The present perspective of anthropology is one more multi-disciplinary, more experimental and challenging, than its text-based, single-narrative past. Visual anthropology in particular, as a subdiscipline, provides new ways to approach and produce ethnographic studies and anthropological knowledge that are much more creative and inventive, blending cultural exploration with the artistic avant-garde. Within this subdiscipline, the applications of sensory filmmaking to ethnography are creating new representations and cinematic affect, as anthropologists experiment with visuals and soundscapes to produce new narratives and portrayals.
One such example in visual anthropology is the work of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. Both established anthropologists, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are large contributors to Harvard’s Sensory Ethnographic Lab (SEL), a facility that promotes this kind of creative innovation in anthropology, aiming to generate new perspectives and modes of exploration. As well as working with the sensory, the pair seem often to play with observation and the lenses of objectivity and subjectivity in their co-created works, with projects such as Caniba (2017), an experimental display of convicted cannibal Issei Sagawa, and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), an artistic exploration of the human body, attracting such discussions on narrative and affect. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s most avidly discussed project does not stray from this approach and confronts its subject matter with such experimentation that it has been recognised and commended outside of its discipline, in the greater world of cinema. This project is Leviathan (2012), a cinematic ethnographic study of the commercial fishing industry on the great and treacherous Northern Atlantic Sea.
At 87 enervating minutes, the ethnographic film expresses to its audience the gruelling and dangerous occupation of fishermen on a Massachusetts fishing boat, playing into the nauseating sensations of the cold, perilous life at sea through acrobatic camera work, long-lasting shots and comfortless diegetic sound. Its experimental delivery and content helped it bridge the gap between consumers of anthropology, and the audience and critics of art and film. This essay will discuss Leviathan as an anthropological work of sensorial approach, exploring the methods and intentions of the filmmakers in creating an ethnography of commercial fishing in such a way. Separated into how and why, this paper will use theory and literature to analyse Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor award-winning piece and its success as a sensorial and anthropological audiovisual investigation.
How Castaing-Taylor and Paravel Take a Sensory Approach
With camera-work alone, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel create a highly sensory work that displays the dangers of this occupation. Throughout the hour and a half piece, the constantly moving, unordered erraticism of the camera in scenes is nearly motion sickness-inducing, chaotically fixating yet untethered. This is because of the filmmakers’ use of GoPro cameras for such scenes, attached to chains, propellers, fishermen’s helmets, or loosely placed among dead fish or the slippery decks (Connor, 2019), in order to capture chaotic and destabilising moments aboard. This choice of camera work differs from the pair’s previous, more static films such as Sweetgrass (2009), in a way that reflects the atmosphere and conveys their exploration in a more accurate way than tripod-mounted shots of previous works would. The ability for these small cameras and their unrestrained movement to close in on objects and textures – fish parts, rusted metal, bloody seawater – further evokes sensory experience for its spectator. As David MacDougall writes in The Corporeal Image (2006), “In exaggerating proximity, the close-up brings to the cinema a quasitactility absent in ordinary human relations,” (MacDougall, 2006, p.22), and considering this, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s free-moving cameras allow for a tangible quality that further reflects the environment of the trawler in detail, and animates ethnography in new, stimulating ways. What’s more, each shot is long-lasting, all at least two minutes long (Unger, 2017, p.6), allowing an audience to really perceive the senses and textures of the shots in all their detail. This style of filming not only creates a sensorial affect for the audience, who naturally embody the film’s “unmoored, discombobulated” feeling (Westmoreland, Luvaas, 2015, p.2), but allows the nature of this environment and profession to remain undirected. At the 33rd minute, we watch a close-up sequence of a Petrel attempting to feed from the last catch, the shot is shaky and blurred, focused from below, capturing the animal’s wings and neck as it reaches for fish carcasses; in any other method of filming, this shot would likely be unsuccessful, recording something much less than the natural process of this undisturbed animal in action. This method of filming creates a de-intentionalised cinematography of sorts, an uncontrolled, sensorial natural enactment of the chaotic life Paravel and Castaing-Taylor try to convey, the interactions of natural and man-made processes, the colossality of the North Atlantic, unperturbed by choreographed approach. In its erratic, observational manner, “the film takes the shape of the system it describes” as Eamonn Connor writes (Connor, 2019). These chaotic, violently lulling scenes are coupled with portraiture of the fishermen, slightly more motionless, intimate vignettes of the life aboard that are humanising yet unconflicting from the harshness of the ship’s exterior. Here, these shots add to the sensorial experience, making the viewer once again unaccustomed to the ever-moving torrent depicted outside. These filming methods used by Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are one of many ways they have taken a sensory approach to ethnography, creating an embodiment of the dangerous environment these workers have to face in industrial fishing, as well as the uninterrupted nature that merges with humanity here. The camera work in Leviathan is “about movements and experience—affects, including non-human affects.”, as Andrew Murphie writes (Murphie, 2014, p.13).
