Kritiken

If any of the SEL films creates a "post-humanist" vision, it is this one. Although this goal may seem at odds with a cinema that seeks grounding in the senses, Leviathan simply extrapolates "sensory" from the human body to the body of the world itself—to the bodies of matter, nature, economic exploitation, etc.

If Leviathan is suspect ethnography, it's staggering cinema – proof that there are more things in heaven and below the sea that you can imagine, that there are new images waiting to be discovered.

There is so much in this film to ponder with regard to how it was made and what it's saying. In showing the realities of deep sea fishing and allowing viewers a so-close-you-can-touch/taste/hear/smell-it vision of life on a commercial schooner, the film fills a kind of tacit educational remit.

It doesn't seem just to say that Leviathan documents industrial fishing when the subject is so manifestly overpowering. Perhaps better to say it derives from industrial fishing—or that it places itself in industrial fishing's devouring path.

The main comparisons between [Leviathan and Godard] are not specific recollections, but the film's possible fulfillment of the director's longstanding aims of freeing the cinema with an aesthetic socialism. Godard's tragedy has always been his inability to extricate even his most expansive and giving works from his firmly auteurial voice, but Leviathan truly belongs to everyone and, when cameras bob in the water with chum or fly off with gulls, no one.

...A film like this rises up from the depths of cinema history, surfacing at the intersection of two traditions. Its greatness is due precisely to that rare achievement of coming to terms with a legacy through the most innovative of experiments. At its surface, Leviathan stuns us with the power of the totally unprecedented, but it moves us with the feeling of something familiar coming up from the depths of time.

These aesthetes prefer to pretentiously entitle their "documentary" Leviathan, the biblical monster designated in a haphazardly way to refer to the boat that is traveling the waters. But what exactly is this infernal world that it's referring to? The "modern world"? The "human condition"? We shiver in front of such audacity. The interest of the directors is to keep everything sludgy with their title that's spelled in gothic letters.

Working with long takes, semi-abstract compositions (which turn out to be 100 per cent realistic) and a carefully constructed music and soundtrack best described as industrial noise, Leviathan's impact is overwhelming. Somehow the imperfect, reverberating acoustics of Oaxaca's Museum of Contemporary Art enhanced the experience of the film, plunging the audience into a cauldron of sound.

In tackling the adventure-occupation subject matter familiar to reality television viewers but from an opposite angle, LEVIATHAN positions itself as the anti-reality TV. In this documentary there are no interviews, no narration, and hardly any dialogue, and any message or purpose must be inferred from what is seen and heard. And what is seen and heard in LEVIATHAN can be quite disorienting and disturbing.

In that film – which has more blood and guts than Beauty and a Beat, it's true, as well a faux-Biblical title font and a vaguely ecological message – it's hard to know, at most points, where and how the camera is located... These ambiguities are what make the film intermittently interesting.

For some viewers, this will be entirely too far in the opposite direction; when "Leviathan" was screened at the New York Film Festival last year, numerous walkouts were reported. The adventurous souls who stick with it, however, will find head-spinning images and a cumulative impact that does, in fact, amount to a story.

Aiming for sensory fidelity and steeped in the ethos of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, directors Castaing-Taylor and Paravel have, like many an experimental filmmaker adopting new techniques or media in search of a truer, closer rendering, found a way of seeing that's so viscerally and disorientingly vivid and fresh as to flirt anew with the abstract and visionary.