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7. Valentini 1993, p. 11. On this idea of ‘inner visions’ see the catalogue for another huge
solo exhibition on Viola in Rome at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 2008-2009. See also
Perov 2008.
8. The film rebuilds Viola’s artistic journey through a mix of interviews with Viola and
Perov, also seven international scholars and critics who are experts in Viola’s art: Ray-
mond Bellour, Nadeije Dagen, Anne-Marie Duguet, Alain Fleischer, Jean de Loisy, Va-
lentini, and Neutres.
9. See Townsend 2004, p. 9.
References
Fargier, J.-P. The reflecting pool de Bill Viola. Crisnée: Éditions Yellow Now (French edition).
Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2009 (Italian edition).
Kuspit, D. ‘Bill Viola: Deconstructing Presence’ in Bill Viola: Installations and videotapes, edited by
B. London, published on the occasion of the exhibition Bill Viola, 16 October 1987 – 3 January
1988. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1987.
Neutres, J (ed.). Bill Viola. Album Bilingue. Paris: Édition de la Réunion des musées nationaux,
2014.
Neutres, J (ed.). Bill Viola. Catalogue. Paris: Édition de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2014.
Perov, K (ed.). Bill Viola: Visioni interiori. Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni; Florence: Giunti Arte
Mostre Musei, 2008.
Sossai, M.R. ‘Reflections beyond the threshold of the visible’ in Bill Viola: Reflection, edited by A.
Bernardini, Catalogo mostra Villa e Collezione Panza 12 maggio – 28 ottobre 2012. Cinisello
Balsamo (Mi): Silvana Editoriale, 2012.
Townsend, C (ed.). The art of Bill Viola. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
Valentini, V (ed.). Bill Viola: Vedere con la mente e con il cuore. Roma: Gangemi, 1993.
Viola, B. ‘Apprendere la tecnologia degli esseri umani’ in Le pratiche del video, edited by V.
Valentini. Roma: Bulzoni, 2003.
About the author
Elena Marcheschi (Università di Pisa)
‘Leviathan’: From sensory ethnography to gallery film
Malin Wahlberg
Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhookor tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you
put a cord through its noseor pierce its jaw with a hook? (Job 41)
I entered the doors of the Whitney Biennial (7 March – 25 May 2014) with the
specific aim of attending the 2pm screening of Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor,
Véréna Paravel, 2013), one of the most frequently-referenced films in the context of
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contemporary documentary. I was about to see a gallery film version in order to
challenge my scholarly preconceptions of Leviathan ‘the sensory ethnography doc’.
Thus, I missed the opportunity, as suggested by the museum booklet, to ‘look
broadly at different types of work and various modes of working that can be called
contemporary American art’.
Since 1973 the aim of the Whitney Biennial has been to show a representative
chart of contemporary American art, often with the explicit intention to support
young artists and to cover a variety of techniques in different media. The 2014
exhibition did follow up on the decision from last year to include work by inter-
national artists, also by the recently deceased (among others: Sarah Charlesworth,
Gretchen Bender, Tony Greene, Malachi Ritscher, and other prominent people
such as Prof. Allan Sekula and writer David Foster Wallace). The diversity of the
works on display in terms of subjects, different media, and techniques was even
more pronounced this year since three guest curators – one for each floor of the
museum – were invited to select what totaled 103 participants. Curator Stuart
Comer characterises his ‘Third Floor’ Biennial selection, including Leviathan,
with the keywords ‘hybrid art’, ‘interdisciplinary’, and ‘the multiple roles of the
white cube, the theater, the cinema, and the publishing forum’.１
The following reflection on Leviathan will be less informed by its possible relations
to the other works exhibited on the Third Floor than by its presentation and
embodied extension from the film screen to the gallery wall and the black box at
the Whitney. A logical point of departure is provided by the recent buzz that
Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s projects have created among documentary critics
and scholars in the context of experimental ethnography and digital media. Le-
viathan has been praised as a film that defies narration while exemplifying a new
take on the observational mode commonly associated with ethnographic cinema.
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It results from the filmmakers’ longstanding attempts to explore the sensory and
tactile elements of the filmed motif and the soundscape beyond the limiting pro-
spect of any enclosed narrative or a more authoritarian direction of cinematogra-
phy and editing. Ohad Ladesman notes that with the earlier achievement of Sweet-
grass (Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009), Castaing-Taylor was still in the
realm of ethnographic representation, although experimentation with sound re-
cording and cameras attached to the subjects’ bodies added a striking, spectacular
dimension to the framing and voicing of the Allestad family and their last sheep
drive into ‘Montana’s ruggedly dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth range north of Yel-
lowstone’.
In his 1996 essay ‘Iconophobia’, Castaing-Taylor testified to his taste for ‘multi-
ple interpretations’ and a desire to further invest in the promises of an observa-
tional mode quite different from the aesthetics of direct cinema. Leviathan unfolds
as a sound-image spectacle that in many ways operates beyond the familiar ‘crisis
structure’, intentional gaze, and performed social gesture that we associate with
direct cinema. Ladesman makes a wonderful point as he reassesses the familiar
‘fly-on-the-wall’ trope to suggest that in Leviathan the work onboard an industrial
fishing vessel is rather framed and orchestrated from the embodied perspective of
the fly itself:
[b]ecause of their spherical shape and protrusion from the fly’s head, the eyes give
the fly an almost 360-degree view of the world. Thus, a fly sees in a mosaic way –
thousands of tiny images coalesce and together represent one visual image.２
Most reviewers have praised the strong immersive effect produced by Leviathan.