The anthropologists also use sound in their film as a sensorial element that recreates the somewhat horrifying bodily experience of this life on the trawler. Using only diegetic noise, Leviathan’s sound design consists of crashing waves, naturally colossal in their volume, scraping metal from fishing equipment, howling winds, and occasionally the muffled chatter of the men aboard. Edited and composed by fellow SEL pioneer Ernst Karel, the team create a soundscape in this piece that, like its visuals, is all at once disorienting and palpable. Using the recorded sound from the GoPro microphones and later amplifying these with added audio, from sound libraries, that only heighten the audio, Karel distorts and alters the sound effects to create a “subjective sonic environment that is both “concrete”- deriving from the diegesis of the film – and “expressive” as it is manipulated for effect and metaphorical meaning.” (Unger, 2017, p.13). Sometimes silent, sometimes multi-textured, Leviathan’s sound is always jarring and discordant, unpleasant to the point of unnerving in it’s depiction of this job and environment, not unlike the kind of soundscape created for a horror film, with similar bodily affect induced. Though manipulated and expressed by Karel, textured metallic groans and auditory moments of engulfing water reflect the regular experiences of the job, that contrast vastly to the ones of an audience in a theatre, or home setting. Here, the film appears to display a sensory experience true to life on the boat, and it contrasts with the sensory experience of its screening location (in most cases). This sonic experience creates a depth to the ethnography, immersing the audience further into the circumstances Castaing-Taylor and Paravel try to present. Here, the team do as Steve Feld said of Colin Turnbull’s use of sound, which is “ask what it means to live and feel as a person in this place… (their) recordings signal that the concept of ‘‘habitus’’ must include a history of listening.” (Feld, Bennels, 2004, p.462). This listening journey is drastic and extreme, cacophonous and unpleasant – edited or not. Leviathan’s soundscape also encapsulates the film: beginning before the picture becomes clear, and continuing over the rolling credits, creating a sonic environment that “exists and extends beyond what the camera can capture, and therefore, what the viewer can see” (Unger, 2017, p.13). This becomes a particularly ethnographic approach to the senses, in that it expresses a continual truth of the environment, that is not formulated only for an 87-minute showing, nor a pair of filmmakers, but for the life and experience they both depict. In this last 5 minutes and 15 seconds of audio, the audience sensorially encounters a tinny eeriness, that haunts the surrounding screening environment as a reminder of this formidable landscape as far as Castaing-Taylor, Paravel and Karel can stretch it out.
As the soundscape remains only diegetic and obscured, and the visuals are often dark and unfocused, the narrative of Leviathan remains predominantly unled. Driven only by content, temporality only shown through alternations of dark and light skies, the film’s narrative is almost a non-narrative, veering far from most traditional ethnography, and even cinema. No main characters, distinct dialogue or clear chronology mean the message and investigation of the project is conveyed only through the senses it evokes – feelings of disorientation, suffocation, fear at the colossus create a discernable display of the extremes of commercial fishing and the life lived to undertake the occupation. Castaing-Taylor says about the footage that its “opaqueness” catalyses imagination in its audience (Lim, 2012), acting almost as a device of deeper understanding in its non-narrative; the audience conceives the environment better by being stripped of explanation, by relying on the senses instead of interview or voiceover. In this way, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s use of non-narrative heightens the sensorial experience of the film, generating embodiment, and thus instigating a better understanding of Leviathan’s meaning.
