Apstraktni dokumentarac o ribarskom pokolju (odjavna špica navodi latinske nazive svih riba koje su se pojavile na ekranu.) Prizor s pticama snimljenima iz vode jedan je od najčudesnijih ikada snimljenih.
In the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras – tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker – it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.
You’ve never seen a documentary like Leviathan, a galvanizing, uncompromising, and genuinely horrifying documentary on deep-sea-fishing in the North Atlantic. If its subject doesn’t sound terribly original, the film’s approach, limited to one boat’s graveyard shift, is wholly singular: shot entirely with GoPro digital cameras, a tiny water- and shockproof model, the directors attach them to the heads and bodies of ship crew, the sides of the boat during high winds, the inside of a slippery basin filled with dead fish, and other points of view that defy or distort an immersive perspective. Thoroughly avant-garde, this agitated technique is less fly-on-the-wall than fly-caught-on-sandpaper, a writhing and throbbing sensory assault that invigorates with ephemeral abstract imagery, while never obscuring the grisly, lugubrious tasks of hauling and gutting an endless, alien mass. With its aggressive soundscape of whirring motors and violent sloshing, I wouldn’t necessarily call Leviathan a pleasant experience, but it’s a film that could only have been made today, utterly forthright in its attempt to use digital technology to show us something we’ve never seen before.
www.tinymixtapes.com/
Off the New Bedford coast, bobbing on the ink-black Atlantic, a roaring vessel harvests nets full of fish from the great deep. On deck scramble an exhausted crew of colourful slicker-wearing fisherman, some of the last physical labourers in a post-industrial society. Alongside the boat, seagulls fly, diving into the water for chum.
These are the basic elements of Leviathan, the newest collaborative work from anthropologists, artists, and filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Locarno 2010 multiple-prizewinning Foreign Parts). By collaborative, I also mean in participation with the sailors, the fish, and the birds, who all appear alongside one another in the credits – in a Gothic font, for Leviathan is an abstract, anarchic horror film.
The title is, of course, Biblical, referring to a great fish that eventually came to symbolize evil in the Christian Era. This Leviathan is the locale for slaughter, for blood, for heavy metal mechanical mayhem; it’s documentary filmmaking by way of Baroque painting and slasher cinema.
The title also brings to mind Hobbes, whose Leviathan was the State; he also philosophized that all ideas are derived from sensory experience. Hailing from the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, the filmmakers have made the ne plus ultra of immersive documentaries.
In this stunning and unparalleled work, using small digital cameras, they have discovered new forms of cinema. There has not yet been a film quite like Leviathan: see and feel it for yourself. - www.pardolive.ch/
Masterful Fishing Doc 'Leviathan' Presents a Fresh Take on the Nature Documentary Form
A documentary dream team for enthusiasts of experimental approaches to the form, "Leviathan" recalls the strengths of both directors' previous efforts. Castain-Taylor's pensive 2003 look at sheep herders, "Sweetgrass," similarly foregrounded the inextricable bond between humanity and nature, while Paravel turned the grimy discomfort of a Queens junkyard into a marvelously engaging paean to people living at the edges of society. The anonymous fishermen regularly glimpsed throughout "Leviathan" contain a primal dimension drawn out by the way they become almost immediately subsumed by the surrounding environment. The movie opens with a quote from Job about the unflappable power of the leviathan (the title is later referenced with a sampling of a song by heavy metal rockers Mastadon). But the filmmakers eschew biblical aspirations for raw, cosmic power rendered especially involving by disorientation. Both during the black of night, when the boat forms a piercing figure in the black frame, and in the daylight glow, the camera rarely ever stops moving: From the earliest shots, it constantly shifts from the loud interiors of the boat to view the dark abyss below, resting on blotches of white foam and endowing them with abstract power.
There's little time to adjust before the first of many horrific plunges into the water, where the adventurous, free-romaing lens peers upward before careening to the surface for air. The angles and framing "choices" are as much beholden to a natural ebb and flow as the ocean itself, but the filmmakers thread the images together with brilliant finesse, so that it's often difficult to spot the abrupt editing choices; even more frequently, the montage builds to such an absorbing effect that it's impossible to break the spell and look for them.
Having established the POV of the fishermen, "Leviathan" shifts to the semi-static view of the fish. As cameras lie among the detritus and observe its chorus of vacant stares, the cycle of the fishermen's work is echoed by the rhythmic sounds of chopping and the thud of animal parts hitting the hull as scales glitter among pools of blood.
Even as its perspective grows increasingly alien, 'Leviathan' is full of life.
Despite the overload of sights and sounds, "Leviathan" adheres to a remarkably cogent aesthetic filled with innumerable painterly touches, from the red and blue gloves of the fishermen to the dark yellows of the ship interiors. Flitting across the screen at a relentless pace, the ongoing motion gives the impression of the late Stan Brakhage's dizzying stylings in aquatic terms. However, the stunt work on display roots the continuing sequence that forms the entire movie in a precise world. "Leviathan" resembles nothing like the existing format for nature documentaries, but it does point to a different approach to it. Generally speaking, the genre is predicated on distance between the viewer and subject. "Leviathan," on the other hand, delves into the thick of it, the camera merging with subjects living and dead, fashioning the natural world into the ultimate expressionistic accomplishment.
Even as its perspective grows increasingly alien, "Leviathan" is full of life. The most striking moment involves a flock of seagulls seen upside down against an empty sky, the digital image morphing them into violent brushstrokes on a blank canvas. The stunning black and white tableaux frees the gulls from a familiar reality while poeticizing their natural buoyancy.
The fishermen are also folded into this reverse objectification. In the lengthiest scene, a middle-aged man rests in the ship interior, neatly framed in a shot that drags on for minutes until he eventually falls asleep. Viewed in his natural habitat, he takes on the same primitive qualities applied to the cold-blooded vertebrae lining the ship.
Without rescinding its atmosphere, "Leviathan" finally brings up its credits, which contain a tribute to vessels lost off the Bedford Coast. Even then, however, it avoids hitting an elegiac note. While ominous, the movie maintains a life-affirming message, celebrating an ancient ritual by plummeting its lyrical depths and staying there. - www.indiewire.com/
Blood and Thunder: Enter the Leviathan
By
Let’s start with a coincidence. The title of Part I, Chap. 1 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Of Sense.” The name of the Harvard project headed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose new film, made in collaboration with Véréna Paravel, shares a title with Hobbes’ seminal work of political philosophy: the Sensory Ethnography Lab. This isn’t to say that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel are Hobbesians, or that their Leviathan has any interest in social contract theory (though it might). No, it’s a useful coincidence as far as it brings sense front and centre, sets it up unmistakably as the root of our engagement with all that’s around us. Hobbes’ brief explication positions sense as a response to movements in an Other, one unconcerned with its status as a viewed-smelled-heard-touched-tasted object. And Leviathan—in contrast to so many films today that would hardly exist outside their audience’s heads—both applies this to the relationship between the camera and the world, and functions as such an object itself, a mass of sound and light vibrating in the dark, unknowable beyond the waves in our eyes and our ears.
As such, things can be terribly scary. But not, I think, the way that horror movies are frightening: there, a threat exists and the fear’s in the uncertainty of when and where it will come; here, it springs from having all the narrative we normally hang on to torn away, leaving us with only our senses to follow in the dark. It’s that lack of narrative that makes it seem ridiculous to call this something like “a documentary on commercial fishing in the North Atlantic off the coast of New Bedford.” Rather, Leviathan takes on the shape of the system it describes, a circular flow, choppy like those cold waves, that moves neither forward nor backward but simply works and accumulates (fish, footage) without ever linking to a history, an endgame.
After an appropriately ominous sounding epigraph taken from the book of Job, the film opens in darkness, not so much a beginning as one entry point picked from many possibilities. As the wind howls and machines clatter and clank, splashes of colour—red, blue, orange, green; all rich digital hues awash in low-light visual noise—creep or flash into view, gradually resolving into a horrifying image of labour, chains frantically wrapped as huge fishing nets emerge from the waves. This opening sequence continues for more than 20 minutes, the image drifting in and out of clear representation, the camera occasionally plunging overboard, diving into the churning wake only to crawl back onboard into the ongoing work. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s editing moves seamlessly among footage captured by a dozen tiny GoPro cameras, some manned by the filmmakers, others tossed overboard in waterproof containers, and the rest attached to the helmets of the fisherman. This invisible flux—four viewings in and I’m still not entirely certain when the first edit takes place—renders the whole world equally; there are simply images of and from things, all moving together in Vertovian harmony. That the experience is so unsettling only speaks to how infrequently life today requires us to engage this sensually.
The contrast between the three modes—underwater, worker-vision, and traditional (though these latter moments still find plenty of new angles, whether staring eye-to-eye with a decapitated fish as it slides across the deck or running up the armpit of a fisherman as he shucks scallop after scallop)—provides something like a structure for the film, a continuous, cyclical movement from uncertainty to immediacy to curiosity. What connects the three is the relationship to the world described above, the sense the camera regards what surrounds it, lets the world, natural and unnatural, in in such a way that these impressions shape the film as much as any intelligence behind the camera, creating the vibrating object that is Leviathan. Never before has the ocean been filmed as such, because never before has the ocean been allowed to register so directly (though David Gatten’s What the Water Said films achieve something similar ontologically, if not phenomenologically). Likewise, labour has never been seen this way, because never before has it been filmed with so little mediation, literally from within. When a fisherman turns his head quickly, or scurries quickly across the deck, and the image only registers a blur of movement, a smear of colour there and gone, there’s finally a sense of what work really is: the structures that let the capitalist praise work for its efficiency, or the vulgar Marxist to condemn it for its alienation, fall away and we’re left with the fact of labour as such, in all its complexity. It’s tiring to see and hear in a way that a traditionally clearer view could never be.