Adjectives such as ‘visceral’, ‘compelling’, ‘embodied’, or ‘disembodied’ viewing
have met with the recurrent question of the purpose or meaning of the film as a
representation, a dystopian tale inspired by the book of Job, as a critique of
industrial fishing, of environmental problems, and the capital society at large.
Critics have been impressed by the overall ambiguous invocation of the apoca-
lypse – but, to paraphrase Zadie Smith, the apocalypse ‘is always usefully cast into
the future’, and Leviathan is perhaps most of all an elegy for ‘our profound, histor-
ical attraction to apocalypse’３ rather than a terrifying sign of the times. Rather
than any call for action regarding how to actually save the seas and the planet
the visual leitmotif of waste and exploitation may accord with the biblical ‘Oh,
what have we done!’With the exception of the brief quote from Job inserted at the
end of the film as a few lines of running text in gothic font, this association belongs
to one of many different possible readings. As a gallery film the impressive display
of digital sound-images and the ambiguous invocation of sea and sea creatures
seem to nullify the importance of symbolic closure.
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What is striking in the predominant reception of Leviathan is the submissive
attitude of the critics and scholars towards the intentions of the filmmakers and
the scientific lab in question, as if the Harvard-based Sensory Ethnography Lab
would automatically provide a legitimacy that commands us to build our inter-
pretations of this film on the statements delivered by the directors and the produ-
cers. The gallery context helped me to shift focus from the predominant interpre-
tations to the very screen event at hand, to also think about the film in terms of
machine vision and poetic re-enactment in the age of digital filmmaking. In my
opinion the major attraction of Leviathan consists in the peculiar combination of
movement, change, and contemplation.
A phenomenological claim of classical film theory is that velocity works against
contemplation. In the work of André Bazin and others there is the recognition of
the human gesture in film, which demands the duration of a shot and the direc-
tion of an intentional gaze. In cinema, Roger Leenhardt argued, there is a specific
temporal mode for each gesture: ‘a brief moment for the amused smile a moderate
duration for the indifferent face, and a long duration for sadness and suffering’.４ I
thought of this as I lay back on one of the soft cushions to look into the opening
black image of Leviathan. As unidentified shapes of red, orange, and bright yellow
appeared and disappeared out of the dark frame and the dramatic, muffled sound
of machines, roaring sea, and splashing water filled the room, I was impressed by
the impact of the full screen that covered the entire wall. With the audience
virtually at sea level, we were engaged in a mode of contemplation – although
far beyond the duration and framing of any Bazinian realism.
What the gallery setting seemed to reinforce was the pulsating sound-image
attraction of digital machine vision, which belongs to the formal experimentation
at hand and the project to change something in the relation between the film and
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its audience. With few exceptions the gestures of the fishermen have been frag-
mented into compelling details, while the point-of-view is disembodied, unpre-
dictable, and the result of small waterproof GoPro cameras. These cameras were
attached to the fishermen and the film crew’s bodies or hats, to the slippery floor,
poked into the chaos of not-yet-dead creatures, and placed on sticks that can be
directed at objects, events, and even put into the water and into motion, as the
vessel itself speeds up. Along with the engine sounds, the slimy noise of rattling
fish, and the auditory drama of wind and water, a regular work shift at an indus-
trial fishing vessel is both subject to representation and the subject of a spectacu-
lar screen event. There was a rhythm and tempo in the repetitive actions of haul-
ing in huge nets, cutting fish, and throwing the excessive amounts of fish remains
overboard; also a rhythm and tempo in the frame, and in the unfolding of edited
images and sounds. I was reminded of Laura U. Marks’ suggestion that in digital
video ‘the image’s origin is less important than the decision to actualize the virtual
image in a particular way’.５ The fragmented vision and digital sound of Leviathan
results in a sensory spatiality with new, surprising effects for a cinematic mode of
contemplation in the gallery space.
In the black box the screening time is set in order to reduce distractions and
secure audience attention throughout the entire film, as opposed to looped videos
and installations, where the room and the visitor’s non-directed path are built-in
facets of a multiscreen projection or an interactive work.６ Unfortunately, the pro-
verbial sound problem of the gallery film made way for the recurring frame-break-
ing event of violin music from the installation next door, which tended to ruin the
Leviathan soundscape. Also, several times during the screening the black cloth
covering the doorway was pushed aside and people entered either to stay or,
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most often, to watch a few glimpses of dead fish and sea gulls in strange angles,
only to rush on to the next installation. Distractions such as these bring attention
to the gallery room as a social space marked by rules and rituals that are very
different from those of the movie theatre.