Why Castaing-Taylor and Paravel Take a Sensory Approach
As some have been discussed previously, there are several ways that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s sensory approach benefits Leviathan as an ethnography, and benefits it also in the world of cinema, as a piece recognised for its experimentation. One key benefit that this sensory approach engenders is ‘spectatorial subjectivity’, a phrase Westmoreland and Luvaas use to describe a result of the filmmakers’ methods. The reliance of the audiovisual piece on sensory reaction in its lack of expository sound and narrative opens it up to the same subjectivity a lot of Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s co-created works produce. Through corporeal sensation, Leviathan depicts something interpretive, a knowledge of this world of industry fishing that is dependent on the viewers’ “ability to submit themselves to an experience of alterity that denaturalises human perception and means letting go of the sovereign self” as Eamonn Connor describes it (Connor, 2019). The co-creators ask something of their audience in this sensory approach; they require a near-abandonment of the human perspective for one that is greater by focusing on the non-human aspects of this enterprise, fixating on the crashing waves, on decapitated fish. So forth, the documentary looks beyond the men aboard to the environment that surrounds them, and the horrifying effect commercial fishing has on that, in its “sonic evocation of site itself rather than privileging the individuals who live and work at the site” (Unger, 2017, p.5). Although the spectacle is a bodily experience, it is also made bigger than the body in its subjectivity. Irina Leimbacher conveys this point in The World Made Flesh (2014): “Leviathan simply extrapolates ‘sensory’ from the human body to the body of the world itself—to the bodies of matter, nature, economic exploitation,” (Leimbacher, 2014, p.39). Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s methods of subjectivity and sensoriality create sympathetic consideration not only for the fishermen, but the nature that converges with them brutally in this capitalist action.
In terms of traditional cinematic theory, Leviathan can be seen to reflect a level of realism that extends its meaning and purpose as an anthropological film. In their sensory approach, the SEL filmmakers open their film up to an audience in a manner of embodiment, and the previously mentioned subjectivity the films camerawork creates, make the piece less configured and somewhat more depicting of the site’s reality, especially in the omniscience of it’s cameras everywhere in and around the boat. In Heretical Empiricism (1972), Pasolini suggested that the mode of realist documentary obscures its own falsehood successfully through its sensorial qualities; “This means that the camera is not felt, and that what counts is the real action” (Pasolini, Lawton, Barnett, 2005, p.216). Castaing-Taylor and Paravel maintain this concealment in their experimental methods, drawing their audience into feeling and experiencing the environment (‘real action’) rather than just watching it. In its motion sickness, its submergence, its hair-raising metallic clashing, Leviathan sutures its audience to the screen and its content: the site of this trawler in the North Atlantic. In Bazinian theory, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s piece is less of a representation of reality than a piece of reality itself, in its unorthodox and widespread capture of life from non-fixed camerawork and non-narrative. This Bazinian reality is invigorated more by the sensory approach, conveying the experience it reproduces beyond the screen, and although the film’s soundscape is manipulated, it conveys more of a reality and experience than a narrated, commentative sound design would, and thus remains more true. Leviathan has the observational and realist intention of polyperspectivity and corporeality that is “neither attuned to nor motivated by any logic of narrative comprehension.”(Landesman, 2015, p.15), and this plays into its purpose as a study with ethnographic and anthropological foundation, a discipline and study that is observational in principle.
