For the official version of record, see here:
Simpson, M. (2025). Visceral, Abstract: Labors of Looking. Media Theory, 9(1), 117–142. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i1.1167
Visceral, Abstract: Labors of Looking
MARK SIMPSON
University of Alberta, CANADA
Abstract
In what ways, to what ends, and with what violent consequences does the offshore mediate the onshore in late capitalism? This question is the (silent) spur for the essay that follows. In it I consider the interimplicated violences of labor and mediation in two contemporary maritime films: Leviathan (2012), about commercial fishing off the New England coast, and The Forgotten Space (2010), about the global shipping industry. My analysis juxtaposes the immersive aesthetic on view in Leviathan with the dialectical dilation offered in The Forgotten Space — two perspectives that, likewise modulating the visceral and the abstract, nonetheless constitute importantly distinct forms of materialist commitment. Despite such differences, both films connect or indeed mediate ocean-work and camera-work as practices in order to foreground, provocatively, labors of looking — the work involved in what Jonathan Beller terms “value-producing human attention” (2006: 4) — and thus manage to capture the arduous interchange of material processes (manufacture and circulation) with supposedly immaterial ones (attention and affect) in late capitalist life.
Keywords
Oceans, Rendering, Containerization, Materialism, Late Capitalism, Documentary Film
If there is a single object that can be said to embody the disavowal implicit in the transnational bourgeoisie’s fantasy of a world of wealth without workers, a world of uninhibited flows, it is this: the container, the very coffin of remote labor power. And like the table in Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism, the coffin has learned to dance.
— Allan Sekula, Fish Story
— Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons
Logistics remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the movement of things. And the transport of things remains, as ever, logistics’ unrealizable ambition.
On 23 March 2021, the container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, becoming stuck and, for six days, jamming the circuits of global trade. In a world still gripped by the Covid pandemic and increasingly accustomed to the remote delivery of pretty much everything, the event proved as unnerving as disruptive. The story dominated the headlines, subject to voluminous coverage in news reports, editorials, and visual guides: supply-chain blockage as a type of slow-roiling violence — and a generative, profitable source of media spectacle.[1]
The Ever Given’s accident illustrates by contrast how, to quote Jennifer Wenzel, “well-functioning infrastructure enables and makes things happen, but the iteration of that enabling and happening is smoothed out and effaced into nonevent: the normality of noninterruption, good service, strong signal, ‘nothing happening’” (Wenzel, 2022: 170). The six-day clogging of the Suez Canal brought into visibility onshore those logistical operations ordinarily conducted (and obscured) offshore, whether actually or conceptually or both. In so doing, it supplied a vividly literal reminder of what Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás call “the creative destruction that accompanies the reproduction of a social system like capitalism in its interaction with a natural force like the sea” (Campling and Colás, 2021: 2).
The dynamics that characterize the episode of the Ever Given — labor, media, mediation; exceptional disruption and everyday violence; circulation and blockage; concretion and abstraction; visibility and invisibility — animate every operation, systemic or indeed ever given, of capitalism today. In what follows I analyze these dynamics in two recent maritime films: Leviathan, a 2012 documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel about commercial fishing off the New England coast; and The Forgotten Space, a 2010 documentary by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch about the global shipping industry. Both films enable and particularize what Hester Blum calls “attentive[ness] to the material conditions and praxis of the maritime world” (Blum, 2010: 670). Yet the forms of materiality on view — and the types of materialism on offer — differ significantly, with consequences for the perspectives composed by each film in making visible the workings of ordinarily obscured maritime spaces. Whereas Leviathan features a brutally immersive aesthetic, The Forgotten Space employs a dilational dialectic attuned to the vicious contradictions of capital. Connecting these rival approaches to documentary practice, with their distinct takes on the imbrication of the visceral and the abstract, is a shared concern with the labor of looking alongside the labors of fishing or shipping: with the compound violences of maritime-work and camera-work as they mediate the interchange between material processes (manufacture and circulation) and supposedly immaterial ones (attention and affect) under contemporary capitalism.
I. Immersions
Introducing a 2010 PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) forum on oceanic studies, Patricia Yaeger notes the proliferation of liquid tropes in the global present in order to venture a telling distinction: “This rush of aqueous metaphors lends materiality to a world that becomes more ethereal every day … But our era’s airborne imaginary should not mask the real materiality on which late capitalism is based: Earth’s commerce still depends on oceans” (Yaeger, 2010: 523). Yaeger proposes a new term by which to reckon this real, really oceanic materiality: ecocriticism$, a term and concept designed, in her words, “to remind us that the ocean as oikos or home rolls under, beneath, and inside the edicts of state and free market capitalism” (Yaeger, 2010: 529). The perspective afforded by way of Yaeger’s coinage is one that can reckon “the ocean in a state of emergency, a crisis that demands unnatural histories written by unnaturalists who limn the fleshy entanglement of sea creatures, sea trash, and machines” (ibid.).
