Anthropological film, as a concept, has roots as deep as the origins of cinema- one could argue the early Lumiere reels captured the principles of this observational genre. The notion of anthropological film hinges on indexing human behaviors occurring in front of the camera as objectively as possible, usually abiding by certain aesthetic and ethical tenets to mitigate the filmmaker’s intervention. The focus remains on human actions, rather obviously. Nature/naturalistic documentaries, on the other hand, tend to apply similar non-interventionist strategies to their own content, though an anthropomorphized “story” usually washes over the scenes narrated by the voice of god. Rarely are natural subjects depicted absent from their ascribed narratives imposed by the filmmaker. There seems to exist a compulsion to explicitly tie meanings to these images, perhaps because they lack a human subject. But what happens when the human and natural subject are given equal weight, both sets of imagery afforded their implicit meanings? As purveyors of anthropological film, hailing from the Harvard-based Sensory Ethnography Lab, filmmakers Lucien Cataing-Taylor and Verena Paravel provide an answer to this question by documenting the environment surrounding a drag net fishing boat off the coast of New England. Though nebulous in its generic classification, billed somewhere between art house and anthropological documentary, Leviathan (2012, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel) delivers a uniquely anti-anthropocentric glance at the harrowing world of commercial fishing by aesthetically and methodologically divorcing itself from overtly human actors. The film achieves this unique perspective through its engagement of the observational mode, which informs Leviathan’s unconventional cinematographic choices as well as its strategically immersive sound design. The film aims to translate the viewer from an anthropocentric expectation of the material toward something more holistic and arguably ecocentric, by virtue of the film’s structure.
Before we can discuss how Leviathan minimizes the human element of the anthropological documentary, we must first establish what anthropocentrism is and how it relates to the film’s content. The premise originates from ecological terms relating to how humans morally conceptualize the environment. An anthropocentric point of view “considers humans to be the most important life form, and other forms of life to be important only to the extent that they affect humans or can be useful to humans” (Kortenkamp and Moore: pg 2). This conception of the environment places human utility over most other considerations when making decisions with ecological impacts. A person might value a nice seafood dinner more than the sharks and other sea creatures that often get caught in trolling nets, as their deaths bring no immediate threat to human life in their eyes. This mindset fails to consider that the mass loss of apex predators as bycatch (the fish/creatures a vessel dredges up but has no “use” for) or as targeted species deeply affects marine ecology and is leading to the veritable collapse of the world’s fisheries. On the other hand, the ecocentric stance emphasizes that “nature has moral consideration because it has intrinsic value, value aside from its usefulness to humans”; someone of this mindset would be appalled by said devastation despite it not having a “direct” impact on their life (Kortenkamp and Moore: pg 2). The narrow-minded and short-sighted anthropocentric view on ecology comes hand in hand with global capitalism, as resource extraction and depletion are often seen as laudably productive rather than unsustainable and destructive. Leviathan aims to paint the human as an ecological actor, contextualized within the environment. Rather than frame these acts of devastation as furthering human enterprise, the fishing boat’s merciless extraction is laid bare- presented without context or justification. The purely observational content removes a layer of agency from the depicted humans, in a way that furthers the message of the film- framing these workers as cogs in the unstoppable consumptive machine. We venture away from the fictional “endless bounty of the sea”, coming face to face with the grotesque reality of waste and glut inherent in commercial fishing. It is this reframing, which we may consider an abandonment of anthropocentric reasoning in favor of ecocentric reasoning, that carries the film’s persuasive/transformative heft.
Leviathan subverts anthropocentrism by taking on an overwhelmingly observational mode of documentary. To understand how this method minimizes the human element of the film, we should explore what makes this documentary observational. In a broad sense, the observational mode prioritizes “the nonintervention of the filmmaker”, choosing instead to “cede ‘control’ over the events that occur in front of the camera” (Nichols: pg 38). Leviathan easily achieves both these tenets in its ingenious utilization of the GoPro camera, as its portability goes unmatched. The miniscule camera easily disappears into the disarray aboard the ship, making it nearly invisible and impossible to interfere with the tasks being recorded. Anthropological film tends to embrace this form of representation; it “has enjoyed considerable use as an ethnographic tool” because it allows for anthropologists/filmmakers to “observe the activities of others without resorting to techniques of exposition” (Nichols: pg 42). By maintaining relatively loyal to this single mode of representation, especially one so seemingly detached from its content, Leviathan leaves room for the audience to draw conclusions based on the sensory wash presented in the film. By keeping the humans in the film at a distance, we tend not to align with their actions, as they are rarely “humanized” by the indiscriminate camera. Not once in the film is the camera directly acknowledged or addressed, cementing the chasm between the audience and the social actors. This detachment, coupled with the similar amounts of screen time and visual treatment of “the fishermen and the dead fish” garners them a “similar status as spectacular motifs”, essentially equating their worth within the filmic rhetoric (Wahlberg: pg 254). Beyond the visual treatment of subjects, observational cinema also provides the audience a chance to “overhear something of the lived experience of others” in order to “anchor speech to images of observation that locate the dialogue, and sound, in a specific moment” (Nichols: pg 39-42). Foregoing “speech” for other sounds, Leviathan’s soundscape emphasizes the squelching and sloshing grotesqueness of its imagery, but beyond adding a layer of viscera, the sound design orients the viewer when the film’s shots become truly unhinged. The soundscape “convey[s] information traditionally contained in the image”, often helping us “orient ourselves to the sources of the various components of the soundtrack” as well as which “perspective we are actually experiencing” (Kerins: pg 44-47). This is most apparent when the camera is attached to a free-floating object or animal, as the soundscape is the only constant in such tumultuous and sometimes incomprehensible shots. To further understand the role of sight and sound in Leviathan’s ecocentric/anti-anthropocentric observational treatment, we should experience them in the context of a sequence.