Castaing-Taylor and Paravel counterweight these moments with their own steadier views, moments of calm duration as fish are slaughtered and scallops are shucked. If Leviathan only contained these it would still be great, a high-seas version of Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (1949). But in concert with the images from within the work, they express the whole system, brutal death reinserted into labour that we can see doesn’t allow for the time to stop and worry about such things.
Perhaps though it would be better to say that they’re too caught up in the motion, rather than that they don’t have the time (that they’re moving too fast), because time here is a sneaky, slippery thing. Given the film’s nearly perpetual night, there aren’t any temporal markers—the events captured could come from a single day as easily a month. Some events, like the rigging and deployment of two fishing nets seen schematically from a high perch or the ship’s captain dozing off as he watches Deadliest Catch on television, play out in real time. Others, such as the opening immersion, appear continuous even as their fluidity takes on an increasingly uncanny quality (i.e., I may not be sure when every edit occurs, but I know they’re there); the creeping doubt that time has been overtaken by filmed space. Here, as with the shifts among the modes of filming, there’s a respirational quality, expanding for moments where duration briefly regains a foothold before contracting to a condensed, contrived continuity. Or perhaps vice versa. In either case, time comes in through the eyes, whether it’s the weighted seconds of a fixed frame or the flood of moments in constant movement.
Which is to say that sensual time has replaced historical time. This is ultimately a more profound dislocation from narrative than the absence of characters or dialogue, and the base on which it builds this world removed from the mechanics of the market, the great historical marker of our young century. It would make no sense to follow these fisherman back to the sale of their haul, because at no point does the film acknowledge the sort of time that renders an event complete. Sensual time links actions into an ongoing stream: rays are caught; they are butchered; the undesirable parts are tossed overboard; blood flows into the sea; gulls are attracted to the floating carcasses; they dive into the waves to eat; the waves rock the boat; men shower amidst the rocking; they return to work…And so it goes.
In this stream of the sensual, every colour seen, every sound heard, is a little step closer to freedom from all those stories and histories that the 20th century collapsed under. There’s no more “Once upon a time…,” which isn’t to say there’s no more history. It’s there to be felt, whether in the lunar, ravaged face of the ship’s captain or the numb efficiency with which men slaughter fish. It’s there in the way a fisherman lights two cigarettes, one for himself and one for the man working with him. And it’s there in the mountain of hundreds, maybe thousands of fish that tumble out of a net and cover the camera at one point, leaving just the tiniest sliver of light wrought red through reflection, the most poignantly Brakhagian moment in a movie full of them. In each of these a history imprints itself on the present, expresses itself in a way that can be followed back to a fuller understanding of now.
Both Sweetgrass (made by Castaing-Taylor with Ilisa Barbash, 2009) and Foreign Parts (made by Paravel with J.P. Sniadecki, 2010) are elegies for communities at the edge of irrelevance: a group of Montana cowboys in the former, a slum economy in the latter. They’re stories of what happens at the business end of progress—industrialization, gentrification—where jobs are lost, homes are destroyed, lives are set adrift. Both are, in their sense of commitment, their perspicacity, exceptional films, doubly commendable for offering a record of what’s been lost to mindless forward motion. Still, both also can’t help but tell old stories: lives spoken, journeys taken, landscapes and junkyards we know even if we don’t. What sets Leviathan apart is its ability to present the world, now, anew; until we’re out from under the weight of all these narratives—which in the digital age only proliferate—it’ll remain just as urgent. At the heart of all this is a very old, simple argument: that to know the world is to first know its beauty.
Beauty, here, is everywhere, as much in the sticky rich red of the blood that oozes down the side of a container where fish are hacked to pieces as in the play between blue-green and orange when a huge net bring a universe of debris—starfish, shells, sand—with it toward the surface. It’s there in a strange sequence that follows a water bird as it roots around the deck, the camera tracking it at ground level, capturing the glistening wet of its feathers as it looks desperately for something it can’t seem to find before abandoning its search and plunging overboard into stormy seas. That the manic comedy of this little avian Chaplin leads possibly to death is fitting: real beauty needs real stakes. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel make this clear with a closing credit dedicating the film to ten ships, “and countless others,” lost to the same waters they filmed on. (The second credit curiosity is a listing, in Latin, of all the species that appear in the film, a little reminder of the camera’s ability to accept all the world’s impressions equally.)
So we can follow this movement, from beauty to the world to everything that is behind the world. All of it enters through our eyes and our ears, vibrating directly on us. What this says is: there is a world out there and it is huge and I am in it. Leviathan doesn’t ask us to bring anything to it; it doesn’t need our stories, our knowledge, our prejudices. In its indifference to our presence it’s a nice reminder of why the movies can be so affecting in the first place, of what it feels like to be confronted with something that is truly outside of everything our experiences have taught us. Here is a true 21st-century ethnography, the results of a study of foreign culture—a social and industrial space very few people will ever know first-hand—illuminating not only that culture, but also cutting through the stories and forcing us to reconsider our mode of engaging with all that is not ourselves.
Leviathan ends with its most disorienting sequence, a spatially jumbled journey that flies with gulls seen from below beneath a gaping starless sky, then plunges into black-green water, emerges to view the gulls from above—the image flipped so ocean becomes sky—and ends back in the rushing darkness of rough seas. Like everything that came before, it’s truly spectacular, an optic-aural overload whose aim isn’t to force us into submission but to knock us off our bearings, to prompt an increase in our energies of engagement. Each viewing of Leviathan has, fittingly, given the hundreds of gulls that swoop and caw throughout, left me feeling a little like Tippi & Co. at the end of The Birds (1963): grateful and alive and scared and aware of all that’s around me like never before.
Let’s start with a coincidence. The title of Part I, Chap. 1 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Of Sense.” The name of the Harvard project headed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose new film, made in collaboration with Véréna Paravel, shares a title with Hobbes’ seminal work of political philosophy: the Sensory Ethnography Lab. This isn’t to say that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel are Hobbesians, or that their Leviathan has any interest in social contract theory (though it might). No, it’s a useful coincidence as far as it brings sense front and centre, sets it up unmistakably as the root of our engagement with all that’s around us. Hobbes’ brief explication positions sense as a response to movements in an Other, one unconcerned with its status as a viewed-smelled-heard-touched-tasted object. And Leviathan—in contrast to so many films today that would hardly exist outside their audience’s heads—both applies this to the relationship between the camera and the world, and functions as such an object itself, a mass of sound and light vibrating in the dark, unknowable beyond the waves in our eyes and our ears.
As such, things can be terribly scary. But not, I think, the way that horror movies are frightening: there, a threat exists and the fear’s in the uncertainty of when and where it will come; here, it springs from having all the narrative we normally hang on to torn away, leaving us with only our senses to follow in the dark. It’s that lack of narrative that makes it seem ridiculous to call this something like “a documentary on commercial fishing in the North Atlantic off the coast of New Bedford.” Rather, Leviathan takes on the shape of the system it describes, a circular flow, choppy like those cold waves, that moves neither forward nor backward but simply works and accumulates (fish, footage) without ever linking to a history, an endgame.
After an appropriately ominous sounding epigraph taken from the book of Job, the film opens in darkness, not so much a beginning as one entry point picked from many possibilities. As the wind howls and machines clatter and clank, splashes of colour—red, blue, orange, green; all rich digital hues awash in low-light visual noise—creep or flash into view, gradually resolving into a horrifying image of labour, chains frantically wrapped as huge fishing nets emerge from the waves. This opening sequence continues for more than 20 minutes, the image drifting in and out of clear representation, the camera occasionally plunging overboard, diving into the churning wake only to crawl back onboard into the ongoing work. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s editing moves seamlessly among footage captured by a dozen tiny GoPro cameras, some manned by the filmmakers, others tossed overboard in waterproof containers, and the rest attached to the helmets of the fisherman. This invisible flux—four viewings in and I’m still not entirely certain when the first edit takes place—renders the whole world equally; there are simply images of and from things, all moving together in Vertovian harmony. That the experience is so unsettling only speaks to how infrequently life today requires us to engage this sensually.
The contrast between the three modes—underwater, worker-vision, and traditional (though these latter moments still find plenty of new angles, whether staring eye-to-eye with a decapitated fish as it slides across the deck or running up the armpit of a fisherman as he shucks scallop after scallop)—provides something like a structure for the film, a continuous, cyclical movement from uncertainty to immediacy to curiosity. What connects the three is the relationship to the world described above, the sense the camera regards what surrounds it, lets the world, natural and unnatural, in in such a way that these impressions shape the film as much as any intelligence behind the camera, creating the vibrating object that is Leviathan. Never before has the ocean been filmed as such, because never before has the ocean been allowed to register so directly (though David Gatten’s What the Water Said films achieve something similar ontologically, if not phenomenologically). Likewise, labour has never been seen this way, because never before has it been filmed with so little mediation, literally from within. When a fisherman turns his head quickly, or scurries quickly across the deck, and the image only registers a blur of movement, a smear of colour there and gone, there’s finally a sense of what work really is: the structures that let the capitalist praise work for its efficiency, or the vulgar Marxist to condemn it for its alienation, fall away and we’re left with the fact of labour as such, in all its complexity. It’s tiring to see and hear in a way that a traditionally clearer view could never be.
Castaing-Taylor and Paravel counterweight these moments with their own steadier views, moments of calm duration as fish are slaughtered and scallops are shucked. If Leviathan only contained these it would still be great, a high-seas version of Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (1949). But in concert with the images from within the work, they express the whole system, brutal death reinserted into labour that we can see doesn’t allow for the time to stop and worry about such things.
