kind of role model, highlighting his benevolence andtranquility despite his long-term incarceration. Evenwhen individuals acknowledge that Herman has wrong-fully committed a crime, they generally describe him asan exceptionally positive force. Thus, these figures chal-lenge the commonly held notion that solitary confine-ment contains the worst of the worst.

In the end, neither the project nor Hermans appealsfor release are successful, and we can only speculatewhether Jackie will manage to establish the communityspace and Herman will be released from prison. The filmends after a series of disappointing setbacks, but bothHerman and Jackie appear hopeful that the situationwill improve with time. Ultimately, we are left with animage of two individuals wrestling with their ownwildly different predicaments while simultaneously col-laborating to contest a system they both see as unjust.

Hermans House certainly raises questions concern-ing the humanity of solitary confinement as a form ofpunishmentin part through Jackies fierce criticism ofthe practice. However, the film provides little informa-tion about the wider prison system; historical, political,and economic factors that have shaped its current formare not extensively explored. Further, the politics andcontroversy surrounding Hermans own case (such ashis involvement with the Black Panther Party and hisdisputed murder of a prison guard) are only brieflyaddressed. Instead, the film problematizes solitary con-finement by drawing attention to Hermans humanityand civility. The film does not romanticize Herman, butit does home in on his positive qualities; he is relent-lessly optimistic and a seemingly endless source ofencouragement. In fact, one of the films most powerfulcontributions is the way in which it challenges thecommonly held image of the criminal as a kind ofdangerous other (David Garland, The Culture ofControl: Crime and Social Order in ContemporarySociety, University of Chicago Press, 2001). In an erawhen the media often treat prisoners as almost subhu-man and one-dimensional, the film tells the story of aprisoner who is both likeable and complex.

Hermans House would be a valuable resource forcourses on legal anthropology, criminal justice, andsociology, and social activism. While the film offerslittle information about the prison system in the UnitedStates, it would be a useful tool to introduce moresubstantive topics about incarceration and race, theexpansion of the prison system, and the tensions thatarise when individuals engage in activism surroundingthese issues. As the film has a heavy emotional impactand confronts the stereotypical characterization of pris-oners, students may be able to discuss the wider impli-cations of the system with fewer preconceived notions.

Leviathan

A film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Vrna Paravel,2012, 87 minutes, DCP, 1.85:1, Dolby 5.1. Distributedby The Cinema Guild, Inc., 115 West 30th Street, Suite800, New York, NY 10001-4061, http://www.cinemaguild.com

Hunter SnyderYale University

In the second century, Oppian of Corycus wrote inHalieutica, in the sea, many things are hidden (inmare multa latent) (Thayer 1928). Despite rich descrip-tions in literature and film since time immemorial, thesea remains opaque and of much interest to us asterrestrial species. Leviathan agitates our understanding,our ways of seeing, and our intrigue within art, cinema,and literature concerning how pelagic bodies move.

Trained as anthropologistsan academic title fromwhich they now seem to rescind in jest (Chang 2013)filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Vrna Paravelsail northeasterly out of the worlds former whalingcapital, New Bedford, Massachusetts, to the North Atlan-tics most fruitful fishing ground. Location and contextare unimportant, however, because Leviathan does nottake place anywhere, apart from somewhere aboard,overboard, aloft, and below a fishing trawler. Somewherebetween both consciousness and unconscious dream-worlds, sandwiched between the Gulf of Maine and theNorth Atlantic Ocean, it is made unassumingly cleareven in the opening of recorded momentsthat what-ever we have known of work at sea is partial.

Instead of the discursive clarity (Alvarez 2012)that the documentary tends toward, Castaing-Taylor andParavel align with modes of interpreting beyond seeingand hearing, to the exhausting/enfeebling/disorientingopalescence of the sea. Through this negotiation with thesea, Leviathan elides linear narrative and sequentiality,sound/picture synchronicity, human characters, andeven the principal recordist as the eventual storyteller.And a three-act (beginning, middle, and end) structure?Leviathan isnt concerned with that so much either.

In the opening sequence of shots, the immediatedesperate search begins for something that seems his-torically familiar to documentary cinema or to the rec-ognizable sea. Maybe a main character, or a location?Through the motions of what we later find out to be astern man (although he and the other seamen will neverbecome distinctive, admirable, and/or despised charac-ters), weonce audience, now embodied cameragazeinto the digital noise that is purported to be the sea overGeorges Bank before dawn, while an interminable

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length of chain is taken up upon the net drumitselfwith speed holes reminiscent of a film reel (Figure 1).We make counterclockwise hand gestures to the green-horn on port. Our faces are shrouded deep inside of thehoods of our orange spray gear, until somehowamidelectric solenoids and crashing wavesthe first (andseldom) utterance of dialogue is given up. The green-horn who is taking out a knot on portlike ushas noidea what is being said and asked.

