Filmed on a fishing boat off the coast of Boston, Leviathan pushes the boundaries of what can be filmed. The projection of this documentary that warns of the threats of intensive fishing as much as it reveals the stunning beauty of the ocean's entrails, will be followed by a meeting with its co-director, Verena Paravel.
Born on April 21, 1971 in Neuchâtel (CH), Verena Paravel is a French director, artist and anthropologist. She works at the Sensory Ethnography Lab, a research center at Harvard University. Her work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been screened in numerous festivals such as Berlin, Locarno, New York and Toronto.
She has notably directed with Lucien Castaing-Taylor, in 2012 Leviathan, an experimental film about industrial fishing in North America, in 2017 Caniba, about and with Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man accused of killing and eating a Dutch student in Paris in 1981, and in 2022 De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a journey to the heart of the body mixing their images with those recorded by doctors.
Verena Paravel is a lecturer in the ECAL/HEAD Master of Film Studies.
Leviathan
Documentary
Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel
Written by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel
United States, United Kingdom, France - 2012 - 87 minutes
Filmed on an industrial fishing boat, using a dozen small digital cameras, Leviathan is a documentary of incredible formal innovation and a harrowing plunge into the ship’s labyrinthine bowels. Almost entirely without dialogue, the film exposes the brutality and bloodiness of the human-nature-machine encounter. Between anthropological observation and abstract cinematic experience, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel have created a monstrous and sublime audio-visual opus, whose carnage and shadowy setting add up to nothing less than a seaborne nightmare.