Perhaps though it would be better to say that they’re too caught up in the motion, rather than that they don’t have the time (that they’re moving too fast), because time here is a sneaky, slippery thing. Given the film’s nearly perpetual night, there aren’t any temporal markers—the events captured could come from a single day as easily a month. Some events, like the rigging and deployment of two fishing nets seen schematically from a high perch or the ship’s captain dozing off as he watches Deadliest Catch on television, play out in real time. Others, such as the opening immersion, appear continuous even as their fluidity takes on an increasingly uncanny quality (i.e., I may not be sure when every edit occurs, but I know they’re there); the creeping doubt that time has been overtaken by filmed space. Here, as with the shifts among the modes of filming, there’s a respirational quality, expanding for moments where duration briefly regains a foothold before contracting to a condensed, contrived continuity. Or perhaps vice versa. In either case, time comes in through the eyes, whether it’s the weighted seconds of a fixed frame or the flood of moments in constant movement.
Which is to say that sensual time has replaced historical time. This is ultimately a more profound dislocation from narrative than the absence of characters or dialogue, and the base on which it builds this world removed from the mechanics of the market, the great historical marker of our young century. It would make no sense to follow these fisherman back to the sale of their haul, because at no point does the film acknowledge the sort of time that renders an event complete. Sensual time links actions into an ongoing stream: rays are caught; they are butchered; the undesirable parts are tossed overboard; blood flows into the sea; gulls are attracted to the floating carcasses; they dive into the waves to eat; the waves rock the boat; men shower amidst the rocking; they return to work…And so it goes.
In this stream of the sensual, every colour seen, every sound heard, is a little step closer to freedom from all those stories and histories that the 20th century collapsed under. There’s no more “Once upon a time…,” which isn’t to say there’s no more history. It’s there to be felt, whether in the lunar, ravaged face of the ship’s captain or the numb efficiency with which men slaughter fish. It’s there in the way a fisherman lights two cigarettes, one for himself and one for the man working with him. And it’s there in the mountain of hundreds, maybe thousands of fish that tumble out of a net and cover the camera at one point, leaving just the tiniest sliver of light wrought red through reflection, the most poignantly Brakhagian moment in a movie full of them. In each of these a history imprints itself on the present, expresses itself in a way that can be followed back to a fuller understanding of now.
Both Sweetgrass (made by Castaing-Taylor with Ilisa Barbash, 2009) and Foreign Parts (made by Paravel with J.P. Sniadecki, 2010) are elegies for communities at the edge of irrelevance: a group of Montana cowboys in the former, a slum economy in the latter. They’re stories of what happens at the business end of progress—industrialization, gentrification—where jobs are lost, homes are destroyed, lives are set adrift. Both are, in their sense of commitment, their perspicacity, exceptional films, doubly commendable for offering a record of what’s been lost to mindless forward motion. Still, both also can’t help but tell old stories: lives spoken, journeys taken, landscapes and junkyards we know even if we don’t. What sets Leviathan apart is its ability to present the world, now, anew; until we’re out from under the weight of all these narratives—which in the digital age only proliferate—it’ll remain just as urgent. At the heart of all this is a very old, simple argument: that to know the world is to first know its beauty.
Beauty, here, is everywhere, as much in the sticky rich red of the blood that oozes down the side of a container where fish are hacked to pieces as in the play between blue-green and orange when a huge net bring a universe of debris—starfish, shells, sand—with it toward the surface. It’s there in a strange sequence that follows a water bird as it roots around the deck, the camera tracking it at ground level, capturing the glistening wet of its feathers as it looks desperately for something it can’t seem to find before abandoning its search and plunging overboard into stormy seas. That the manic comedy of this little avian Chaplin leads possibly to death is fitting: real beauty needs real stakes. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel make this clear with a closing credit dedicating the film to ten ships, “and countless others,” lost to the same waters they filmed on. (The second credit curiosity is a listing, in Latin, of all the species that appear in the film, a little reminder of the camera’s ability to accept all the world’s impressions equally.)
So we can follow this movement, from beauty to the world to everything that is behind the world. All of it enters through our eyes and our ears, vibrating directly on us. What this says is: there is a world out there and it is huge and I am in it. Leviathan doesn’t ask us to bring anything to it; it doesn’t need our stories, our knowledge, our prejudices. In its indifference to our presence it’s a nice reminder of why the movies can be so affecting in the first place, of what it feels like to be confronted with something that is truly outside of everything our experiences have taught us. Here is a true 21st-century ethnography, the results of a study of foreign culture—a social and industrial space very few people will ever know first-hand—illuminating not only that culture, but also cutting through the stories and forcing us to reconsider our mode of engaging with all that is not ourselves.
Leviathan ends with its most disorienting sequence, a spatially jumbled journey that flies with gulls seen from below beneath a gaping starless sky, then plunges into black-green water, emerges to view the gulls from above—the image flipped so ocean becomes sky—and ends back in the rushing darkness of rough seas. Like everything that came before, it’s truly spectacular, an optic-aural overload whose aim isn’t to force us into submission but to knock us off our bearings, to prompt an increase in our energies of engagement. Each viewing of Leviathan has, fittingly, given the hundreds of gulls that swoop and caw throughout, left me feeling a little like Tippi & Co. at the end of The Birds (1963): grateful and alive and scared and aware of all that’s around me like never before.
Heavy Metal: An Interview with "Leviathan" Co-Director Véréna Paravel
ADAM COOK: Can you describe how Leviathan was filmed and the cameras you used?
VÉRÉNA PARAVEL: We started doing ethnographic research around the harbor in New Bedford, the former whaling capital of the world, using big cameras, EX3, EX1. We were interested in documenting an industry which economy goes back to the bay colony. Then, we went at sea for the first time with the idea of dispersing other small GoPro cameras between the fishermen and us. We lost all of our bigger cameras at sea but at the end, those small cheap cameras that we used were the most interesting tools for us to be able to work with the fishermen and to go even beyond that, to share and spread the perspective also to the catch and the elements…
COOK: …To express the experience of all these different points of view.
PARAVEL: Exactly. We didn’t want the film to be an imposition of our own intentions.
COOK: It’s more like an investigation, to experiment with placing the camera in these different roles and finding out what the perspectives are like.
PARAVEL: Yes, it was a constant search to capture the experience of being there. We didn’t have any pre-conceived statement in mind. Lucien and I share this belief that filmmaking is not for communicating a single idea, it’s a form of engagement with the world.
COOK: And it’s very visceral, this engagement, it’s the process of experiencing.
PARAVEL: The film itself is a very honest reaction to being at high seas. We had a discussion for less than a minute about what to do. The film is a gesture, a physical and emotional reaction to our experience, almost like an epileptic crisis or something—an aesthetic translation of what we have been subjected to.
COOK: How would you describe your experience of being on the ship? Frightening?
PARAVEL: A lot of fear, yes. A lot of physical pain. Being crushed by the magnitude of nature, entangled in it. Feeling fully alive. And an inch away from death.
COOK: I think we actually get a sense of that pain watching the film.
PARAVEL: Isolation, exhaustion, loneliness.
COOK: For me watching it, there was sense of alienation from the environment. Everything looked so strange to me.
PARAVEL: Maybe because we attached those cameras to the fisherman themselves the result is an embodiment of this very cephalic point of view. It’s not only the body that’s moving, you’re literally in their head, you’re with them, you’re a part of their actions, but your spatial and temporal orientation disappears and this is how you feel on a fishing vessel. So, we wanted to privilege this unique perspective, but we didn’t want to limit it to the fisherman. Unlike in most documentaries where it’s only the human subjects’ perspective, we wanted to give the same ontological weight to the fishermen and their catch and it spread to the elements as well.
COOK: How long did you spend at sea?
PARAVEL: I think we made 5 or 6 voyages, and every time was between 8 days and 14 days, so maybe 2 months in total.
COOK: Did it get easier or harder each time?
PARAVEL: It depends. Some trips were really, really difficult for us. Some were easier. In the winter when it’s really cold and the sea is really rough, it’s physically challenging. Lucien was unfortunately very sick. We knew it was worth it though, that we were doing something…
COOK: …New, completely. As a film critic I try to contextualize the movies I see, and part of that is comparing new films to other work and trying to relate it in that way, to find precedents, and this is such a challenging film to do that with. If I told you of the filmmakers I thought of while watching your film, you might think I’m crazy. They’re only vaguely linked, but nevertheless Leviathan evoked the following names for me: Stan Brakhage, Tony Scott [Note: this conversation took place before his passing] and most loosely Werner Herzog, only for the way he can render our world alien to us like you and Lucien do in your film. That’s the closest point of comparison I could find, was a synthesis of very specific aspects of these directors’ work: motion, strangeness, disorientation and visual and sensory pleasure. It doesn’t come close, but I think that illustrates how unique Leviathan is.
I noticed a thank you to Claire Denis in the end credits?
PARAVEL: She was the first to see a really rough, rough, rough cut and it was a very important moment for us because we didn’t and still don’t know what the film is—we know it’s a monster. She sat, watched the film, and she was touched and discombobulated by it, in a way that we could strongly feel. Feeling that in her gave us the energy and the strength to continue our project. She was very encouraging. We, of course, admire her work.
COOK: Me too, very much, and now that you mention it, something in the motion of L’intrus also feels vaguely reminiscent of your film, and some of the noise on the soundtrack feels like a cousin to the noise in Leviathan. Another silly comparison! [laughs]
PARAVEL: [laughs] You’re not the first person to say “I can’t compare it.” Maybe it’s better to compare it to painting or poetry, or different forms—
COOK: —or heavy metal!
PARAVEL: Exactly, heavy metal!
COOK: Could you talk about the heavy metal music in the film?
PARAVEL: This is what the fishermen listen to. It’s a heavy metal film.
COOK: You’ve collaborated with J.P. Sniadecki on Foreign Parts (2010) and now with Lucien Castaing-Taylor on Leviathan. Can you talk about why you like working in partnerships and how it works?
