Technology at Sea: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, "Leviathan"

The documentary film Leviathan, directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel (Arrête ton cinéma, 2012, 87 min.), begins in cacophonous blackness, metallic yawps charging a darkened screen. Slowly, colors and shapes swim into view: yellow rain gear; a stretch of orange chain; finally, arabesques of green foam churning in the ocean’s black. A chain drags a steel plate out of the swell—an otter board, a plane that holds open a trawl net under tow. Then, activity resolves out of the visual wrack: a man in rain gear leans over the sea, disentangling heavy chains while a gruff voice chants advice and a blue glove gestures demonstratively below.In eighty-seven minutes of jarring, decentering cinema, Leviathan immerses viewers in the crashing sensorium of the New England fishery. Its action takes place on a stern-rigged trawler out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, dragging for scallops and “groundfish”—cod, hake, and pollock, the bottom-dwelling, schooling species that made Massachusetts a center of the American fishing industry in its heyday. But to describe Leviathan’s site and subject matter in such blandly expository terms is to miss what makes it unique—for the film offers no narration or diegetic information to ground the traces of commercial fishing in a normative interpretive framework. We never learn about the technical specifications of a stern-rigged trawler or see the lives of fishermen situated in the context of coastal New England. In Leviathan, a trawler is not a work-site to be explained or an environmental disaster to be decried, but a buzzing, blooming world emerging at the rheumy membrane where sea meets steel.