Leviathan and Sweetgrass

When I watched Leviathan and Sweetgrass, I was bored at first, and I felt physically and mentally uncomfortable while I was forcing myself to watch them. I only watched Leviathan at home on my laptop. The film showed at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2013. It was about ten years ago, and that’s when the film was was basically it hadn’t been widely released, but it was about to be widely released. Imagine the audience sitting in a movie theater watching a movie at that time, the scene and the sound overwhelmed the audience, the feeling must be very strong.

I realized why I’m uncomfortable, it’s because of violence. There’s kind of naturalized violence that runs through these films that I think requires us to think about it. However, the objects themselves or the works themselves seem to radically resist the effort to think them through or to speak nearby. It’s the same when I watched Sweetgrass. The film slowly begins to show us a psychic violence, a clear violence, having to deal with sheep, having to deal with bears, having to deal with loneliness and isolation.

Leviathan works as a cinematic object relies explicitly on the concept of the ‘emotive formula,’ a series of emotionally charged visual tropes dependent for their power upon their relative consistency through time. The “emotive formula” is a way of conceptualizing the irruptive, violent force of a gesture, an expression, a movement that is both infused with passion and, in its perception, in turn produces a sensuous, passionate movement in the receiver. The concept allows audience to better understand overwhelmingly singular works like Leviathan or Sweetgrass, composed of feelings and impressions.