical stance on human/animal/world existence. However, the shot could also be a bird’s eye view – in the most literal sense of the term – with the camera once more embodying an animal, leading further and further away from the strand of human perception. The shot could also be reflecting the earlier scene in which we voyeuristically gazed on the fisherman showering, for in both we hover above and occupy a previously impossible space – rather than just the intimate and private space of the shower, the outside world has possibly become something now which we are invited to gaze upon voyeuristically, from a space that was previously blind to us. That this one shot is entangled with three possible strands of perception is how Leviathan can manipulate and transform how we, as the audience/participant, can see the world more intricately than before, examining all its complex connections and contradictions as delicately as how we might pick up and study a fallen leaf in the forest, or a shell on the beach.
By Joseph Gilson
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