Yaeger’s 2010 account of ecocriticism$ reads, uncannily, like a predictive digest of Leviathan, the feature-length experimental documentary about fish-work on a trawler in the Georges Banks released two years later by the visual anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. Completely devoid of narration and almost so of dialogue, this resolutely unnaturalist film manages, in the process of illuminating the trials of fishing labor in oceanic environs, to undercut many conventional expectations about what documentary is and what it can do. Conceptually and affectively, Leviathan delivers on the commitments guiding the Sensory Ethnography Lab, the Harvard institute directed by Castaing-Taylor that (as proclaimed on its home page) seeks “to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world … encourag[ing] attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with difficulty, if it all, be rendered with words” (Sensory Ethnography Lab).[2]
Leviathan is a harrowing, engrossing film. Formally, conceptually, and affectively, it delivers what Jane Stadler calls “the experiential realism of visceral cinema” (Stadler, 2016: 460). Compiled from footage shot on GoPro cameras by Castaing-Taylor and Paravel over six trips on the fishing vessel Athena, it immerses its audience over the course of twenty-two shots, all of extended if varying lengths, in the sensations and rhythms of fish-work.[3] The subject matter and approach together constitute a kind of resource aesthetics: a mode that deploys the resource concept logistically and aesthetically to confront an extractive will to trade in resources as signs as well as inputs.[4]
Leviathan begins inscrutably, its initial images emerging out of almost total darkness to depict the hauling up of the nets with their catch. The camera then takes us through various aspects of the boat’s world: the gutting and dismembering of fish to separate those parts with commercial value from those without; the transfer of the valuable parts from above deck to below; the hauling and harvesting of shellfish; the jettisoning of waste into the sea; and brief, stunned moments of respite for crew members, in the shower or the boat’s canteen. While much of the action takes place on board the Athena, at times the camera takes us off the boat, filming alongside or behind it and even under the water’s surface. The film ends as it begins, in near darkness. In place of narrative, it accretes detail and sensation. Its framing, meanwhile, is cryptic: the title is withheld until the end, with three verses from the Book of Job instead launching the film (Leviathan, 2012: 00:00:35)— thereby projecting leviathan-ness onto a scriptural horizon, at once eternal and a-temporal.[5] In keeping with this elemental ethos, Castaing-Taylor argues that the film (as one of four components of the Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with a Hook? project) concerns “humanity and the sea, and our plundering of marine resources” (Sensory Ethnography Lab: Lucien Castaing-Taylor). Paravel, for her part, told the audience during Leviathan’s premiere at the Locarno Film Festival that “[w]e still don’t know what the film is about” — a telling indication not just of the work’s opacity but, indeed, of its makers’ commitment to undecidability (Lim, 2012).
The film activates such method, texture, and mood right from the outset, with a murky, indistinct, disorienting first sequence that combines intermittent glimpses of fishers managing the catch as it is hauled aboard with constant, cacophonous noise from the winches pulling the cables and chains attached to the nets (Leviathan, 2012: 00:00:25-00:15:20). Sound attacks us first, with sights arriving after, almost as though images, like sea creatures, need dredging up from the blackened ocean depths. The sequence couples sensory deprivation with sensory overload, a lurching combination (too little! too much!) that persists throughout the film as the primary means of immersing so as to disorient the audience within the visual and aural sensations found on a commercial trawler.[6] The queasy-making effect discombobulates the will to comprehend typically offered by the documentary mode. As Dennis Lim observes in the New York Times, “Where most documentaries prize clarity, this one attests to the power of estrangement” (Lim, 2012). “With no dialogue and only GoPro cameras attached to moving equipment and unstable bodies,” notes Robin Miskolcze, “the film pushes the viewer to lose the land-based comfort of physical, sensory, and positional anchoring. While the experience is certainly immersive, it remains defiant of human orientation or organization” (Miskolcze, 2020: 38). Defamiliarization in Leviathan is double: provoked, at the level of content, by sensory assaults from this strange world and, at the level of form, by material and conceptual challenges to documentary as a mode.
Castaing-Taylor clearly anticipates — and hopes to provoke — such disquieting uncertainties when he says that, while the film “is utterly a documentary, … it also doesn’t feel like a documentary to me. It feels more like a horror film or science fiction” (Lim, 2012). The feel of horror, in particular, issues from the intensive depiction of the violence entailed in harvesting marine life. This work is unrelentingly brutal, in both the mutilating damage it does to fish and the alienating damage it does to workers, as numerous passages in the film make clear. Carnage is most overt in those episodes in which the fishers, vigorously yet matter-of-factly, dismember their catch: gutting and decapitating cod while the gore accumulates, or slashing the fins off skates with hook and machete. In one memorable sequence, the camera sits at deck level as one and then another cod’s head slides back and forth on the blood- and water-slicked surface, reflected upside down in the viscous liquids, before slipping off the boat with all the rest of the refuse (Leviathan, 2012: 00:31:24-00:32:20). The perspective turns us, for a time, into decapitated cod’s decapitated kin, seeing as a dead fish head (never) sees, intimate with yet violated by relentless maritime butchery.[7]
In such moments we confront the status of the trawler as floating abattoir. Importantly, though, Leviathan’s visceral challenge — its queasy-making power — is not restricted to these graphic scenes, but likewise generalized across the film: in the shots of the waste left behind by the process; in the punishing, numbing grind of the work-day routine; in the omnipresent sounds of this marine ecology — the din of the boat’s several engines and numerous other machines, the noises of the catch and its processing, the caws of the seabirds always in the boat’s wake, the heave and churn of the sea. Sonically as well as visually, Leviathan requires us to inhabit and endure a surfeit of sensory accumulation. As Megan Hayes and Jeff Diamanti emphasize, “[t]he gaze of the camera plunges us into environments that would drown, suffocate, or freeze the human. And the effect of this plunging is awful” (Hayes and Diamanti, 2020: 182).
Crucial to the film’s capacity to enthrall us with discomfort is the mode of apprehending it offers. Close-ups predominate this film, its images and sounds claustrophobically intimate. With the exception of a few shots of the Athena taken from another boat, a memorable view of the deck from above, and striking shots of the gulls following the trawler, our relation to this world is completely proximate, even embedded. These (notable) exceptions apart, the film affords us no distance — and so no respite — from the unrelenting brutality of fish-work screened from start to finish. At stake, one may suppose, is the sensation of “experiential immediacy” as a reality-effect (Uhlin, 2020: 308). Immersive grittiness here affirms as it signals the authenticity and integrity of this brand of sensory ethnography.