In Leviathan, the use of a sensory approach also attains a dedication to ethnography and, to an arguable extent, ethical documentary. Since its beginning, ethnography has had a vexed relationship with its subjects and an undeniable root in colonial exploration. This problematic foundation means that in order to be ethical, ethnographic and anthropological studies require conscious and outspoken contrast from the typical orientalised angle. In the documentarians’ unorthodox techniques, Leviathan attempts to scorn this colonial orientalisation, while dedicating itself to an ethnographic approach. A key tool the film uses to do so is its embodiment. In the aforementioned use of GoPro cameras, attached to the fisherman and to the trawler’s equipment, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor distance their visuals from a disembodied, authoritative gaze, and instead place the audience into the perspective of the interlocutors. Eamonn Connor likens this sensorial camerawork to Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction, a research methodology that challenges the hierarchical relationship between researcher and researched along with other methodological binaries (Fox, 2023) of which the filmmakers’ methods can be seen to disrupt in a way that does not disavow or disrespect the way anthropology has done in the past. “The film takes the shape of the system it describes; its discursive practices are materially enacted,” Connor writes of Leviathan’s sensorial approach, “The cameras move in accordance with the flows and currents of the marine ecology in which they are submerged and attest to the idea that knowing and being are entangled material practices” (Connor, 2019). This description of the film’s carefully curated methodology and process attests to Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s commitment to the work as ethnographic, as research, and not just documentarian. In Faye Ginsberg’s significant work Decolonising Documentary On Screen and Off (2018), she also recognises Leviathan’s dedication to ethnographic practice in its sensory approach, writing about its recording methods that “Such affordances have been used to enhance the ethnographic sensibility of “being there” in its most physical and most haptic sense as was made dramatically evident” (Ginsberg, 2018, p.41). Despite this agreeance, she also criticises the extent of the film’s ethics and accountability. In the article, Ginsberg writes of the necessity for “relational documentary”, a term that describes the kind of non-fiction media that considers, with regard, its subject and the ethics of telling their stories (Ginsberg, 2018). Regarding this, she writes of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and the SEL in general, “What all this work neglects to stress, however, is any sense of accountability for the ethical/political relationships that ethnographic and other documentary filmmakers co-construct with the subjects whose lives are central to their films” (p.42) This question of accountability is a valid one, as the filmmakers appear, aforesaid, to focus beyond the human element of life on the trawler, evoking the site itself more than the fishermen that work and live there. Considering Ginsberg’s argument, one cannot entirely say that this ethnography is decolonial, but in their GoPro aesthetics, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor create a relationship of shared authorship with their subjects that argues the point that Connor makes, creating collaboration in every key element of the film’s production, condemning a classical exertion of otherness. The ethical approach of the film is a contested argument, but an argument nonetheless. Regardless, Leviathan’s sensory methods can be seen to contradict traditional, problematic, unethical approaches to an ethnographic subject and so remain a valid reason for this experimental application.
To conclude this analysis of method and reason, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s documentary Leviathan is a practice-based anthropological piece, that is sensorial in its experimental approach. Through multiperspective camerawork in the form of untethered and attachable GoPros, temporally-suspended structure and complex, non-narrational sound design, the film creates a bodily experience in its spectators. The corporeality of Leviathan is formulated in order to express the danger and hardship of its subject: commercial fishing. In the darkness, colossality and eeriness expressed by its visuals and sound, the ethnography depicts how gruelling work aboard this Massachusetts-based fishing trawler is. It also conveys the harsh effects this world has on the surrounding nature and ecologies, going further than fixating on humanity aboard, to embody aspects of the non-human throughout. The piece becomes an ethnographic horror film of sorts in its sensorial conveyance, condemning the damage and harshness of the industry, consumerism and, more generally, the fallout of the Anthropocene. As members of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s dedication to ethnography is furthered by the sensory approach they take, allowing the film to express its message while remaining observational and also interpretable. In its effect on audiences, its tangible and experiential spectatorship, Leviathan becomes an argument for a better visual anthropology, one that is exciting and experiential, one that conveys ethnography as art. This audiovisual work has also become successful outside of an audience of anthropologists, gaining critical acclaim as an experimental piece of cinema. With this in mind, the film becomes even more of a rationale for the use of sensory approach in practice-based anthropology, and in documentary cinema in general.
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