For the purposes of this analysis, we will be examining the dehumanizing role of the video and audio in a sequence featuring both fish and fishermen. The sequence in question documents the washing and gutting of some of the night’s catch (Leviathan: 00:22:19-00:26:15). The first shot washes over the screen, with vague shapes of fish rushing toward the camera as it wades in and out of the small waves. We can tell the location is somewhere on the ship due to the mechanical whirring behind the lapping of water and dead fish. The camera bobs slightly above the detritus, signaling it is probably attached to some sort of support, unlike in other scenes where it might flow freely in the water. Its grounding, however, allows for the perception and indexing of the tides which form on the deck as the ship rocks back and forth over the waves. We are one with the corpses, sometimes knocking into them as they are crashing up against one another; this is the only index of the camera’s intrusion (Leviathan: 00:22:53). The shot begins to gain rhythm as the camera continues to watch the sliding fish, the array of which shifts slightly at every pass. Though the contents of the frame keep shifting, the constant sloshing of water ensures spatial cohesion. The cyclical dance of the fish highlights the sheer amount of them aimlessly flowing along the deck. Suddenly, a fish still fighting for its life begins flailing, bringing on a sense of guilt and pity- as we know its ultimate fate (Leviathan: 00:23:17-00:23:22). As this same shot progresses, the camera begins to slowly move closer and closer to the fish, eliminating the piles of them previously framed in the background. Instead, the screen is engulfed with the bloated and deformed bodies now constantly bumping into the camera. Soon, the camera begins to follow two forms which reveal themselves as boots, panning right (Leviathan: 00:24:14). These disembodied feet represent the first human depicted in the shot; their less-than-preferential treatment emphasizes their relative unimportance and ambivalence. Much like the ebbing fish, the boots remain part of the environment- only briefly distracting the camera from the waves. The boots begin kicking up fish, gradually making the man’s presence known. This entire shot alone lasts over two minutes before cutting to a panning tilt of more dead fish (Leviathan: 00:24:40). The long take reinforces the observational nature of the camera as it represents “lived time”, indexing the painfully felt duration of our foray into this fleshy flux (Nichols: pg 39-40).
As we move along this new bloody pile of fish, we reach a large tub full of even more corpses being scavenged and ravaged by some of the fishermen. The camera begins to nestle itself inside the vat in order to provide what I imagine is the perspective of one of the dead fish watching the others get hacked up as blood sprays in all directions (Leviathan: 00:24:55). The sounds of the fishermen’s knives pierce the boat’s mechanical droning and squishy thuds of the carving process. As the camera meanders freely in the tub, attempting to capture all within its line of sight, the consistent audio ensures some semblance of spatial logic. The humans in this shot are only implied through the constant protrusion of their limbs and knives, at times a torso and head briefly appear in the background. Their appearance as fragmented bodies emulates the fragmentation and butchering of the fish, decontextualizing the men as nothing more than mechanical arms repeating their ruthless and gory task. A movement toward closeup of one of the fish being decapitated synchronizes with the appearance of a man’s head framed by the knife-wielder’s arm, once again visually equating the two seemingly disparate entities (Leviathan: 00:25:31-00:25:56). We then cut to another fisherman picking up one of the beheaded fish, bringing it close to his visually ambiguous body cloaked in black. As he lifts the fish to his torso and cleans it, the frame is almost abstract in swaths of black and red- accompanied by the squelching of dismemberment reminding us of what is going on (Leviathan: 00:26:06-00:26:14). The predator cleans its kill. All the events of this scene develop so procedurally and subtly that it takes a moment to even begin to question the horrors of what is pictured, as by this point the film has veritably desensitized you to the constant oozing and squishing of guts and gills. These people are hardly human in terms of their depictions, never moving beyond the imagery of savage scavengers tearing apart carcasses. The empathetic character in this scene is most certainly that one fish gasping for life on the deck, not the ruthless humans tearing apart these innocent creatures. In this powerful dynamic shift from anthropocentrism, Leviathan achieves much of its goals. By alienating our empathy from the human characters, either by not depicting them as human or by emphasizing the monstrosity of their actions through their normalcy, the film imbues the “normal behavior” of the fishermen with an underlying sense of horror (Young: pg 101). We align more with the desecrated sea life than we do with the fishermen, not to say that the film demonizes them. The film handles the fishermen as beings without agency, much like the fish they butcher.
Ultimately, Leviathan powerfully captures a harrowing ecological vignette by virtue of its cinematographic and sonic employment of the observational mode. The clandestine camera captures intimate moments fraught with death- filtered through the placidity of monotony. Were there any real intervention of the camera within this world, the balance between man and beast that the film works so hard to maintain would be lost. Leviathan spares no one in its wash of empathy-inducing gore and devastation. All the destruction seems almost inevitable and natural, while still painfully unnecessary. At the center of it remains an unapologetic denouncement of the undeniably human cause of this easily preventable desolation. This film abandons the anthropocentric lens, instead presenting the issue of catastrophic commercial fishing in its microcosmic form. The small window into the madness should prove even more disturbing when thought of at scale. Leviathan’s visceral effect on its audience ideally sparks some kind of thought about the commercial fishing industry and its ecological realities. Though the film never explicitly decries the fishermen or their sector, the sheer glut of agonizing and excruciating imagery and sound implies some subversive sense of derision.
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