Yet this immersive grittiness is not simply a matter of verisimilitude, of documentary fidelity. Instead, it modulates the vividly visceral with the just as vividly abstract. Distinctive here is an early passage in which the camera records still-living cod as they slosh around a pen on deck before their butchery, with the ocean swell generating the sway that causes them to slip in and out of view and focus, often colliding with the camera lens, a blurry, smeary squelch of eyes and tongues and gills we hear and see and nearly feel (Leviathan, 2012: 00:22:32-00:25:00). More pronounced still is a sequence late in the film in which the camera, presumably mounted on a pole, moves from recording the upside-down images of gulls in flight to plunge in and out of the sea — a technique that, producing intense sucking noises, convolutes water-image with bird-image, converting one into the other to profoundly abstracting effect (Leviathan, 2012: 01:19:45-01:20:50). Such moments drive home the filmmakers’ willingness to embrace the contingencies that make their approach to film-work so challenging. The ceaseless visual and sonic interference caused by conditions on the boat — spray, shriek, churn, hum, darkness — serves to decompose or indeed dis-compose the film’s perspectives, a conceptual and textural violence crucial to this mode of filmic composition.
The dis-compositional effects I am describing evidently arise from the uncertainties and instabilities of oceanic environs, but they issue as well from the characteristics and affordances of the cameras employed. As mentioned earlier, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel secured much of the film’s footage using GoPros, which, placeable anywhere — fastened to the fishers, thrown amidst the haul, tied to the nets or to poles and plunged into the ocean — could proliferate and at the same time dislocate the film’s point of view. As Graig Uhlin argues, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel
utilize the seeming rawness of nature to break open representational mimesis and access a sensuous immediacy, … [which] appears in the film as a formal ugliness that distorts the transparency of the image. One might note, for instance, the perspectival disorientation produced by the lightweight mobility of the GoPro cameras, which enables them to attain extremely close proximity to what is filmed, with the effect of abstracting the subject matter from its immediate spatial context (Uhlin, 2020: 308-9).[8]
Importantly visual, this abstracting power issues as well from the interplay of sound with image in the film: a constant source of tension and so a means to intensify disorientation and shock that can confound or indeed pull apart comprehension in a process of sense unmaking. Where fish-work as dis-compositional labor carves up sea creature bodies, this approach to filmmaking violates image, sound, and the apprehending sensorium encountering them together.[9]
The prospect of compositional dis-composition recalls for me Nicole Shukin’s brilliant account in Animal Capital (2009) of what she terms “[t]he double entendre of rendering” in which “rendering indexes both economies of representation … and resource economies” (Shukin, 2009: 20-1) and marks the entanglement of material substances and discursive signs. Shukin’s most memorable example comes from early cinema, when animals in motion were recorded on filmstock coated with gelatin rendered from animal remains. In Leviathan the rendition is compound, transmuting the material and immaterial: GoPro technology provides the im/material substrate by which signs of piscine disassembly get rendered; the digital is decompositional in its abstracting rendition of dis-composed fish flesh and bird flight and laboring limbs into 0s and 1s.[10]
For the filmmakers, it would seem, the strategies I am describing are valuable not least in the significance they hold for the work and authority of creative practice. As Paravel contends, the resulting perspectives serve “to distribute the authorship” (Lim, 2012). Put another way, the technique invites viewers to imagine that they see and feel not only as film spectators or even filmmakers do, but likewise and simultaneously as fishers, as dead and dying fish, as gulls, as fishing nets, as ocean waves, as digital action cameras do — an invitation underscored in the closing credits, where the list of cast members includes not just the fishers but their boat and the various species in their marine world. The plunge, here, takes us into the recalibrated ontologies of the new materialism.[11]
The orientations on offer in new materialist precepts and commitments can estrange the human to profound and powerful effect. New materialist claims often seem tantalizing in the bid they make to unravel humanist common-sense. An older materialism will nonetheless worry about the logic of equivalence or likeness they involve, and also wonder about their consequence for the conduct of politics. In Leviathan, defamiliarization tends to come at the expense of any real historical reckoning. The film’s “estrangement from the perspective of labor,” Michael Metzger remarks, is “an unfortunate consequence of the posthumanist effort to reposition the human in its environment, an effort which has depended on the privileging of affect over articulation” (Metzger, 2015: n.p.). The quasi-subjects and quasi-objects assembled in Leviathan are only obliquely, haltingly social and historical actants. As Catherine Russell observes, “the geo-political specificity of the footage tends to be subsumed within a mythic abstraction in which the spectacle is emptied of its radical energies” (Russell, 2015: 33). The film’s material and aesthetic practices work vividly to proliferate perspectives across the spatial coordinates of this claustrophobic maritime ecology — but not at all across its temporal realm or horizon. Thus while we sense and feel quite intimately the harrowing material particularities of present-day commercial fishing, we are in the dark when it comes to reckoning the history and circuitry — the historicity of the circuitry — of this mode of capital accumulation. The gender dynamic of the industry, constituting the maleness of fish-work as work, seems given in the film, and in that givenness completely opaque. Likewise, we would never know, watching this documentary, that the conjuncture from which Leviathan emerges is one featuring the mass industrialization of the global fishery and involving what the geographer Kevin St Martin terms the “institutionalization of … essentially neoliberal practices in fisheries management [in the US since the 1950s] … [and so what amounts to] a creeping enclosure of the fisheries commons” (St Martin, 2008: 133). Tracking between the intimate and the elemental, Leviathan has no real time for the historical or the global.
II. Dilations
Leviathan exemplifies, in its immersive materialism, Allan Sekula’s argument that the modern regime of maritime depiction favors detail over the panoramic (Sekula, 1995: 107). Sekula’s own practice operates otherwise, working instead to dilate between panorama and detail.[12] The effect is contrapuntal, which is to say dialectical. For Alberto Toscano, Sekula directs his image-work
against the imperatives of universal equivalence, which requires the separation of workers from their means of subsistence, their means of cognition and their means of representation, their mutation into ‘monetary subjects without money.’ … As our crisis-ridden present throws up ever more intense forms of abstract domination, for which image-making stands as a crucial conduit, but also a potential choke-point, Sekula’s practice of purposeful immersion — excavating the archives of exploitation while patiently composing atlases of resistance — remains an indispensable resource for an aesthetics in and against capital (Toscano, 2018: n.p.).