In this listening to commands, the similar indistincthollering of the opening shots in Sweetgrass (LucienCastaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, 2009) come to mind.In the mountains of Montana, we squint at a cowboy bya pasture fence, who calls out a faint yet disquietingCOOM BIDDY! To the sheep, to the greenhorn, and tous, assigning meaning from foreign sounds to familiardemands requires considerable cognition. Throughout

Leviathan, Ernst Karels cultivated yet hyper-cacophonous sound mix demands cognition through theaural, especially within these moments of utterance,nearly all of which are curiously incomprehensible.

At sea, orientation is a vital but often turbid state ofawareness. Intermixed with happenings taken by movingbodies, cameras also make images on abiotic armatures.Affixed to the mast or a long pole, then dunked over-board, and then back up for air (and when we come up,I swear I hear the camera inhale), we are now suddenly faroutside of the body. In fact, much of Leviathan takesplace underwater, often without any sense of which wayis up or down. In our search for some orientation, we lookup from underwater at the top of the sea with floodlightspeering into the deep, and also look downupsidedownfrom a birds-eye view of the seagulls givingchase to the floating platform (Figure 2). The foreign

FIGURE 1. Still from Leviathan. Used with permission from The Cinema Guild.

FIGURE 2. Still from Leviathan. Used with permission from The Cinema Guild.

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texture of churned water from under, and the law thatbirds above always mark the horizon by flying right-side-up proves precisely that at sea, and in documentarycinema, orientation is never an absolute.

The back-and-forth from deep inside to high aboveand far from a recording hand exhausts us. Fortu-nately, there are a few shots by tripod, and by the handof a filmmaker; these shots stand out strikingly. Thefilmic trope of following a subject from behindwhichis coincidentally common in Foreign Parts (VrnaParavel and J. P. Sniadecki, 2010)1also takes place inthe sequence of a Greater Shearwater (Puffinus gravis)exploring the trawlers deck in a lulled moment. Butunable to take flight, the seabird cannot climb into thelivewell tank where bycatch tosses from fore to aft. Andwhile we often perceive birds as animals that fly ratherthan walk, like the capable biped that it is, the ternstaggers through a scupper in the bulwarks, off the deck,and into the black.

Despite how complicated Leviathans thick (andthin) depictions may be, at the core a strange andunfamiliar banality is also represented. Leviathan pri-oritizes the monotony of shucking scallops, standing atthe helm and its inherent cognitive fuzziness, thedaylessness of time at sea, and the amplification of theincessant hum of diesel engines and hydraulic pumps,which our ears only notice once they have been shut off.These banal yet sensory depictions make for an internalemotional reality that takes over the body from theinside. Inevitably, these are also the moments that arecut first from contemporary representations of work atsea. The traditionally vapid is now the exciting, and thespectacular.

In a break from work, in perhaps the most overtlypolitical scene, the captain spits into his dip cup whilewatching The Discovery Channels Deadliest Catch.Reacting numbly to the TV program in a shot that feelslike 15 minutes long, he unconsciously falls asleep.Watching the totality of his dozing offI admitalsoinvites my body to shut down, which Castaing-Taylorlater remarked is a quite common reaction at this point inthe movie. Over ten years before Leviathan, Taylor wrotethat long takes, by exhibiting a deficiency of authorialintelligence . . . reflect an ambiguity that is at the heart ofhuman experience itself (Castaing-Taylor 1996:86). Theambiguous scene that follows the captains dozing off isa dream within the dream, pairing ideally with thecaptains own slumber, and perhaps representative of ourown cognitive exhaustion. While many ethnographicfilms inevitably sedate, never in my life has a filmconsciously exhausted me to such an extent.

Castaing-Taylors emphasis on long takes is crucialin sedating us such that we can enter the dream that

follows the captains dozing, but does it have to be tothe blabbering narration of Mike Rowe? As a film ladenwith thoughtful, yet unclear and understated depictions,this moments diegesis is offensively literal. Instead ofcontinuing to produce multiple readings in the bizarreconfluences of image and sound, this is where Leviathanbecomes bossyan instance where Taylor momen-tarily agrees with P.T.W. Baxters thoughts of film asimposing itself through the temporary suspension ofdisbelief (Castaing-Taylor 1996:72, 75; see esp. 77). InSweetgrass, a similar externalized emotional reality isbroadcasted overtly on top of a mountain, by a shep-herd crying to his mother about how onerous his workis. Are the filmmakers making a direct critique on illrepresentations of work in popular media? Maybe, butin doing so, they are also marking the bossy ontologiesof spoken and said communication, and these modesinherent inabilities to proffer the same multiple readingsthat the profilmic generates. In hearing the tiresomenarration of Rowe, the ontology of the verbal acts as afoil to the rest of the films sensual and immersivemodes of communicating.

