From Tribes to Trawlers: Leviathan (2012) and the Sensory/Aesthetic Turn in Ethnographic Film

Leviathan (2012, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel) is an extraordinarily visceral feature length non-fiction film produced by the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) that drops the viewer right into the heart of life on board a commercial fishing vessel. According to a statement on their website the aim of the SEL is to ‘support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence.’ With Leviathan the filmmakers have successfully created an immersive aesthetic-sensual work that conveys a very strong sense of the material, physical nature of the environment it depicts. This paper offers a brief history of the use of film in anthropology, tracing the developments and debates in this unique discipline that have led to this interest in exploring and representing the ‘affective fabric of human existence’ through a visual medium, before moving on to a close analysis of the film itself through the lens of recent work by writers such as Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks and Jennifer Barker. The work of Laura Marks in particular, and her theory of ‘haptic visuality’, provides the theoretical underpinning for an analysis of Leviathan that emphasises the tactile, multisensory properties of the film and the implications this has for the film's status as a work of ethnographic inquiry.