Focusing over the course of many projects — among them Fish Story (1988-1995), TITANIC’s Wake (1998-2000), Black Tide/Marea Negra (2003), The Lottery of the Sea (2006), The Forgotten Space (2010), and Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum (2010-2013) — on dynamics of maritime transport and labor in the circuits of production and exchange, Sekula ventures camera-work as a mode of anti-capitalist poesis, accumulating imagery and insight to expose and unnerve processes of capital accumulation. As I argue elsewhere, “[a]gain and again, Sekula seems to churn back through his own archive in order to proliferate ever intensifying visions of the same urgent conjuncture. The citational effect of such recursive return is at once accumulative and circulatory, compiling meaning and accruing value so as to mobilize and proliferate perspectives of critique and angles of attack” (Simpson, 2017: 304). Against the abiding smoothness of neoliberal common-sense, Sekula contests its “fantasy of frictionless integration” (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015: 202) by tracking the many signs of friction that run throughout contemporary capitalism’s productive, extractive, and speculative modes.[13]
Whereas Castaing-Taylor and Paravel leave their film unmoored by language, eschewing voiceover or any appreciable dialogue, Sekula himself delivers the almost constant narration that threads together images in The Forgotten Space. The interplay of language and imagery is vital to the dialectical argument made by what Sekula and Burch call their “film essay” (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:00:42). As Filippo Menozzi incisively notes: “Through the clash of image and word, the container becomes the marker of a subversive, restless, and unpacified totality, an allegorical countertotality of struggle, violence, and resistance torn between commodity and utopia” (Menozzi, 2023: 186). The film begins by setting the scene in which its action will unfold:
Midstream: a muddy estuary near a port. Forgotten space: out of sight, out of mind. Upstream: the hinterland — a greedy continent. Downstream: other ports, great harbor cities, oceans, one hundred thousand invisible ships, one and a half million invisible seafarers, binding the world together through trade (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:00:23-00:00:51).
Accompanying shots from a ship in the estuary of port infrastructures and nuclear cooling towers near Doel, a ruined Belgian town, this voiceover initiates, in miniature, the expansive project of the film to come: an experiment in cognitive mapping that will seek to articulate the contradictory dynamics that compose life in the age of global capital. As the language of invisibility conveys, the very prospect of action entails an absent presence, with ships and their workers completely indispensable to capital’s productive circuitry yet routinely effaced and erased from view as from consciousness. As forgotten space, midstream is decidedly offshore — a term and a concept we will come to recognize as not just noun but verb (Urry, 2014).
Having thus set the scene, the voiceover goes on to introduce the film’s protagonist in memorable terms:
The unlikely story of a steel box that changed the world trading system. Ships now resemble floating warehouses, plying fixed routes between producing countries and consuming countries, while factories become ship-like, stealing away in the dead of night in search of cheaper labor. Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of exploit and adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery? Does this box, the acme of order, efficiency, and global progress, create disorder and destruction and throw the world out of balance? Until recently it was easy to believe that the world economy was running on automatic, regulating itself with an invisible hand. Now we know that the global trading system floats on a sea of credit and that bankers can as comfortably bet on failure as they can on success (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:01:34-00:02:55).[14]
This narrative recounts, in condensed form, the antinomies and transubstantiations — warehouse-like ships and ship-like factories, order and disorder, progress and destruction, invisible hands and bankable failures — that have animated the passage into capitalism’s contemporary mode, underscoring in particular the mediating significance and power of the shipping container as generic unit of equivalence. The accompanying images, meanwhile, render such dynamics by spooling between the intimate and the extimate, the banal and the near-sublime: cargo-box chasm, vast oceanic horizon, inscrutable mechanism, four-feed screen, abandoned teacup. No people appear in this initial footage from the massive container ship Hanjin Budapest; it’s as if this enormous floating infrastructure makes its own way across the ocean, an auto-mobile monument to the ever-increasing sedimentation of dead labor.[15] Fittingly, the closing shot in the sequence, of cargo-box shadows appearing on the waves, turns the ocean itself into a kind of filmic negative, evoking the absent presence of the shipping container as it shadows not just forgotten maritime space but every space and social relation in the world today. Here, we realize, forgotten space names a compound space: oceanic expanse alongside circulating cargo ships alongside the occluded interiority of containerization itself.[16]
The issues raised in this opening sequence animate the remainder of the film. Sekula and Burch seek to remember the forgotten space of sea and container by constellating its violent asymmetries and antinomies over four filmic movements punctuated throughout by Riccardo Tesi’s droning, guttural melodeon score (music that, artisanal and resolutely embodied, constitutes a defiant counterpoint to the logistics regime). The first, “Phoenix and Mammoth,” unfolds the politics of barge and rail, automation and expropriation in and around Rotterdam’s massive port. “Mud and Sun” follows, exploring the container transport industry’s twin violences of risk and debt in the shadow of the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor complex. “Mirrors and Smoke,” the third movement, traces the contradictory links among capital speculation, industrial manufacture, and laboring migrancy in Hong Kong and Foshan. The final movement, “Rust,” contemplates the post-industrial displacement of dock-work by culture-work in the formerly port-centric city of Bilbao. Each locale is interstitial, stretched and torn between a thriving industrial past and a tenuous post-industrial future, with its filming undertaken to reckon and render the decisively material brutality and precarity of laboring life in a supposedly immaterial age. “Just as momentum builds,” Hayes and Diamanti observe, “the film halts, pivots, and peels back another layer again, its agitated, recursive style intervening in a homogenous global space of fluid linearity. In the tangential gathering of the film, time is repeatedly scratched over in a thickening present of equally significant infrastructural contradictions” (Hayes and Diamanti, 2020: 176). The four segments of The Forgotten Space, framed by a prologue and an epilogue shot in Doel’s ruins, are connected through interludes from the Korean container ship first depicted in the film’s opening. This structuring conceit juxtaposes the logic of film form with the logistics of capitalist traffic, an analogy that animates the film’s critique. The container ship as forgotten space articulates The Forgotten Space, we come to realize, just as it does global capitalism — but to contrary ends and effects.