PARAVEL: I wish Lucien were here. It’s our film. To answer your question, we don’t divide the work, we organically share it. With J.P. in the junkyard, we helped each other, we protected each other, we hold each other, passing the camera from hand to hand. With Lucien, it was a real pleasure to share not only the camera and the sound device but also endless beautiful discussions on Leviathan. For us, making a film is about sharing. And anyway, you can not be alone in a junkyard, you can not be alone on a boat, and you’re never alone making a film, read the credits…
COOK: One thing I wish I did is count the number of shots in the film.
PARAVEL: 130.
COOK: As I expected, lower than how it feels as you’re watching it, because there’s an illusion of montage in the movie, from the constant submergence and emergence in and from the ocean—this is what evoked the intensity of Scott for me. It feels like a rapid succession of shots, but sometimes these are drawn out takes, and there’s an automatic-cutting in the interaction between nature and the camera, it’s frenetic.
PARAVEL: They’re long takes, yes. I mean this is true and not true because the first fifteen minutes of the film looks like a single shot, but it’s not. We really worked on fluidity—it is, also, a liquid film. COOK: Can you talk about the sound design in the film and Ernst Karel? Sound plays a huge role in the film, obviously.
PARAVEL: We recorded with a sound device and we recorded hours and hours of sound but we realized that the sound coming from the little GoPro camera, especially when it was in its plastic case, was—I guess most filmmakers would have gotten rid of it, but we decided to work with it…It’s so disturbing…
COOK: …The digital noise. It’s like in Film socialisme. Godard uses raw digital sound from the scenes on the boat, and it’s noisy but there’s something sensually beautiful about it.
PARAVEL: Absolutely. So, to highlight that, we did our sound and we edited our sound, but at the end we gave Ernst the film so he remixed it and worked with the extra sound from the GoPro camera, and I hope you listened to the end credits because he composed the end credits. We also worked for the first time with another sound designer in New York, Jacob Ribicoff, who has done amazing work. Ernst and Jacob helped bring the film to another level.
COOK: I’ll leave it there, but with one last comment: Leviathan is best seen close to the screen, with the volume as loud as possible.
PARAVEL: Thank you for saying that.
The Merger of Academia and Art House
Harvard Filmmakers’ Messy World
Left, Arrête Ton Cinéma, Right, Cinema Guild
Left, a scene from “Leviathan,” a film by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor; and, right, a scene from Mr. Castaing-Taylor’s “Sweetgrass,” which he made with Ilisa Barbash.
By DENNIS LIM
TUCKED within the syllabus for a class that the filmmaker and anthropologist Lucien Castaing-Taylor teaches at Harvard is a rhetorical question that sums up his view of nonfiction film: “If life is messy and unpredictable, and documentary is a reflection of life, should it not be digressive and open-ended too?”
Straddling academia and the art house, Mr. Castaing-Taylor and his associates and students at the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard have been responsible for some of the most daring and significant documentaries of recent years, works that — not incidentally — challenge the conventions of both ethnographic film and documentary in general.
Documentary, as practiced in this country today, is a largely informational genre, driven by causes or personalities. The ethnographic film, traditionally the province of anthropologists investigating the cultures of others, is in some ways even more rigid, charged with analyzing data and advancing arguments. In both cases the emphasis is on content over form. What tends to get lost is the simple awareness that film, unlike a pamphlet or an academic paper, is a medium ideally suited to capturing the flux of lived experience.
Mr. Castaing-Taylor established the lab in 2006 as a collaboration between the departments of anthropology and visual and environmental studies. Asked recently about its founding principles, he said: “It takes ethnography seriously. It’s not as though you can do ethnography with a two-day, fly-by-night visit somewhere. But it also takes ‘sensory’ seriously. Most anthropological writing and most ethnographic film, with the exception of some truly great works, is so devoid of emotional or sensory experience.” Above all, he added: “It takes what art can do seriously. It tries to yoke it to the real in some way.”
As with the pioneering anthropological works of Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner, the founder of Harvard’s Film Study Center (which Mr. Castaing-Taylor now directs), the best films to have emerged from the lab are potent reminders that documentary and art are not mutually incompatible. As Mr. Castaing-Taylor put it: “What does it mean to try to produce an artwork after months of doing field work and when you get really close to people? What kind of art can be generated by that?”
The answers are as striking as they are varied. Mr. Castaing-Taylor’s “Sweetgrass” (2009), which he made with Ilisa Barbash, also an anthropologist and a curator at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, is a visually majestic chronicle of Montana sheep ranchers, filmed over the course of three summer pastures. Véréna Paravel’s and J. P. Sniadecki’s “Foreign Parts” (2010) is a lived-in portrait, tender but unsentimental, of an endangered junkyard neighborhood in Willets Point, Queens.
Stephanie Spray has worked extensively in Nepal, producing intricate sound pieces and intimate family portraits like “As Long as There’s Breath” (2009). Mr. Sniadecki’s latest, “People’s Park,” which he directed with Libbie Dina Cohn, is a single-shot tour of a bustling park in Chengdu, China, achieved through careful planning, multiple takes and an evident rapport with the park’s denizens.
“Leviathan,” a new film by Ms. Paravel and Mr. Castaing-Taylor, is perhaps the most radical work yet to emerge from the lab and certainly the one that goes furthest in striving for an immersive cinematic experience. Shot entirely aboard a fishing trawler off the Massachusetts coast, largely with small, waterproof digital cameras that were variously tethered to the fishermen, tossed in with their dead or dying catch and plunged into the roiling ocean, the film had its premiere in competition last month at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where it won the international critics’ prize. It will be shown next week at the Toronto International Film Festival, in the Wavelengths section for innovative cinema and at the New York Film Festival.
A portrait of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic as the written word alone could never render it, “Leviathan” conveys the brutal toll that the enterprise takes on the workers and on the ocean, and it could even be read as an environmental parable in which the sea threatens to exact its revenge on humanity. But none of this is explicit in the film, which avoids exposition and context, unfolds almost entirely in the dark and often verges on hallucinatory abstraction. Where most documentaries prize clarity, this one attests to the power of estrangement.
Over dinner in Brooklyn one July evening while in New York to complete the color correction and sound mix for “Leviathan,” Mr. Castaing-Taylor acknowledged that he was still unsure how to describe the film. “It is utterly a documentary, and in the sense that we gave over the camera for part of it, it’s perhaps even more documentary, less mediated by the filmmakers,” he said. “But it also doesn’t feel like a documentary to me. It feels more like a horror film or science fiction.”
Mr. Castaing-Taylor, who was born in Liverpool, England, where his father worked in shipping, said “Leviathan” had begun as a broader inquiry into shipping and fishing. He was drawn to the coastal town of New Bedford, Mass., the onetime whaling capital of the world immortalized in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” and the tension between its mythic status and today’s down-at-the-heels reality. The initial idea was to capture the different facets of the fishing industry, and he started by shooting in the local factories that produce dredges, nets and ice.
Early last year, after Ms. Paravel joined Mr. Castaing-Taylor on the project and after they had shot some 50 hours of footage on land, the filmmakers were invited out to sea by the fishermen they had befriended. “Once we started filming on the boat, we lost interest in land,” Mr. Castaing-Taylor said. “There was something going on out there that was much more cosmic and profound.”
In rough seas and frigid temperatures nearly 200 miles off the coast, perpetually wet and rarely sleeping more than two hours at a stretch, the filmmakers faced constant reminders that fishing has one of the highest mortality rates of any occupation. Mr. Castaing-Taylor was seasick much of the time; Ms. Paravel was so physically battered from the outings that twice she had to be taken to the emergency room upon returning. They made six trips in all, each one lasting up to two weeks.
“The film became a physical reaction to the experience of being out at sea,” Ms. Paravel said, speaking by Skype from Brittany. She added that the meaning of “Leviathan,” the title from the get-go, evolved as the film progressed. Originally an allusion to Melville, who used it to refer to great whales, and to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for whom it symbolized the state (and who also argued that all thought originates in sensory experience), the word became most apt in its original biblical sense of a sea monster.
Melville remained a guiding spirit. “Moby-Dick,” which Ms. Paravel and Mr. Castaing-Taylor took turns reading to each other on the boat, also has a pronounced documentary aspect, as Ms. Paravel pointed out. “He has all these endless descriptions of all kinds of whales,” she said.
On the second trip, having already lost one camera to the waves, the filmmakers tried out the GoPro, a compact and durable attachable camera popular among extreme-sports enthusiasts. Part of the appeal of the GoPro footage — especially in the pitch-black night scenes, with movement sometimes registering as ghostly afterimages — was that it lacked the definition of more expensive cameras. “The footage seemed to be much more opaque in a good way,” Mr. Castaing-Taylor said. “It activated the viewer’s imagination much more.”
“Leviathan” extends the point-of-view experiments of “Sweetgrass,” sections of which Mr. Castaing-Taylor shot with a torso-strapped camera amid hundreds of sheep, as if part of the herd. This time the small, inexpensive cameras allowed them to “distribute the authorship,” Ms. Paravel said, enabling a collaboration of sorts among the filmmakers, their subjects and nature itself.
Mr. Castaing-Taylor recalled the first time he watched the footage from cameras that had been affixed to the fishermen’s helmets as they scrambled about the slippery deck. “It was more corporeal, more embodied than the most frenetic vérité footage,” he said. “There’s this charge of subjectivity. But at the same time it renounces any directorial intent.” The filmmakers also taped the cameras to wooden poles that they dipped into the water, resulting in disorienting shots of bloody fish parts tumbling back into the ocean and upside-down views of swarming sea gulls overhead.
