One of my all-time favorite experimental documentaries is Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, which was produced as part of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Its 87 minutes were shot on an industrial shipping vessel at open sea (200 miles off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts) using GoPro cameras, which often seem to be mounted on top of different parts of the ship. It’s one of the most potent texts about the food industry I’ve ever seen, yet the entire film has barely one sentence of text spoken throughout it.
Leviathan retains a highly meditative and beautiful watching experience, yet that beauty is created out of a somewhat abstract representation of an extremely cruel and violent reality (of both humans and non-humans). In that aspect, a potential criticism of the film would be that it transforms violence into a visual pleasure to such an extent that it weakens any activist potential that could possibly have arisen. As Harun Farocki suggests in his film “Inextinguishable Fire” (1969), the question of how to represent reality in a way that will lead to its disclosure and understanding, in a way that will lead the viewer to action, is a paradoxical one, since a violent image can also mask or lead to not seeing, to oblivion and numbness.
That being said, from my perception of what art is, this film is an extraordinary example of poetic precision between form and content. It does not preach or impose a meaning, there is no trace of pedagogy or didacticism, yet it holds it all within it and allows for in-depth observation and examination of a distant reality of labor and death that the average person relies on in their day-to-day life without giving it any thought. I would argue that this context, along with the potent visual imagery of the film, which is unbelievably mesmerizing, and the very clever almost hidden soundtrack treatment, elevate Leviathan to a masterpiece.
(A side note: other than Leviathan, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab is the home of some more pretty amazing experimental explorations – https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/)