Again and again across these four movements, the film makes vivid the power of the multimodal shipping container to mediate the violences of labor under advanced capitalism. Early in “Phoenix and Mammoth,” Sekula’s narration recounts the shifting itineraries of global traffic enabled through containerization. “Cargo containers,” he notes,
were an American invention of the mid 1950s modeled on the automatic and continuous flow of oil into tankships. The box became a fundamental physical unit of trade. In 2008 Rotterdam handled almost 11 million — the busiest port in Europe but well behind those of Asia. The center of gravity of the maritime world has shifted east. The boxes made cargo anonymous, odorless, secretive, abstract (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:06:00-00:06:34).
One outcome of this anonymizing, abstracting process is the recomposition of laboring dynamics at the Rotterdam port: “In the outer terminals in Rotterdam, the physical human labor that remains has become a literal appendage to the machine” (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:08:17-00:08:24). The resulting cyborg system is monstrous in the alienation it delivers to the workers who remain: “We speak of labor-saving machines. And yet what is really saved by automation? Automation does not guarantee freedom from drudgery. It merely raises drudgery to a higher power” (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:09:47-00:09:59). Wim Verschoor, the crane operator moving and stacking containers in this sequence, describes the exhausting demands of the relentless focus, the draining intensity of concentration, demanded by this work (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:10:36-00:11:27). Here, we see that infrastructural labor in the logistically determined circuits of late capitalist traffic is likewise part of the attention economy. The consideration of Rotterdam’s port concludes with unsettling images of Montessori students playing on toy container cranes and movers (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:11:37-00:12:23). “The free play of the mind and the muscles,” Sekula reflects ironically, before asking: “A spirited rehearsal for the automatic future?” (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:11:52-00:12:02). The work of this play prefigures a lifetime of toil that amusement will subsequently serve to prolong.[17] Young people are here interpellated into those subjectivities requisite for a future of automated drudgery — or quite possibly of laboring redundancy.
In “Mirrors and Smoke,” Sekula and Burch track the maritime world’s center of gravity eastward to Hong Kong and Foshan, where dynamics of laboring violence are made brutally concrete. “Ocean shipping was the first industry to be globalized,” Sekula recounts,
in a deliberate effort to pay the lowest possible wages. This was because of yet another postwar maritime invention of the Americans: the flag of convenience, which allows ships owned in the rich countries to register in poor countries, like Liberia and Panama. This legal loophole makes it possible to hire cheaper foreign crews and avoid safety rules and regulations. Taken together, the flag of convenience and the container take us back to a world of relentless toil, interrupted only briefly (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:12:56-01:13:37).
Such relentless toil plays out, grindingly, in the visit the film makes to the Donlim factory in Foshan City, Guangdong province, a Chinese-owned plant mass-producing goods for Walmart where aurally assaulting noises (not so dissimilar to the ones in Leviathan) provide the soundtrack to a bleakly harrowing tour of the assembly line (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:20:22-01:25:42). “If we think of plastics and imagine light industry, we forget the metallic heaviness and precision of injection molds, which must themselves be manufactured,” the voiceover observes (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:21:55-01:22:05), before we watch footage of a woman at an injection-molding station doing finishing work on an endless series of plastic components for what we later discover are espresso machines — a sequence followed with a fixed shot of the vast factory hall filled with row upon row of identical stations that makes grimly vivid the serial production of serial production (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:22:06-01:22:58). The ensuing cut brings us to the cafeteria, where countless workers take on the sustenance needed to reproduce their ability to produce on the assembly line (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:22:59-01:23:35) while Sekula reports: “American and European corporate lobbyists fought hard and en masse against a new Chinese labor law that cracked open the door to collective bargaining and higher wages. China’s foreign partners would like the low-wage utopia to last forever” (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:23:04-01:23:20). The dystopian import and impact of such corporate desire will amplify the violence of manufacturing labor that the logistics of containerization serve to mediate and deliver.
The episodes in Rotterdam and Foshan are only two of many in The Forgotten Space that document, critically, the means and ends of this laboring violence. Others include ones focused on migrant life and work in agriculture in the Netherlands and in hospitality and domestic service in Hong Kong; on precarious truck-driving in the container corridors around Long Beach and remaindered life in homeless encampments outside Los Angeles; and on the rise of cultural industry — “the velvet glove that cushions the iron fist of world trade” (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:35:23-01:35:28) — with the Guggenheim’s arrival in Bilbao. Across these episodes, as Brett Story contends, “[t]he violence and degradation of contemporary maritime capitalism … holds alongside the more dangerous consequence of its forgetting: disconnection” (Story, 2012: 1578). The processes and dynamics of capital accumulation mangle while also reifying social subjects who labor. This insight points in turn to its corollary: that violent labor names a redundancy, since under capital labor is and does violence. The issue is at once systemic and historical. Labor’s real abstraction serves structurally to mediate all relations under capitalism, alienating everyone who works, while the ever-increasing growth of infrastructure impels and intensifies the shedding of laborers by replacing living with dead labor, workers with machines. There is no labor without this compound violence. And today, as The Forgotten Space documents, such violence is epitomized by the infrastructural technology through which it is relentlessly mediated: “the container, the very coffin of remote labor power” (Sekula, 1995: 137).
Sekula and Burch conclude their film essay with two versions of possibility for the future-to-come. One emerges after the close of the segment about Bilbao, during the final interlude on the Hanjin Budapest. As nighttime footage of the ship preparing to dock scrolls past, Sekula’s voiceover poses a series of haunting questions:
What happens when the system runs out of workers to exploit, when the credit bubble breaks, when hyper-producing China owns the debt of hyper-consuming America? Can the system as we know it survive? Does the container, like capitalism in general, sow the seeds of its own destruction by allowing industry to take flight? A Trojan horse that turns on its inventors (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:42:43-01:43:12).
