In Week 5, I attended Professor Richard Baxtrom’s lecture, and although I learned more about anthropology and anthropology-related documentaries such as Sweetgrass during this lecture, I would like to share my views on Leviathan, which is a documentary about Sensory ethnography. “In lieu of this discursivity or discussivity, sensory ethnography offers a cinema of sensuous plenitude and perceptual richness, embodied experience, and visceral immediacy.” (Pavsek, 2015)

In this work, which uses a GoPro as a photographic device, the rhythm of the footage often changes to follow the rhythm of the waves.  “Through- out the film, its naturalism is made explicit through the repeated swooping of the camera up from the depths of the sea, which runs parallel to the violence of extract- ing all manner of sea life from these depths, onto the harsh, metallic-chaotic surface of the ship’s deck.” (Baxstrom and Meyers, 2018) There is no denying that some of the scenes represent blood and violence. （Figure 1）Just as Baxstrom and Meyers (2018) mentioned, this work lets the audience directly plunge into some scenes with overwhelming, roaring and sometimes disgusting sounds of the documentary. This movie allowed me to see an experience I had never experienced before. It allowed me to see the work of fishermen from a stranger’s perspective, but I involuntarily put myself into it. To be honest, when I watched some of the bloody scenes in this documentary, such as the scene of killing fish, I personally felt discomfort, which came from these real and cruel clips.

 Figure 1 Image from Leviathan

At the same time, these real and cruel clips let me feel the relationship between human beings and species and nature. In front of the fish, fishermen play the role of the abuser. They kill fish to get food and pay. However, from the perspective of human beings, the working environment of commercial fisheries is difficult and unstable, which makes human beings seem to become weak in front of the sea because of the mystery and choppy sea. Is that how we relate to the world? Human beings profit from nature, but also to maintain the respect and love of nature. There is no doubt that this is a thoughtful documentary.

Besides, the video below is a review of it I found on Youtube, and I agree with some of his points. Thanks for reading.