Leviathan
Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with a Hook? Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel
GBR/USA 2013, Forum Expanded
“Humanity is haunted by the sea.… It is a threshold that mediates between life and death, upper and lower, the aereal and the aqueous.… It is infinitely beautiful, yet disquietingly deep.
Leviathan is a project that stems from a year spent at sea filming with industrial fishermen from New England. In portraying the labor of fishing, it participates in a longstanding history of transforming fisherfolk into images, one that goes back to the beginnings of photography. Yet it resists both the romanticism and the anthropocentrism of this tradition, striving instead for a less sentimental relationship between the human and the pelagic, and to afford equal aesthetic attention and ontological weight to the human, the ecological, and the industrial.
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 cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.” – Lucien Castaing Taylor, Vérena Paravel
Leviathan is a project that stems from a year spent at sea filming with industrial fishermen from New England. In portraying the labor of fishing, it participates in a longstanding history of transforming fisherfolk into images, one that goes back to the beginnings of photography. Yet it resists both the romanticism and the anthropocentrism of this tradition, striving instead for a less sentimental relationship between the human and the pelagic, and to afford equal aesthetic attention and ontological weight to the human, the ecological, and the industrial.
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 cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.” – Lucien Castaing Taylor, Vérena Paravel