Leviathan collapses the distance between therecorded and the recorder. In addition to red fish flesh,and a warm orange shower inside the belly of the vessel,this collapse of authorial control thrusts us violentlyinto a visceral corporeality of living bodies. As anthro-pologist Chip Sullivan reminds us plainly, in order tomake an image come alive, one must be totally within it(2008:132). Leviathans living bodies are constituted inthe anthropomorphic ship, the bodies of water (both thesea and bodies of sloshing deck water), and mostactively in the bodies of the fisherman. At the sametime, this embodied cinema is enthrallinglydefamiliarizing, with feelings previously manifested inForeign Parts, when a car is shaken off its chassis byforklift at close range, or in Sweetgrass, when hearing acowboy cawing across an expansive valley.

More than two decades before Leviathan, in a dis-course of sensory ethnography and experimental eth-nography labs, visual anthropologist Marcus Banksboldly declared that one of the main problems [of usingethnographic film as a medium of communication] is thatanthropologists simply do not take film seriously (Banks1988:2). Twenty years after Bankss sobering critique,Leviathanas a vessel, a maritime mythical creature, andas a filmis enigmatic beyond representing the turbidityof pelagic emplacement. Leviathan also represents criti-cal experimentation within documentary cinema andtangentially within the ethnographic method.

In 1996, far in the wake of the Writing Culture(Clifford and Marcus 1986) critiques, amid muchdiscourse regarding how ethnographic film is compared

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with text, Taylor Maurice Blochs claim that ethno-graphic film speaks for itself [like a text can] is wrong.Instead, Taylor asks, But what if ethnographic filmdoes not speak at all? What if film does not say, butshows? What if film does not just describe, but depicts?In Leviathan, the only explicit saying comes after thefilm has ended, in a list of Leviathans cast in binomialnomenclature, and a shortlist of ships lost at sea. Thismovement of limited explicitness is also seen in the endcredits of Sweetgrass and Foreign Parts, not as a trope,but originating from a school of knowledge that shapesthis new discourse of ethnography and documentarycinema. For those concerned with phenomenology, theanthropology of work, sensory ethnography, and/or thetradition and transgressions of ethnographic film,Leviathan is compulsory viewing. In Leviathansshowing and limited saying, the argumentation of filmas logically inferior to that of text is swallowed wholeby more feral bodies. Perhaps it is Leviathans recordingof the illogicality of life itself that allows this filmic seacreature to slip away.

Note

1 Filmmakers Paravel, Sniadecki, Barbash, and Castaing-Taylor have produced their films under the auspices ofHarvards Sensory Ethnography Lab. See NakamurasMaking Sense of Sensory Ethnography: The Sensual andthe Multisensory in American Anthropologist, vol. 115, no.1, pp. 132144, or McDonalds American EthnographicFilm and Personal Documentary (University of CaliforniaPress, 2013) for comprehensive details on SEL at Harvard.

References

Alvarez, Patricia2012 Interview with Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki.

FieldsightsVisual and New Media Review, CulturalAnthropology Online, December 17. http://production.culanth.org/fieldsights/33-interview-with-verena-paravel-and-j-p-sniadecki, accessedApril 17, 2013.

Banks, Marcus1988 The Non-Transparency of Ethnographic Film.

Anthropology Today 4(5):23.Castaing-Taylor, Lucien

1996 Iconophobia. Transition 69:6488.Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, and Ilisa Barbash, dirs.

2009 Sweetgrass. The Cinema Guild. New York.Chang, Dustin

2013 Interview: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and VrnaParavel on LEVIATHAN and the Possibilities ofCinema. International Interviews, February 26.http://twitchfilm.com/2013/02/lucien-castaing-taylor-verena-paravel-interview.html, accessedApril 17, 2013.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog-

raphy. Berkeley: University of California Press.Paravel, Vrna, and J. P. Sniadecki, dirs.

2010 Foreign Parts. Kino Lorber. New York.Sullivan, Chip

2008 Telling Untold Stories. In Drawing/Thinking. MarcTreib, ed. Pp. 122135 London: Routledge.

Thayer, Bill, trans.1928 Oppian - Halieutica, Book 1. Oppian, Halieutica or

Fishing. Vol. 1. Pp. 201281 Cambridge, MA: LoebClassical Library.

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