Leviathan – Centro Luigi Pecci
France, UK, USA, 2012, 85'
Filmed in the same waters crossed by the whaleboat Pequod chasing Moby Dick in Melville’s novel, Leviathan is the result of Sensory Ethnography Lab’s radical project, i.e., making a film that captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. The fishing practice is filmed by GoPro cameras that dizzyingly plunge into the depths of the sea and jump up the top of the boat, decentralizing the no-longer-human gaze to immerse the audience into gigantic, indomitable, and sublime nature.
Leviathan does not feign three-dimensionality but finds it in the whirling frenzy of the shots, only apparently at the mercy of natural forces. Shying away from all categorization, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel pursue a conception of the image that manages to eschew all conventional relationships to representation, time, and space. The cosmic, powerful, and dark portrayal of one of the most ancient challenges of humankind is also an environmental parable in which the sea menaces to take revenge on humanity, one that we should heed, now more than ever.
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 12 Nov 2022
- Time: 12:00
Location
- Centro Pecci - Viale della Repubblica, 277, 59100 Prato
Organizer
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Verena Paravel e Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor collaborate as visual anthropologists in the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, Harvard University. Their works joined the permanent collections of museums such as the MoMa of New York and the British Museum, and has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of New York, the Centre Pompidou and Berlin Kunsthalle. Their first feature-length together, Leviathan (2012), received the FIPRESCI Award at Locarno Film Festival in 2012. Somniloquies (2016), presented at Berlinale in 2017, was commissioned by documenta 14, along with with Commensal (2017). In 2018 Caniba (2017) won the Special Jury Award at the 74th Venice Film Festival among many other awards. The Fabric of the Human Body (2022), their fourth film, has been selected for the Directors’ Fortnight of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