The container ship’s approach to yet one more harbor terminal complex supplies the imagistic vehicle for the conceptual arrival, in the film’s argument, of containerization’s terminal condition. In the prospective future raised by Sekula’s questions, the forgotten space inside the world’s innumerable cargo boxes might just collapse from within, in a quasi-automated variation on the grave-digger thesis of Marx and Engels.[18]
The epilogue to The Forgotten Space, returning us to Doel, offers a second, more clearly agential possibility. Amidst defiantly festive scenes on the town’s crumbling streets, the film shows us people dancing crosscut with close-up shots of artisanal hands carving a wooden shoe while the voiceover delivers its concluding reminder:
More and more is not the answer. The lifeboat carved from the wooden shoe of days gone by is all we’ve got. The lowly crew must seize the helm. The last gift to remain safely in Pandora’s box after evils have been unleashed on the world is hope (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:47:59-01:48:48).[19]
Hope here is tenuous and uncertain, not least because Doel’s instance seems so grimly perilous. But the encouragement on offer counters the supply chain’s ever-accumulating “[m]ore and more” with stubborn, resilient traditions of craft and sociability — while also seeding, with the image of the wooden shoe, the restive specter of sabotage.[20]
III. Labors of looking
Notwithstanding the divergent emphases in Leviathan and The Forgotten Space on intimacy and dilation — and the distinct materialist practices and commitments operative within these divergent emphases — the two films come together in a shared concern for the labor of looking as it bears on the relation of materiality to immateriality in capital’s accumulative dynamics.
In Leviathan the relevant passage occurs just past the three-quarter point and is distinctive for being the most striking of the very few still-camera shots that show almost no movement inside the image frame. The moment is one when our sensing and feeling of the visceral intimacies of fish-work start to give way to another order of reckoning — when the dialectics of panorama and detail begin to emerge, if only incipiently. Here we see, in a four-minute interlude that only underscores the relentless restlessness of the rest of the film, one of the fishers on a break, sitting exhausted and periodically nodding off to sleep in the ship’s canteen while “Deadliest Catch,” the Discovery Channel’s take on crab fishing in Alaska, plays on television (Leviathan, 2012: 01:09:26-01:13:46). The passage shows that there’s no escape from commercial fishing on a trawler: break-time only compounds work-time by delivering the latter in simulacral form. The intended irony here presumably has to do with the unreality of reality TV: the dissimilarity between life on the Athena and ‘life’ on the Discovery Channel, and so the difference between Leviathan’s sensory ethnography and hegemonic modes of popular documentary.[21] Yet in making this point the episode also serves to illuminate the labor of looking — a labor that enthralls this worker even while he rests, and that renders the difference between Leviathan and “Deadliest Catch,” between experimental film and reality television, fully proximate. Harnessed to cameras even as they tend the nets, captured by televisual spectacles while they rest, Leviathan’s fishers labor in the image, helping to produce and accumulate information, knowledge, sensation, and affect — a condition that, whatever the particularities of fish-work, constitutes one form of commonality, of likeness, between them and the film’s viewers. In comparable (and, under the algorithm, increasingly concurrent) ways — yet to often asymmetrical, divergent effects — everyone today is attentive to distraction, distracted by attention: implicated, interpellated, violated by and through the work of image-work. Jonathan Beller calls this condition the cinematic mode of production: “the value-productive dimensions of sensual labor in the visual register … [wherein] labor as dissymmetrical exchange with capital is transacted across the image” (Beller, 2006: 3 … 14). Thus apprehended, the “leviathan” in Leviathan does not name fishing, or marine life, or the elemental ocean: it names film itself.[22]
The comparable passage in The Forgotten Space occurs at the very end. Behind rolling credits, a film crew member uses a cloth, a spray bottle, and her own breath to clean the lens of the camera recording her actions (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 01:49:51-01:51:49). The shot calls attention to yet another forgotten space: the space of encounter between camera and world, between material image-making technology and embodied image-makers — not to mention we embodied image-viewers. The perspective will puncture any lingering illusion that documentary filmmaking, as a practice, is immediate or unmediated, reminding us instead that cameras, like containers, are mediating technologies, but ones thereby able, unlike containers, to reckon and render instead of obscuring the material processes involved in such mediation.[23] Here, the labor (and laboriousness) of camera-work is made explicit: a media practice that materializes by mediating the social worlds it depicts. Recalling by contrast the early moment at the Rotterdam port when the crane operator Wim Verschoor laments the dirtiness of the window through which he must concentrate on moving and stacking containers (The Forgotten Space, 2010: 00:10:55-00:10:57), this closing footage braids together the apprehension of working and the work of apprehending. To film is to look is to labor: a perspective that discerns, in film-work’s work, the attendant work our watching entails. Apprehending images is not merely, passively receptive, and not only a process of violation by and of viewers — it can likewise constitute a resolutely productive, because collective, activity. By closing the film with this view, Sekula and Burch leave us to contemplate generative intimacies that connect supposedly distinct modes of material and immaterial making and doing in a late capitalist age of perpetual, perceptual traffic.[24]
As this last claim will suggest, the fact that two recent documentaries about laboring violences contain such resonantly comparable moments does not signal some overarching displacement of material production by the attention economy (as a facet of so-called immaterial labor) on the global circuit. Their presence and their force in Leviathan and The Forgotten Space will indicate instead that production and attention exist in dialectical tension, together interimplicated and inescapable in a 24/7 world (Crary, 2014). Such inextricability makes us complicit within the violently material yet immaterial dynamics we have witnessed in these films. Might it likewise, against the disconnection risked through forgetting, encourage us to remember why and how to connect — and therein supply an opening onto some unanticipated solidarities to come? Reflecting on prospects for sabotage in the contemporary moment, Darin Barney contends that
To make sabotage the name for transformative political potential in the context of contemporary capitalism — across the multiple relations of inequality and domination characteristic of capitalist societies — is to affirm the tendency of systems to produce the energies and harbour the agencies of their own undoing. … [W]hat about the saboteurs — those who are positioned to pull fine threads of deviation in order to exacerbate relations … that already compromise the “efficiency” of the system in a decisive way? Those whose saboteurial actions might produce erosion, if not revolution, particularly under conditions in which capitalism relies for its functioning on articulated infrastructures that it cannot police or secure perfectly? These grave-diggers are, potentially, everywhere (Barney, 2018: 147-8).
