Leviathan and the Entangled Lives of Species

‘Spectacular’ is an understatement for what Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel achieved with their impression of life on a fishing boat setting out across the North Atlantic Ocean to fish in the exact location where Melville’s crazed captain Ahab pursued the white whale Moby Dick.

Raw poetry

The anthropologically trained pair of artists attached a dozen small GoPro cameras to both boat and crew. From the resulting hours of footage, the makers edited together an impression in raw poetry of life onboard a fishing vessel, showing the crew, the fish, the gulls and the waves all from an equal perspective.

The film premièred at the Locarno film festival in 2012, winning the international film critics’ FIPRESCI Prize ahead of a glorious run through countless festivals.

Special introduction

Preceded by a lecture (20') by Mark Westmoreland, Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology at ReCNTR / Leiden University and co-editor of a special issue on Leviathan for the journal Visual Anthropology Review. He will give an extensive introduction to Leviathan, a film he describes as an 'experimental post-humanist study of commercial fishing in the North Sea'.

Presented in collaboration with ReCNTR, Leiden University.