Shifting focus from the ethnography of the gallery space to the supposed eth-
nographic project of Leviathan, the question is where to locate ‘the thrill of the
real’ and how to account for social representation in this film? Christopher Pavsek
laments the empty language game of critics and scholars lost in the murky waters
of phenomenology, or visual anthropologists who celebrate Leviathan in terms of
an innovative ethnographic practice. What does it mean to be ‘engulfed’ in moving
images or ‘immersed’ in the rolling sea or the swash of water projected on the
wall? Pavsek argues that the film entirely sidesteps the ethnographic project and
‘the tricky task of representing the other’.７ Devoid of any speaking subjects or
intentional framing, the fishermen and the dead fish obtain a similar status as
spectacular motifs. The individual fisherman has been fragmented into close-ups
of muscles, perspiration, grimaces, skin, tattoos, or the stark yellow of a raincoat.
But it is exactly this obsession with the material feel of objects and organic texture
and the related auditory nuances of edited sound that are being conveyed and
transformed by the digital optics of this film. Only once – in a unique static long
take where one of the fishermen sits staring at a television set (the camera placed
behind and slightly above the television) – did I recognise Leenhardt’s long dura-
tion for sadness, suffering, and, we may add, exhaustion. However, this is a se-
quence more reminiscent of European art cinema (Bresson, Akerman, Haneke,
Kaurismäki) than of American Direct Cinema. A stylistic choice added to this
impression: the sound of a television ad has been edited to match perfectly with
the work environment and the supposed brotherhood onboard.
Leviathan accomplishes a stunning exploration of digital sound-images and
their sensory impact. This film brings attention to the medium itself, to the very
process through which registered glimpses of reality transform and become re-
enacted into an imaginary whole. The pulsating quality of takes combined and
contrasted to the muffled soundscape was something that seemed even more
poignant in the gallery room. The experience of rhythm and velocity took on a
sculptural dimension, with occasional effects similar to 3D – an impression com-
pleted by the scale of the screen/museum wall and the physical awareness of the
room as an important facet of the installation.
In the context of documentary cinema acceleration tends to be either a matter
of intentional juxtaposition (by editing) or a sign of claimed authenticity: the
shaky street scenes testify to a camera out of control, to a cameraman at the
epicenter of an unfolding drama. Leviathan strives for another kind of visceral
authenticity. In this case there is no technological imperfection to grant our satis-
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faction with shaky images. The chance-element of imperfect sound in Direct Ci-
nema is, to quote Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, replaced by ‘a surrender to the unpre-
dictability of the apparatus, an exploration of the specific ways the simple, porta-
ble GoPro cameras register and interpret a chaotic reality, and the unexpected
effects that ensue, including striking and stylized colour’.８ We, the part of the
gallery audience who remain on our floor puffs throughout the screening, are
gradually being indulged in a cinematic adventure where new digital attractions
have added to the longstanding magic of camera inscription and editing. The
unfolding, orchestrated series of sensory views in flux call for contemplation and
demand to be seen from beginning to end. To fully appreciate the details of this
film you would have to stay on your cushion to see the beauty of the montage and
the unfolding of an imaginary realm with symbolic implications, or a screen event
open to the projection of your own desires and anxieties.
Notes
1 . Comer & Elms & Grabner 2014
2. Ladesman 2014.
3. Smith 2014.
4. Wahlberg 2008, p. 79.
5. Marks 2002, p. 151.
6. Fowler 2004.
7. Pavsek 2014.
8. Hanssen 2014.
References
Castaing-Taylor, L. ’Iconophobia’, Transition 69, 1996: 64-88.
Comer, S., Elms, A., and Grabner, M. Whitney Biennial 2014. New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, 2014.
Fowler, C. ‘Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Time. From Maya Deren to Eija Liisa
Ahtila’, Screen, 45, no. 4, Winter 2004.
Frisvold Hanssen, E. ‘”His eyes are like the rays of dawn”: Colour vision and embodiment in
Leviathan’. Paper presented at Visible Evidence XX, 17 August 2014, and developed for the
Leviathan panel with discussant Prof. Catherine Russell at the SCMS conference on 22 March
2014 in Seattle. Forthcoming essay in Visual Anthropology, 2015.
Ladesman, O. ’Faraway, So Close: Leviathan and the Digital Future of Observational Ethnogra-
phy’. Paper presented at Visible Evidence XX, 17 August 2014, and developed for the Le-
viathan panel with discussant Prof. Catherine Russell at the SCMS conference on 22 March
2014 in Seattle. Forthcoming essay in Visual Anthropology, 2015.
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Marks, L. Sensous theory and multisensory media. Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002.
Pavsek, C. ‘Where’s the Sense in Sensory Ethnography’. Paper presented at Visible Evidence XX, 17
August 2014, and developed for the Leviathan panel with discussant Prof. Catherine Russell
at the SCMS conference on 22 March 2014 in Seattle. Forthcoming essay in Visual Anthropol-
ogy, 2015.
Smith, Z. ‘Elegy for a Country’s Seasons’, The New York Review of Books, Vol. LXI, no. 6, 3-23 April
2014: 6.
Wahlberg, M. Documentary time: Film and phenomenology. Minneapolis-London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008.
About the author
Malin Wahlberg (Stockholm University)
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