Leviathan

If you want to see a masterpiece of visual and sound like no other, see the documentary film Leviathan. It is one of my favorite films (now) and like nothing I have ever seen, a true experience of nature and life in both the cruelest and most beautiful sense.

The director is able to convey amazing emotion and feeling though just the use of light and shape, let alone the whole piece taking the audience though an experience of life and nature. It's contrasting imagery of experimental visuals based on shape and color compared to ones of stark, bestial nature.

I barely have any words to try and explain how masterful this film is. Please do not avoid it because some of the poor reviews here, watch the film with an open mind and you will experience something that you never have before.

LEVIATHAN has attracted a fair amount of negative criticism from users. The reason is obvious: it is an essentially plot less piece designed to appeal to the senses and the imagination rather than telling a story. Focusing on the fishing industry in New Bedford, USA, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel create a visually arresting experience in which color and imagery assume paramount importance. The movie is full of memorable images - a flock of seagulls flying at night, a lone bird trying to find food on the fishing boat, the sight of the fishermen lopping the heads off their catch. The movie has a memorable soundtrack, with the sounds of daily life in the fishing industry forming a kind of musique-concrete style score that has a certain haunting power. In thematic terms, the directors are out to show the power of the elements and how human life often seems insignificant by comparison - sometimes the fishermen seem entirely at the mercy of the cruel sea. Nonetheless they acquire a certain stoicism that enables them to continue their work; in one sequence, for instance, a lone fishermen is shown watching the television during one of his all-too- brief breaks from his nightly chores. LEVIATHAN does not celebrate the fishermen's life; it is more concerned to create an experience for viewers, and more than fulfills the task.

This experimental-documentary film examines in a very concise manner the problematic of mass consumption featuring a fishing ship as an all- devouring sea monster - Leviathan. The viewer is immediately immersed in a dark vision of this demonic large steel beast which leaves behind the remains of sea creatures and coloring sea water in red, surrounded with the sounds of fluttering semi-living fish, chains, anchors, ocean and screams of seagulls. They all create this sinister sound like a choked howls from abyss. An impressive visual and sound voyage and innovative approach to the issue (mass consumption) characterize this exceptional work about insufficiently identified atrocities of contemporary civilization.

Blood, guts, flesh, fishes, carcasses, knifes, butchery, filth, water, seagulls, workers, cigarettes, days, nights, alienation, Gopro cameras. This is sensory anthropology at its best. The viewer is trapped into this immersive world and forced to experience life and working hours through the fishermen's eyes. A fascinating, nauseous and vertiginous documentary film about industrial fishing. Masterpiece.

I've never felt compelled to counteract negative reviews on this site before, but in the case of Leviathan I couldn't help myself. If I had come to this film expecting a traditional documentary on the commercial fishing industry, I may have been contributing my very own one-star critique right now. Then again, if I'd thought this was going to be a traditional documentary on the commercial fishing industry, I probably wouldn't have watched it in the first place.

Leviathan is definitely experimental (though experiential may be a better descriptor for it.) It offers no narration, no facts or figures, no conclusion or agenda. The only dialogue we hear is, for the most part, distorted to the point of abstraction.

What Leviathan does offer is an immersive, hypnotic experience. The sounds and images are alternately nightmarish, surreal and eerily beautiful. Even the rudimentary glimpses into the lives of the fishermen on board are rendered at an odd reserve, remaining as enigmatic as the seabirds we see throughout the film, crashing into the black waves. Experiencing this movie is like being transformed into an alien observer; the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Of course, everyone's entitled to an opinion, and I can completely understand why a person might hate this movie. It truly is a Rorschach blot of a film, allowing the audience to engage with it from almost any angle imaginable. I think that's where Leviathan's beauty lies. Anyone interested in what movies can show us should at least give this one a shot.