As with most Sensory Ethnography Lab films, sound plays an important role in the nearly wordless but often thunderous “Leviathan”; the sound artist Ernst Karel, who teaches in the program, collaborates on the sound mixes and designs for most of the films. For “Leviathan” he and a sound designer, Jacob Ribicoff, combined the industrial din of machinery and engines with the gasping sounds that the encased GoPro cameras produced when submerged.
For all its innovations in suggesting new possibilities for the video image, the formal questions behind a film like “Leviathan” are part of a venerable tradition. Its quest to find fresh ways of seeing, to push the limits of cinema as a tool for both capturing reality and heightening the senses, was precisely the one that, as far back as the 1920s, compelled the Soviet master Dziga Vertov to formulate his concept of the camera as an all-seeing, endlessly perfectible Kino-Eye.
“Leviathan,” which looks and sounds like no other documentary in memory, is likely to be one of the most talked-about art films of the year; it prompted both raves and walkouts at Locarno. At the premiere Ms. Paravel introduced the film as “a monster.” After the screening, she gamely answered questions about process but declined to be pinned down on meaning.
“We still don’t know exactly what the film is about,” she said.
Signal to Noise
An Interview with Ernst Karel at the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab
by Max Goldberg
posted February 28, 2013
"We've never found anyone who really devotes himself to
recording sound," Richard Leacock complained many years ago. "At the
moment it's not a technical problem, it's a human problem. You have to
think of sound and image as two cameras with two quite different
problems." Of course the familiar picture of the boom operator trailing
the vérité cameraman itself betrays a certain anxiety about isolating
the "right" sounds, but the majority of American documentaries simply
sidestep the problem by recording audio in a soundproofed environment.
The films from Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab take a different route,
risking sonic chaos to bring us to our senses. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien
Castaing-Taylor's Sweetgrass (2009), Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki's Foreign Parts (2010), Libbie Cohn and Sniadecki's People's Park (2012) and Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's Leviathan (2012)
engage very different environmental and social conditions, but they're
unified in their phenomenological faith in reality. This aesthetic
attitude takes definite form in the sculptural approach to location
sound. As the lab's manager and sound editor and mixer for all of the
films mentioned above, Ernst Karel is by any measure a critical part of
the equation.
Karel's Cage-an understanding of contingency and experience as paths of creation naturally complements the SEL filmmakers' experimental recording strategies. His layered mixing suggests an ear open to multiple points of interest and alive to the ever-present possibility of musique concrète. The tangibility of the soundtracks isn't so much the product of delineating discrete signals as capturing the complex ways in which sounds interact with a particular environment and particular microphones. Thoreau was after this same phenomenon when he extolled echo as "an original sound . . . not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood." The SEL films may not be so indrawn, but their fascination with sound as a medium for space and social relations affords a comparable degree of intimacy.
Karel's activities extend far beyond his work on the SEL films. He is currently in post-production on the second installment of Hourly Directional Sound Recordings, a chance-determined quadraphonic installation created in collaboration with the artist Helen Mirra. His own audio-only projects include Swiss Mountain Transport System, a composition compiling location recordings of gondolas and funiculars, and Materials Recover System, a sonic exploration of a recycling plant in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Karel returned to this same space to record sound for Single Stream, a large-scale video installation project done in collaboration with Pawel Wojtasik and Toby Lee that will be featured in the lobby of the Museum of the Moving Image this spring. He was kind enough to break from setting up SEL's postproduction facilities to speak with me about his work in film.
How did you first come to Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab and begin working with filmmakers?
My background was in music, both in terms of what you would normally call music and also what you might call noise. I went to graduate school hoping to study cognitive anthropology or linguistic anthropology. I started thinking of signification in terms of language and its relation to thought, but before long I was thinking about the ways that non-linguistic sound does and does not signify because of my interest in music and sound. That led to me doing field work in India. One project involved looking at the way bell sounds function in the context of Hindu ritual in a particular temple in Tamilnadu. From there, I looked at the different roles of amplified sound in public city spaces—how they carve up social spaces and the connections between those amplified sounds and other sonic practices going on in the culture. I was making recordings, but at that time I thought of them primarily as illustrations for my academic writing. This dual background ultimately led me to the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Lucien [Castaing-Taylor] in particular was of the mind that it would be useful to have someone who thinks of sound first rather than image, in terms of training and helping people to be aware of that aspect of the work. I could bring this to bear, that sound should be one of the first things people think about before going out to record. Because that's really when you need to think about it—not afterwards.
Your work on the films coming out of the SEL is primarily in post-production mixing and editing, right?
Yes. For people who have been here for a while, perhaps I've also helped them to think about recording before they go out on a project. But I haven't actually gone and recorded sound with any of them.
What are some differences between your own recording project, where you're intimately familiar with the site, and the film projects where you're dealing with recordings from a place you haven't been?
It's an advantage, in a way, because you don't have your preconceptions about what it should sound like or what you think it sounds like. Your only reference point is what's actually coming through the speakers, so you're not adding your mental image of what was there. With that said, a lot of the [film] projects are done with sync sound, so you do at least see where it was recorded.
Mostly it is a lot of back and forth. I was really surprised when people writing about Sweetgrass would comment on the sound as being somehow remarkable. To me, it was as straightforward a way of dealing with sound as I could imagine. We weren't doing anything tricky. There are no effects. A lot of it is sync sound, but I think it is something like what you just said, where the sound is allowed to intrude upon what's going on more than might otherwise be the case. For a lot of documentaries, the sound is reined in. It's especially exaggerated when you have a voiceover. Whenever that voice comes in, the sound mysteriously vanishes or gets shifted way down. Sound becomes an optional component of the image when it can suddenly come down for no reason other than someone wants to talk over it.
The world itself is diminished.
In a way, yes. And that's obviously a different approach to moviemaking. But with Sweetgrass, there is plenty of voice and talking, and the way that's dealt with is essentially artificial. The voices are closely recorded with lavalier microphones, and there are conscious decisions about how deeply to enmesh those voices in the landscape or whether to let them come to the forefront. To a large extent, the idea was that there are a lot of animals on screen: some are humans and some are non-humans, so let's put them all together in the mix. You can't understand what a lot of the voices are saying.
Whereas most documentaries privilege intelligibility to the point of redundancy.
We could have easily made the voices intelligible. I could have put them right in the front [of the mix] even though the guy on the horse is 200 meters away. That does happen in the movie when there's that very long shot and he's cursing at all of the sheep.
In that case, it's almost uncanny to be hearing so close and seeing so far.
But then there are other times when the guy is on the horse, and we hardly understand him at all. The sound is buried in the mix, but we had it just as clearly.
Even if we could hear him perfectly, it's not as if he's speaking to the camera and saying, "This is what I mean when I say this or that." And this becomes so much more extreme in Leviathan. In the beginning the voices of the men working the boat sound like they're coming through a broken walkie-talkie.
Well yes, that was a compromised situation. There are a couple of shots where what we're seeing was recorded with good microphones. That opening shot, at least as far as what ended up in the movie, was recorded with the helmet-mounted cameras and their little built-in microphones. The cameras are in a waterproof enclosure, so you have this little mono microphone encased in plastic that records crunchy-sounding low bit rate audio. We had to filter those pretty dramatically so they didn't hurt your ears [laughs]. You can sort of still understand what people are saying, but it ends up sounding like it's coming through a few different layers, which it is. The way that sounds came through on those little GoPro microphones was incredibly unpredictable.
One of the interesting things about the film is the way it frames recording technology as allowing us access to places we couldn't otherwise go but at the same time confronting us with radical limitations of perception.
It wasn't only limitations: the technology also gave gifts. For instance, there were these weird resonances that would come through on these microphones. They're not a faithful representation of, say, the engine sound, but somehow—and I don't know exactly how this was happening—between the engine sounds, the camera enclosure, and the microphone itself, these weird resonances would emerge that seemed motivated by all of the above but not the direct result of any one of those things. We would exaggerate some of these emergent tones tones by using a filter to exaggerate a little peak frequency. There were a couple of shots where there would be a couple of frequencies that would be happening, and so I would exaggerate a different frequency in each channel to create an unsettled feeling.
Did the fact that many of these sounds emerged from the unpredictable interaction of technology and environment, without the same degree of intentionality on the part of the filmmakers, change the nature of the collaboration?
Lucien and Véréna [Paravel] did a huge amount of work on the sound while they were editing the video. A big part of what I did was going through their other recordings. There were a lot of sources for sounds based on other footage that wasn't being used, as well as sound recordings they made just walking around the boat with microphones. Even with the GoPro shots, there are a lot of sounds from those other recordings. It was a matter of going through and finding similar kinds of processes, whether it's cutting the fish or the chains clanging or the nets being hauled up.
Working on these films, do you think of yourself as occupying an intermediary position between the filmmakers and audience? Are you conceiving of a listener differently than you would for a sound-only piece?
With something destined for the cinema, you know that the conditions in which people will be hearing the piece are relatively predictable. When you're composing a sound piece that's going to end up on a CD, people will be listening in unpredictable conditions. I hadn't really thought of the films in the way that you put it, in terms of whether I'm looking out for the audience or the makers. In the case of Leviathan, one thing that was going on with the piece was that they had a very intense and pretty unpleasant time on the boat. So in part we were trying to create an intense and unpleasant experience in the theater. I'm not sure for whose benefit that is.
It's just integral to what it is.
Usually you're not trying to make it unpleasant, and we weren't really trying to make it unpleasant, but then again I've done a lot of stuff in my own sound work that's loud and harsh and intense. That feeling of being disrupted or disturbed from your normal life can be a useful one.
And the boat would be a pretty hellish environment for Schafer for those reasons. He would want to hear the seagulls when the camera comes above the water, but they're being completely drowned out by the ship's engine.
Even in something like Foreign Parts, there are so many different potential points of aural interest, almost like the equivalent of deep focus in photography.
