LEVIATHAN

In the waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen small cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of mankind’s place at the edge of wilderness.

One of the first films to come out of the Sensory Ethnographic Lab and a sizeable influence on experimental nonfiction since, the shaky, murky Leviathan immerses us in marine labor and churns up the belly of the ocean. In cinema at least, the sea has rarely coruscated and clattered like this.