Confronted with the material and immaterial, visceral and abstract coordinates of laboring violence documented so vividly in these two films, we would do well to remember and revisit the forgotten, connective space of sabotage. The lowly crew must seize the helm.
References
Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer ([1944] 1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by J. Cumming. New York: Verso.
Anderman, Z., and A. Hicks (2021) ‘The Pot Still Boils: Introducing Totality and Culture’, Qui Parle 32(1): 1-39. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-10427926
Barney, D. (2018) ‘Sabotage’, Krisis, 2: 145-149. Available at: www.krisis.eu (Accessed: 15 March 2025).
Bellamy, B., M. O’Driscoll, and M. Simpson (eds.) (2016) Postmodern Culture, 26(2) Special Issue: Resource Aesthetics. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2016.0010
Beller, J. (2006) The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England.
Blum, H. (2010) ‘The Prospect of Oceanic Studies’, PMLA, 125(3): 670-677. doi: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.670
Bowens, M. (2018) ‘“The Flesh of The Perceptible”: The New Materialism of Leviathan’, Film-Philosophy, 22(3): 428–447. doi: https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0088
Campling, L. and A. Colás (2021) Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World. New York: Verso.
Chkhaidze, I. (2017) ‘Seen from the Viewpoint of a Fish: Posthumanist Observation in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan’, Sociologija. Mintis ir veiksmas I(40): 26-51. doi: https://doi.org/10.15388/SocMintVei.2017.1.10873
Crary, J. (2104) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. New York: Verso.
Endnotes. (2013) ‘The Holding Pattern: The Ongoing Crisis and the Class Struggles of 2011-2013’, Endnotes 3. Available at: https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-holding-pattern (Accessed: 16 March 2025)
Gross, J. (2025) ‘A Giant Container Ship Got Stuck in the Suez Canal’, The New York Times, 12 March. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/business/ever-given-suez-canal.html (Accessed on 16 March 2025).
Harney, S. and F. Moten (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions.
Hayes, M. and J. Diamanti (2020) ‘Intermodal Aesthetics and the Otherwise of Cargo’, in T. Prorokova-Konrad (ed.), Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis. Morganstown, W. Va.: West Virginia University Press, pp. 29-40.
Kempen, A. (2022) ‘Two Cats, One Fish: The Animal, Leviathan and the Limits of Theory’, Film-Philosophy, 26(1): 44–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0189
King James Bible. Job: 41-31-33.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Directed by Robert Aldrich [Film]. Los Angeles: United Artists.
Landesman, O. (2015) ‘Here, There, and Everywhere: Leviathan and the Digital Future of Observational Ethnography’, Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1): 12-19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12057
Lapworth, A. (2021) ‘Responsibility before the World: Cinema, Perspectivism and a Nonhuman Ethics of Individuation’, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 15(3): 386–410. doi: https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2021.0447
Leggett, T. (2021) ‘Egypt’s Suez Canal blocked by huge container ship’, BBC, 24 March. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56505413 (Accessed: 16 March 2025).
Leimbacher, I. (2014) ‘The World Made Flesh’, Film Comment, 50(2): 36-39. doi: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43460010
Leviathan (2012) Directed by L. Castaing-Taylor and V. Paravel. Harvard: Sensory Ethnography Lab. Available at: Kanopy (Accessed: 16 March 2025).
Lim, D. (2012) ‘The Merger of Academia and Art House’, New York Times 31 August 2012. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/movies/harvard-filmmakers-messy-world.html (Accessed: 10 March 2025).
MacDonald, S. (2013) American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Marx, K. and F. Engels ([1848] 2004) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, Marx/Engels Internet Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm (Accessed: 16 March 2025)
Menozzi, F. (2023) ‘Totality in a Box: The Shipping Container from Commodity to Allegory’, Qui Parle 32(1): 163-197. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-10427981
Metzger, M. (2015) ‘Leviathan’s Labors Lost; or, Who Works After the Subject?’, Millennium Film Journal, 61. Available at: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=110550970&site=ehost-live&scope=site (Accessed: 10 March 2025).
Miskolcze, R. (2020) ‘From Moby-Dick to Contemporary Documentary: Experiencing the Oceanic’, Leviathan, 22(3): 25-42. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2020.0030
Pavsek, C. (2015) ‘Leviathan and the Experience of Sensory Ethnography’, Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1): 4-11. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12056
Russell, C. (2015) ‘Leviathan and the Discourse of Sensory Ethnography: Spleen et idéal’, Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1): 27–33. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12059
Safi, M. et al. (2021) ‘How a container ship blocked the Suez Canal – visual guide’, The Guardian, 24 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/24/how-a-container-ship-blocked-the-suez-canal-visual-guide (Accessed: 16 March 2025).
Sekula, A. (2003) Black Tide/Marea Negra. Available at: https://www.allansekulastudio.org (Accessed: 16 March 2025)
— (1988-1995) Fish Story. Available at: https://www.allansekulastudio.org (Accessed: 16 March 2025)
— (3rd Rev. Ed., 2018) Fish Story. London: MACK.