Yeah, and when you ask yourself, "What is the subject here?" it's not so easy. Maybe that's the virtue of a lo-fi environment: there isn't a clear signal to pick out against everything else that's background. Everything is foreground. Everything is worthy of your attention, and it's jostling to get your attention. It's interesting when you can do something like deep focus with sound, but it can easily get messy. One thing that people who are just starting location recording find out when they bring their recordings home is that there are always more sounds than you remembered. You're listening for that one sound that you thought you were recording, and it turns out that there are a million other sounds going on. I think the conventional strategy for mixing for picture is to artificially create a foreground/background situation with sound. Obviously, dialogue is the main example of that. But if you allow there to be multiple competing foregrounds, it shifts the burden onto the viewer or listener to find their own way.
But as you say, at a certain point it's just a mess. Where is that line?
With Leviathan in particular it gets messy because they're not all high-resolution sounds. We were working with these fuzzy, distorted sounds, but at the same time they're also very detailed. That distortion is a very detailed distortion on that frequency response of those microphones, so you can work with that. It's not realism anymore, but you still have high-resolution sounds even though they're sounds of distortion.
Is there any new technology for recording sound that's especially exciting to you?
Not really. You know, sound recording technology doesn't really change that much. In a way things took a step backwards in the last year or two when people started shooting with DSLR cameras to record video with them because those don't record sound well. When people think more and more about sound before going out to shoot, it allows for more possibilities to do more interesting things with 5.1 or surround sound, and that's always fun because it expands the space of viewing more than the sound is just coming from the front of the room.
Like with People's Park?
Yes, that was interesting. It's shot in about the most straightforward way possible—just the single shot? Just the single shot: you turn on the camera, move around, and press stop. All the sound was sync with the addition of a couple cricket sounds here and there. When I first started talking with [J.P Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn] about the sound, I thought that it would be simple stereo sound, a very pure, straightforward kind of approach. They recorded with three microphones. One was a shotgun mic facing forward, and the other two were DSM microphones, which are these pseudo-binaural microphones that are worn on the side of the head. I have a 5.1 studio, so when I started listening to what they recorded I put the center mic in the center channel and the DSM mics left and right. Then I pulled the DSM mics back so that they were coming halfway between the front and the rear, and suddenly the whole space opened way up. Sounds that were not visible onscreen began to sound like they were coming from behind. Your brain is doing a lot of this work. If you're not seeing anything onscreen for a sound, your brain assigns it a place in that space. So suddenly sounds were moving from front to back and vice versa even though it was only the two microphones. That was a revelation, especially combined with that particular image and that particular way of moving through the space. It became clear that the film had to be a 5.1 soundtrack.
The sound is especially tangible in that case, and it also has a distinct life from the image. I was struck by how often it persists beyond what we can see.
Very much so. You're hearing stuff from the distance, and then you're finally getting closer to it. And sometimes you never get close: you hear it in the distance for a while, and that's it. It was all so unexpectedly rich.
People's Park
Sound is channeled rather than framed: this basic fact is fundamental
to SEL's underlying goal of anthropology by other means—in a word,
embodiment. Before Sweetgrass is about the American pastoral on its last legs, it is the sound of sheep and shears and men muttering to themselves. Before Foreign Parts is
about eminent domain and a neighborhood's complex network of relations,
it is the multidirectional soundscape of shouting, heavy machinery, the
elevated subway, planes overhead, and the different sounds of the
pocked road depending on the season. Before People's Park is
about the interpolations of leisure and restiveness in China's public
spaces, it is about the way sound ropes off invisible boundaries in the
titular park. As for Leviathan (which opens in New York on March 1), let us simply say that
the keening soundtrack is the ocean upon which the images bob, pitch,
and drown. The film's extraordinary power as a work of expanded
cinema—to say nothing of its sublime apprehension of a reality
stretching the limits of human consciousness—flows from the soundtrack's
gasping, clanging, groaning unrest.Karel's Cage-an understanding of contingency and experience as paths of creation naturally complements the SEL filmmakers' experimental recording strategies. His layered mixing suggests an ear open to multiple points of interest and alive to the ever-present possibility of musique concrète. The tangibility of the soundtracks isn't so much the product of delineating discrete signals as capturing the complex ways in which sounds interact with a particular environment and particular microphones. Thoreau was after this same phenomenon when he extolled echo as "an original sound . . . not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood." The SEL films may not be so indrawn, but their fascination with sound as a medium for space and social relations affords a comparable degree of intimacy.
Karel's activities extend far beyond his work on the SEL films. He is currently in post-production on the second installment of Hourly Directional Sound Recordings, a chance-determined quadraphonic installation created in collaboration with the artist Helen Mirra. His own audio-only projects include Swiss Mountain Transport System, a composition compiling location recordings of gondolas and funiculars, and Materials Recover System, a sonic exploration of a recycling plant in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Karel returned to this same space to record sound for Single Stream, a large-scale video installation project done in collaboration with Pawel Wojtasik and Toby Lee that will be featured in the lobby of the Museum of the Moving Image this spring. He was kind enough to break from setting up SEL's postproduction facilities to speak with me about his work in film.
How did you first come to Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab and begin working with filmmakers?
My background was in music, both in terms of what you would normally call music and also what you might call noise. I went to graduate school hoping to study cognitive anthropology or linguistic anthropology. I started thinking of signification in terms of language and its relation to thought, but before long I was thinking about the ways that non-linguistic sound does and does not signify because of my interest in music and sound. That led to me doing field work in India. One project involved looking at the way bell sounds function in the context of Hindu ritual in a particular temple in Tamilnadu. From there, I looked at the different roles of amplified sound in public city spaces—how they carve up social spaces and the connections between those amplified sounds and other sonic practices going on in the culture. I was making recordings, but at that time I thought of them primarily as illustrations for my academic writing. This dual background ultimately led me to the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Lucien [Castaing-Taylor] in particular was of the mind that it would be useful to have someone who thinks of sound first rather than image, in terms of training and helping people to be aware of that aspect of the work. I could bring this to bear, that sound should be one of the first things people think about before going out to record. Because that's really when you need to think about it—not afterwards.
Your work on the films coming out of the SEL is primarily in post-production mixing and editing, right?
Yes. For people who have been here for a while, perhaps I've also helped them to think about recording before they go out on a project. But I haven't actually gone and recorded sound with any of them.
What are some differences between your own recording project, where you're intimately familiar with the site, and the film projects where you're dealing with recordings from a place you haven't been?
It's an advantage, in a way, because you don't have your preconceptions about what it should sound like or what you think it sounds like. Your only reference point is what's actually coming through the speakers, so you're not adding your mental image of what was there. With that said, a lot of the [film] projects are done with sync sound, so you do at least see where it was recorded.
Sweetgrass
Something that sets the SEL films apart from most documentaries is
the way the sound is allowed to exceed the image. Can you speak a
little more about how you actually go about processing the sounds
captured for the films? Are you working alone or constantly going back
and forth with the filmmakers? Mostly it is a lot of back and forth. I was really surprised when people writing about Sweetgrass would comment on the sound as being somehow remarkable. To me, it was as straightforward a way of dealing with sound as I could imagine. We weren't doing anything tricky. There are no effects. A lot of it is sync sound, but I think it is something like what you just said, where the sound is allowed to intrude upon what's going on more than might otherwise be the case. For a lot of documentaries, the sound is reined in. It's especially exaggerated when you have a voiceover. Whenever that voice comes in, the sound mysteriously vanishes or gets shifted way down. Sound becomes an optional component of the image when it can suddenly come down for no reason other than someone wants to talk over it.
The world itself is diminished.
In a way, yes. And that's obviously a different approach to moviemaking. But with Sweetgrass, there is plenty of voice and talking, and the way that's dealt with is essentially artificial. The voices are closely recorded with lavalier microphones, and there are conscious decisions about how deeply to enmesh those voices in the landscape or whether to let them come to the forefront. To a large extent, the idea was that there are a lot of animals on screen: some are humans and some are non-humans, so let's put them all together in the mix. You can't understand what a lot of the voices are saying.
Whereas most documentaries privilege intelligibility to the point of redundancy.
We could have easily made the voices intelligible. I could have put them right in the front [of the mix] even though the guy on the horse is 200 meters away. That does happen in the movie when there's that very long shot and he's cursing at all of the sheep.
In that case, it's almost uncanny to be hearing so close and seeing so far.
But then there are other times when the guy is on the horse, and we hardly understand him at all. The sound is buried in the mix, but we had it just as clearly.
Even if we could hear him perfectly, it's not as if he's speaking to the camera and saying, "This is what I mean when I say this or that." And this becomes so much more extreme in Leviathan. In the beginning the voices of the men working the boat sound like they're coming through a broken walkie-talkie.
Well yes, that was a compromised situation. There are a couple of shots where what we're seeing was recorded with good microphones. That opening shot, at least as far as what ended up in the movie, was recorded with the helmet-mounted cameras and their little built-in microphones. The cameras are in a waterproof enclosure, so you have this little mono microphone encased in plastic that records crunchy-sounding low bit rate audio. We had to filter those pretty dramatically so they didn't hurt your ears [laughs]. You can sort of still understand what people are saying, but it ends up sounding like it's coming through a few different layers, which it is. The way that sounds came through on those little GoPro microphones was incredibly unpredictable.
One of the interesting things about the film is the way it frames recording technology as allowing us access to places we couldn't otherwise go but at the same time confronting us with radical limitations of perception.
