In the Bible’s Old Testament Leviathan is mentioned twice in
Job, firstly in 3:8 where it is generally held to be a dragon, which according
to popular ancient mythology was supposed to cause eclipses by wrapping its
coils around the sun. A second and longer description can be found in Job 41;
1-34 with most biblical scholars agreeing that it’s a crocodile. The only
alternative Biblical interpretation of any significance describes a Leviathan
as a mythical monster. What has this all
to do with the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club screening of the
experimental documentary Leviathan (2012) well simple Job 41
verses 31-33 were part of the opening credits, I quote: He maketh the deep to boil like a pot. He maketh the sea like a pot of
ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him. One would think the deep to be
hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. This
could have easily been a description of the Trawler men in this abstract movie
rather than some imaginary creature of the deep?
Bravely introduced by Audrey Young who started by quoting
Margo Channing from the 1950 movie All
About Eve starring Bette Davis ‘fasten
your seatbelts, its going to be a bumpy night’ little did we know how
bumpy, although two members of the audience did not have their seatbelts
fastened and walked out during the screening!
She went on to tell us that the film was jointly directed by the UK born Lucien Castaing-Taylor and French/Swiss Verena Paravel who both work out of the
Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts. They
originally wanted to make a documentary about whaling before deciding to
concentrate on the industrial side of the North American fishing industry. Both
directors to their credit spent time along side the fishermen as they worked
their 20 out of 24 hour working shifts. Audrey warned us that we, the audience,
would be right in the action amongst the fish heads, sea gales, rough sea’s,
blood, salt and sweat, and she wasn’t far wrong.
Filmed off the notorious New Bedford Coast it’s a fish eye
view of this tough industry that has one of the highest mortality rates of any
industry. It should have been an interesting study of the life on the fishing boats
but unfortunately was nothing of the kind, more like a cross between a video
for a German heavy metal band and an overlong art project appreciated by those
that made it but certainly not by the RBCFT audience who for once where
unanimous in their condemnation of the film. It was generally agreed that there
was enough good material to make a great 15-minute short but at 87 minutes it
was soporific. With the experimental type camera work, a lot of the time you
had no idea what you were looking at other than a nightmare vision of hell at
sea. With a complete lack of narrative or dialog it’s certainly not a film that
draws you in and with its untried formula it would have been better screened at
somewhere like the Tate Modern. The only thing that the film managed to put
across was how harsh and brutal the life of the Trawler men was.
Strangely this experimental documentary won
the Michael Powell award for best British feature at the Edinburgh International
Film Festival, with the judges opining as "an original and
imaginative documentary that observes the brutal routine of deep-sea fishing in
a way which completely immerses the watcher in its story". Immerses
the viewer, not at the RBCFT screening I’m afraid.
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