Initially developed as a sports camera by amateur surfers that aspired to become professionals and desired to capture their actions on the crashing waves more closely, the GoPro camera has stimulated a previously unknown degree of proximity between the filming object and its subject. Still often used in the world of sports, the fisheyed POV shots of the GoPro camera also mirror the highly individualized and capitalized mode of contemporary media production where every “content creator” is the hero in their own video productions — no wonder the camera has also become a mainstay in internet pornography. 

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For all these somewhat predictable and industrialized applications of the semi-revolutionary cameras, there are also much more thought-provoking and subversive examples. One of them being Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), made under The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), Harvards’ experimental laboratory that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. Employing multiple GoPro’s to capture the various stages of the North-American fishing industry, Leviathan examines the shifting relationship between man, nature and labor. The result is a deeply immersive, harrowing work that ventures into the belly of the beast. Reimagining the most nightmarish sequences of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Leviathan attains its own literary and painterly qualities due to the visual imperfections of the GoPro camera chips, whose digital artifacts become an integral part of the film’s textures. 

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Title: Leviathan | Directed by: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel | Year: 2012 | Runtime: 87 min

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About the programme: Which Way Is Up? is a recurring film series curated by film critic Hugo Emmerzael, offering critiques and reflections on our postmodern, late capitalist hellworld through the lens of digital film — from mainstream blockbusters to experimental cinema. 

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