It wasn't only limitations: the technology also gave gifts. For instance, there were these weird resonances that would come through on these microphones. They're not a faithful representation of, say, the engine sound, but somehow—and I don't know exactly how this was happening—between the engine sounds, the camera enclosure, and the microphone itself, these weird resonances would emerge that seemed motivated by all of the above but not the direct result of any one of those things. We would exaggerate some of these emergent tones tones by using a filter to exaggerate a little peak frequency. There were a couple of shots where there would be a couple of frequencies that would be happening, and so I would exaggerate a different frequency in each channel to create an unsettled feeling.
Did the fact that many of these sounds emerged from the unpredictable interaction of technology and environment, without the same degree of intentionality on the part of the filmmakers, change the nature of the collaboration?
Lucien and Véréna [Paravel] did a huge amount of work on the sound while they were editing the video. A big part of what I did was going through their other recordings. There were a lot of sources for sounds based on other footage that wasn't being used, as well as sound recordings they made just walking around the boat with microphones. Even with the GoPro shots, there are a lot of sounds from those other recordings. It was a matter of going through and finding similar kinds of processes, whether it's cutting the fish or the chains clanging or the nets being hauled up.
Working on these films, do you think of yourself as occupying an intermediary position between the filmmakers and audience? Are you conceiving of a listener differently than you would for a sound-only piece?
With something destined for the cinema, you know that the conditions in which people will be hearing the piece are relatively predictable. When you're composing a sound piece that's going to end up on a CD, people will be listening in unpredictable conditions. I hadn't really thought of the films in the way that you put it, in terms of whether I'm looking out for the audience or the makers. In the case of Leviathan, one thing that was going on with the piece was that they had a very intense and pretty unpleasant time on the boat. So in part we were trying to create an intense and unpleasant experience in the theater. I'm not sure for whose benefit that is.
It's just integral to what it is.
Usually you're not trying to make it unpleasant, and we weren't really trying to make it unpleasant, but then again I've done a lot of stuff in my own sound work that's loud and harsh and intense. That feeling of being disrupted or disturbed from your normal life can be a useful one.
Leviathan
It reminds of the distinction that R. Murray Schafer makes between
high-fidelity landscapes and low-fidelity landscapes, which in turn
reflects some of the dualities of rural and urban, nature and machine
that Leviathan just explodes. Schafer's argument rests on
the idea of a clear signal: you're able to pick out the thing you're
supposed to be listening for in the high-fidelity landscape. The
distinction between signal and noise isn't so clear in the Sensory
Ethnography Lab films. And the boat would be a pretty hellish environment for Schafer for those reasons. He would want to hear the seagulls when the camera comes above the water, but they're being completely drowned out by the ship's engine.
Even in something like Foreign Parts, there are so many different potential points of aural interest, almost like the equivalent of deep focus in photography.
Yeah, and when you ask yourself, "What is the subject here?" it's not so easy. Maybe that's the virtue of a lo-fi environment: there isn't a clear signal to pick out against everything else that's background. Everything is foreground. Everything is worthy of your attention, and it's jostling to get your attention. It's interesting when you can do something like deep focus with sound, but it can easily get messy. One thing that people who are just starting location recording find out when they bring their recordings home is that there are always more sounds than you remembered. You're listening for that one sound that you thought you were recording, and it turns out that there are a million other sounds going on. I think the conventional strategy for mixing for picture is to artificially create a foreground/background situation with sound. Obviously, dialogue is the main example of that. But if you allow there to be multiple competing foregrounds, it shifts the burden onto the viewer or listener to find their own way.
But as you say, at a certain point it's just a mess. Where is that line?
With Leviathan in particular it gets messy because they're not all high-resolution sounds. We were working with these fuzzy, distorted sounds, but at the same time they're also very detailed. That distortion is a very detailed distortion on that frequency response of those microphones, so you can work with that. It's not realism anymore, but you still have high-resolution sounds even though they're sounds of distortion.
Is there any new technology for recording sound that's especially exciting to you?
Not really. You know, sound recording technology doesn't really change that much. In a way things took a step backwards in the last year or two when people started shooting with DSLR cameras to record video with them because those don't record sound well. When people think more and more about sound before going out to shoot, it allows for more possibilities to do more interesting things with 5.1 or surround sound, and that's always fun because it expands the space of viewing more than the sound is just coming from the front of the room.
Like with People's Park?
Yes, that was interesting. It's shot in about the most straightforward way possible—just the single shot? Just the single shot: you turn on the camera, move around, and press stop. All the sound was sync with the addition of a couple cricket sounds here and there. When I first started talking with [J.P Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn] about the sound, I thought that it would be simple stereo sound, a very pure, straightforward kind of approach. They recorded with three microphones. One was a shotgun mic facing forward, and the other two were DSM microphones, which are these pseudo-binaural microphones that are worn on the side of the head. I have a 5.1 studio, so when I started listening to what they recorded I put the center mic in the center channel and the DSM mics left and right. Then I pulled the DSM mics back so that they were coming halfway between the front and the rear, and suddenly the whole space opened way up. Sounds that were not visible onscreen began to sound like they were coming from behind. Your brain is doing a lot of this work. If you're not seeing anything onscreen for a sound, your brain assigns it a place in that space. So suddenly sounds were moving from front to back and vice versa even though it was only the two microphones. That was a revelation, especially combined with that particular image and that particular way of moving through the space. It became clear that the film had to be a 5.1 soundtrack.
The sound is especially tangible in that case, and it also has a distinct life from the image. I was struck by how often it persists beyond what we can see.
Very much so. You're hearing stuff from the distance, and then you're finally getting closer to it. And sometimes you never get close: you hear it in the distance for a while, and that's it. It was all so unexpectedly rich.
The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard supports innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography that deploy original media practices to explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence, and the aesthetics and ontology of the natural world. Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the human sciences, and the humanities, works produced in the SEL encourage attention to the many dimensions of life and the world that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone.
Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the SEL provides an academic and institutional context for the development of creative work and research that is itself constitutively visual or acoustic — conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems — and which may thus complement the human sciences’ and humanities’ traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word. It opposes the conventions of visual anthropology that mimic the discursive inclinations of its mother discipline, those of documentary that mimic those of broadcast journalism, and those of art that are not deeply infused with the real.
A unique collaboration between the Departments of Anthropology and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, and the École des arts politiques at Sciences Po in Paris, the instruction offered through the SEL in film, video, phonography, and photography, is distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it is practice-based and promotes experimentation with culturally-inflected, largely nonfiction image-making. The SEL supports a PhD program in Media Anthropology, and a PhD Secondary Field in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Critical Media Practice, for which Castaing-Taylor and Peter Galison serve as Directors of Graduate Studies. Its courses also serve as practice-based electives in the PhD Secondary Field in Film and Visual Studies.
02.22.11 Foreign Parts, a video by FSC fellow Véréna PARAVEL and Social Anth PhD student J.P. Sniadecki, wins the Best Film award at DocsBarcelona Film Festival, and plays for a week at MoMA, New York, March 10-16. Foreign Parts also has won the Prize for Best Film at Punto de Vista.
01.29.11The McGill Daily: "The Intelligence of the Senses: The movement to bring human experience into academia" by Megan Galeucia and Ariel Appel
01.20.11 Anthropology News, January 2011: Read "Aesthetic Experience and Applied Acoustemology: Blue Sky, White River Liner Notes" by Stephanie Spray (PhD candidate, Social Anthropology Program).12.06.10 J.P. Sniadecki wins the Prize for Most Innovative Film from the Sardinia International Ethnographic Film Festival for "Chaiqian/Demolition." The jury's official statement proclaimed: "A statement about observation, the photographic frame, and the qualities of digital photography that allow us to enter the world of Chinese migrant workers and the rapidly changing urban landscape of Chengdu; the deep phenomelogically informed style results in a detailed and sensuous ethnography."
11.29.10. Foreign Parts, a film by Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki (USA) wins 'Best Ethno-Anthropological Film' at the 51st Festival Dei Popoli "for its courage of questioning the traditional approach of anthropological research by choosing the U.S. as the object of its investigation. The desperate community living in the Willets Point junk-yard embodies the conflicts of the American Dream."
Featured Projects
| 2012 | ||
 Bedding Down Lucien Castaing-Taylor audio-video, 6 mins. A crepuscular pastoral. |  Coom Biddy Lucien Castaing-Taylor audio-video, 8 mins. Shear, v. To cut, divide, shear, shave. |  Leviathan Véréna Paravel Lucien Castaing-Taylor 35mm and DCP, 87 mins. www.leviathanfilm.org
In the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.
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People's Park
J.P. Sniadecki, Libbie Dina Cohn DCP, 75 mins.
A single-shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The film explores the dozens of moods, rhythms and pockets of performance coexisting in tight proximity within the park’s prismatic social space, capturing waltzing couples, mighty sycamores, karaoke singers, and buzzing cicadas. A sensory meditation on cinematic time and space, People’s Park offers a gaze at public interaction, leisure and self-expression in China.
|  Materials Recovery Facility Ernst Karel streaming audio, duration variable A sound work recorded at the materials recovery facility run by Casella Waste Systems, in the Charlestown area of northern Boston, which receives truckloads of commingled recyclables from surrounding municipalities and universities. Fed through the facility on a network of massive overlapping conveyor belts, the materials are separated for recycling using automated methods including trommels, disc screens, optical sensors, precisely directed blasts of compressed air, eddy currents, magnets, and a large staff of human workers, who manage much of the separation by hand. | |
| 2011 | ||
 Swiss Mountain Transport Systems Ernst Karel audio, 77:50
Swiss Mountain Transport Systems is an audio CD that consists of location recordings made during the summer and fall of 2008 of the various transport systems which are specific to mountainous terrain – gondolas (aerial cable cars), funiculars, and chairlifts – of different types, of different vintages, and accessing different elevations, in different parts of Switzerland. In this way the album is a sonic investigation of the integration of such technology into the Swiss social-geographical landscape. Recorded from within mostly enclosed mobile environments, this emergent music includes quasi-harmonic mechanical drones, intermittent percussiveness, and transient acoustic glimpses of a vast surrounding landscape inhabited by humans and other animals.
|  On Broadway Aryo Danusiri HDV, 62 min. www.ragam.orgA structural account of the cultural transformation of a mosque in a basement space in Manhattan, New York City. As suggested by the title, this film is 'a song' of transformational moments of space, identities and belief. Consisting of six long take shots, it starts with a relaxed conversation in the everyday life of an emptiness of a basement. Then it gradually becomes an event - an event of struggle. At the end, with a twist, it raises questions about the boundaries between the mundane and the spiritual, the politics and the everyday. Contact: danusiri [at] fas.harvard.edu | |
| 2010 | ||
 Foreign Parts Véréna Paravel and JP Sniadecki HD video, 81 min. A hidden enclave in the shadow of the New York Mets' new stadium, the neighborhood of Willets Point is an industrial zone fated for demolition. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops, lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for urban development. But Foreign Parts discovers a strange community where wrecks, refuse and recycling form a thriving commerce. Cars are stripped, sorted and cataloged by brand and part, then resold to an endless parade of drive-thru customers. Joe, the last original resident, rages and rallies through the street like a lost King Lear, trying to contest his imminent eviction. Two lovers, Sara and Luis, struggle for food and safety through the winter while living in an abandoned van. Julia, the homeless queen of the junkyard, exalts in her beatific visions of daily life among the forgotten. The film observes and captures the struggle of a contestes "eminent domain" neighborhood before its disappearance under the capitalization of New York's urban ecology. |  Heard Laboratories Ernst Karel audio, 79:00 A sonic ethnography of scientific research environments at Harvard University. The sounds of equipment, devices, and activities draw attention to the physical processes underlying scientific research, the work underway which provides a ground for our highly technologized society. In the name of human progress, enormous resources are devoted to and consumed by such activities, which are both hidden and taken for granted. Heard Laboratories brings this background to the fore. |  72 Hours John Hulsey An ongoing series of site-specific interventions that combines video projection with direct action to address the lived experience of foreclosure. |
 Hell Roaring Creek Lucien Castaing-Taylor audio-video, 20 mins.
An auroral pastoral.
|  The High Trail Lucien Castaing-Tayloraudio-video, 7 mins.
In the monumental American West, we are acoustic eavesdroppers on a man
petting his herding dog, while we are visual witnesses to the progress of their charges, as apparently infinite as Rabelais' "moutons de Panurge," across a mythic landscape. |  The Quick and the Dead / Moutons de PanurgeLucien Castaing-Taylor Four channel video installation Berlinale Forum, loop.
A commission by the Kino Arsenal to commemorate the four decades of the
Berlin International Film Festival Forum. |
 Trees Tropiques Alex Fattal
Trees Tropiques subtly explores the difficult issues that arise when the ethics of deforestation and the ethnographic encounter intersect. The vilm incisively poses the question: "Who has the right to cut... both trees and film footage?" Seemingly an observational ethnographic immersion in life along the waterways where the sweet water of the Amazon basin mixes with the salty Atlantic Ocean, the film is suddenly interrupted by questions about the ethics of including images of deforestation, which could land the protagonist in trouble with Brazil's environmental police. The editing waxes experimental, prompting the viewer to revisit editorial decisions, while bringing the family being filmed into the editorial decision-making fold. The vilm ruminates on the global ethics of deforestation as it illustrates the relationship of deforestation to the harvesting of açai, Brazil's latest boom crop that is now a key ingredient of popular energy drinks and a staple of Oprah's diet. Açai is harvested by ascending into the tops of skinny palm trees, offering stunning visuals. The penultimate scene unexpectedly and evocatively ties the themes together in an act of animal acrobatics, defying the audience's expectations. The ecological connections between waterways, flora, fauna, and humanity subtly intertwine to make viewers contemplate all that we are losing in the continual deforestation of the Amazon as well as the multiple levels of complicity in that loss.
|  The Yellow Bank JP Sniadecki
Watching, waiting, and traversing: a portrait of Shanghai at the confluence of tempestuous weather, looming architecture, and murky waterways during a total solar eclipse.
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| 2009 | ||
 As Long As There's Breath Stephanie Spray HD video, 55 min. As Long as There’s Breath depicts a Nepali family’s struggles for cohesion despite everyday travails and the absence of a beloved son. |  Sweetgrass Ilisa Barbash Lucien Castaing-Taylor 35mm, 101 min. An unsentimental elegy to the American West, “Sweetgrass” follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed. | |
 Terrace of the Sea Diana Allan Terrace of the Sea (Jal el Bahar) was shot in 2008 in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin gathering established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in south Lebanon. Structured around a collection of family photographs taken over three generations, the vilm engages with the historical experience of this community by focusing on their precarious relationship with the environment, and in particular on the role that the sea plays in their lives.
Terrace of the Sea examines the experiences of the Ibrahim family – not simply through the prism of nationalist politics, but also through their relationship to work and to the physical environment. More broadly, it is a meditation on the process of memory and on the distances between photography and film, land and sea and – between seeing and being seen.
|  7 Queens Véréna Paravel 22 min.
Recorded during an aimless extended (anti)-ethnographic walk beneath the elevated tracks of the #7 subway line in NYC, 7 Queens wanders in the fragile zone of fleeting relations. Through a series of spontaneous interactions, this piece experiment with boundaries and physical thresholds, and captures evanescent forms of intimacy through random, and sometimes aborted encounters.
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| 2008 | ||
 Chaiqian (Demolition) J P Sniadecki video, 62 min. A portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemeral relationships in the center of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. Contact: jpsniad [at] fas.harvard.edu |  Monsoon-Reflections Stephanie Spray video, 22 min. Drawing its title from a poem by Lekhnath Paudyal, who depicts the monsoon season as sublime and blissful, this video focuses instead on the melancholy and grit of two female Nepali field hands as they carry out their monsoon routines in Lekhnath, Nepal. The video is a sensorial riposte to Paudyal's idealistic depiction of the monsoon as "joyous from start to finish," by means of reflection on labor, gender, and fleeting pleasures in rural Nepal. Contact: sspray [at] fas.harvard.edu |  Sound Safari: Bath, Maine Sharon Lockhart, Ernst Karel, et al audio, 50:30 Under the direction of Sharon Lockhart, a group of Harvard students traveled to Bath, Maine, for two nights and two days of field recording, working with composer Ernst Karel to craft this audio documentary. Places recorded included a fishing vessel outside of town, a high school band rehearsal, the inside of a police car, the town's solid waste facility, a conversation with an Iraq war veteran working out in the gym, and a nursery school classroom, among many others. The work will be presented in conjunction with Lockhart's visit to the Harvard Film Archive for two evenings of screenings, including "Lunch Break" and "Exit", which were also realized with the support of the FSC. |
| 2007 | ||
 Kale and Kale Stephanie Spray video, 50 min. Kale and Kale is an observational work that explores the subtle everyday interactions and relationships among an uncle and nephew, both nicknamed “Kale,” or “black one,” and their families in rural Nepal. The roles they play in the village, with their families, and outside of the village are gradually revealed by way of discrete vignettes. Through the pacing of the scenes and the length of shots, this ethnographic video is also a depiction of time and its passing in rural Nepal. The work invites the viewer to engage unhurriedly and sensorially with its subjects and their environment. Contact: sspray [at] fas.harvard.edu |  Luchando Noelle Stout video, 67 min. Luchando follows a day in the life of four Cuban hustlers—a travesti, a lesbiana, and two pingueros—who set out to resolve their touching and at-times humorous predicaments in Havana’s gay underground. Luchando takes place in the last days of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a late-socialist nation schizophrenically torn between the ideals of socialist equality and a rapidly growing division between the rich and poor. The film’s title 'luchando' has historically meant the fight for Cuba’s socialist revolution, but has become a slang term that hustlers use to describe their sexual encounters with clients. Shot in verite style over the course of a year, Luchando refuses sensationalism and instead emphasizes the subjective and experiential qualities of everyday life. The film explores the ambiguity of cultural categories such as 'homosexual' and 'hustler' that are continually renegotiated by the film’s subjects. Through a long-term, intimate engagement with the characters Luchando humanizes the sex trade in Havana by presenting characters who are at once vulnerable and in-control, affectionate and opportunistic, and whose ultimate strength comes from the bonds they share with one another. |  Songhua JP Sniadecki video, 28 min. Songhua depicts the intimate and complex relationship between Harbin residents and their “mother river," the Songhua in northeastern China. By attending to the everyday activities of leisure and labor unfolding along the banks and promenade, this nonfiction video also explores the interface between aesthetics and ethnography as it addresses environmental crisis within a major waterway of China. Contact: jpsniad [at] fas.harvard.edu |
 Still Life Diana Keown Allan video, 25 min. www.nakba-archive.org Still Life examines the role that a series of personal photos that survived the 1948 displacement play in the life of Said, an elderly Palestinian from Acre now living in exile in Lebanon. The importance of preserving these intimate remnants of a history now largely invisible within a larger global frame of reference cannot be underestimated as Palestine as a historical signifier is in danger of losing it’s signified. Palestine as it was before 1948 has ceased to exist; Acre is no longer a Palestinian port and the other histories of this city now circulate as highly personal, scattered memories. The photographs, around which this piece is structured, are not simply souvenirs or representations, but for their owner function as imprints of Palestine that still carry material traces of places and people from the past within them. For Said, they have become objects of affective transference, evoking memories that remain crucial to his present sense of self––sacred objects that record another history of relation and belonging. Still Life is the first segment of a video triptych that explores the different ways in which memory is being mediated among Palestinians in Lebanon. Contact: dallan [at] fas.harvard.edu | ||
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