— (2006) The Lottery of the Sea. Available at: https://www.allansekulastudio.org (Accessed: 16 March 2025)
— (2010-2013) Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum. Available at: https://www.allansekulastudio.org (Accessed: 16 March 2025)
— (1998-2000) TITANIC’s Wake. Available at: https://www.allansekulastudio.org (Accessed: 16 March 2025)
Sensory Ethnography Lab. Available at: https://sel.fas.harvard.edu (Accessed: 16 March 2025).
Sensory Ethnography Lab: Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Available at: https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/lucien-castaing-taylor (Accessed: 10 March 2025).
Sharpe, C. (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shukin, N. (2009) Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Simpson, M. (2017) ‘Lubricity: Smooth Oil’s Political Frictions’, in: S. Wilson, A. Carlson, and I. Szeman (eds.), Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s, pp.287-318.
— (2014) ‘Resource Aesthetics: Rendering Fish-Work in Leviathan’, paper presented at Energy, Environment, Culture, Marxist Literary Group Institute on Culture and Society, Banff, Alberta, 13-17 June.
Singh, J. (2018) ‘Disposable Objects: Ethecology, Waste, and Maternal Afterlives’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 19(1): 48-54. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2018.1419696
Smith, P. B. (2023) ‘Counterforensics/Counterlogistics: Seeing the Rot’, Discourse, 45(3): 355-380. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a923674
St Marin, K. (2008) ‘The Difference that Class Makes: Neoliberalization and Non-Capitalism in the Fishing Industry of New England’, in: B. Mansfield (ed.), Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations. London: Blackwell, pp. 133-155. doi: https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1002/9781444306750.ch6
Stadler, J. (2016) ‘Experiential Realism and Motion Pictures: A Neurophenomenological Approach’, Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI: 439–65. doi: https://doi.org/10.5840/studphaen20161616
Stevenson, L. and E. Kohn (2015) ‘Leviathan: An Ethnographic Dream’, Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1): 49-53. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12062
Story, B. (2012) Review of The Forgotten Space, Antipode, 44(4): 1575-78. doi: https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00984.x
Thain, A. (2015) ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of Leviathan’, Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1): 41-48. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12061
The Forgotten Space (2010) Directed by A. Sekula and N. Burch. Amsterdam: Doc. Eye Film and Vienna: Wildart Film. Available at: https://ualberta.aviaryplatform.com/r/ht2g738x99 (Accessed: 16 March 2025).
Toscano, A. (2018) ‘The Mirror of Circulation: Allan Sekula and the Logistical Image’, Society + Space. Available at: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-mirror-of-circulation-allan-sekula-and-the-logistical-image# (Accessed: 15 March 2025).
Toscano, A. and J. Kinkle (2015) Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Uhlin, G. (2020) ‘Monkeywrenched Images: Ecocinema and Sabotage’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 18(3): 301-324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2020.1790480
Unger, M.A. (2017) ‘Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s GoPro Sensorium: Leviathan (2012), Experimental Documentary, and Subjective Sounds’, Journal of Film and Video, 69(3): 3-18. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.69.3.0003
Urry, J. (2014) Offshoring. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Varga, Darrell. (2012) ‘Making Political Cinema — The Forgotten Space’, in: J. White (ed.), ‘A Film About the Sea: Notes on Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space’, Halifax: Centre for European Studies and the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, pp. 37-41. Available at: https://cdn.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/images/faculty/arts/centre-european-studies/Forgotten-Space.pdf (Accessed: 16 March 2025).
Wenzel, J. (2022) ‘Forms of Life: Thinking Fossil Infrastructure and Its Narrative Grammar’, Social Text 40 (4 (153)): 153–179. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10013360
Yaeger, P. (2010) ‘Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons’, PMLA, 125(3): 523-45. doi: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.523
Notes
[1] See for instance Leggett (2021) ‘Egypt’s Suez Canal blocked by huge container ship’ and Safi et al. (2021) ‘How a container ship blocked the Suez Canal – visual guide.’ Jenny Gross (2025) published the retrospective ‘A Giant Container Ship Got Stuck in the Suez Canal’ in The New York Times on 12 March 2025 — a measure of the event’s continuing reverberations.
[2] An earlier version of the website was more polemical still in articulating the Sensory Ethnography Lab’s principles, contending that the Lab “opposes the traditions of art that are not deeply infused with the real, those of documentary that are derived from broadcast journalism, and those of visual anthropology that mimic the discursive inclinations of their mother discipline” — a passage quoted by Irena Leimbacher in ‘The Word Made Flesh’ (2014).
[3] Castaing-Taylor and Paravel have emphasized when interviewed that the decision to use GoPros was pragmatic not aesthetic, given the turbulent conditions on-deck: a means of shooting that would not risk damage to the more valuable yet cumbersome gear they’d planned on using.
[4] See the 2016 special issue of Postmodern Culture on resource aesthetics, co-edited by Brent Bellamy, Michael O’Driscoll, and me and inspired by a conference paper I gave at the Marxist Literary Group in 2014 entitled ‘Resource Aesthetics: Rendering Fish-Work in Leviathan’ (Simpson, 2014).
[5] The verses come from Job 41: “He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. / He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. / Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear” (King James Bible: Job: 41:31-33).
[6] As Scott MacDonald observes, “In Leviathan, as in most of the films to come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, sound comes before image and has sensory impact at least as powerful and complex as the imagery. Even as we sometimes struggle to see what we’re seeing and to understand how it fits within the daily round of the fishing boats, we continue to struggle, as the filmmakers must have, to become accustomed to the din of the industrial process of harvesting the ocean” (MacDonald, 2013: 335). Ohad Landesman concurs: “[i]n such a chaotic aural landscape, consisting of crunching, squelching, and shrieking noises, it becomes hard to clearly differentiate between foreground and background spaces and the disorienting sound engulfs the viewer in 360 degrees” (Landesman, 2015: 16).
[7] Aldo Kempen organizes his essay on Leviathan around this episode, arguing that “[h]ere, the spectator encounters a fish in its singularity. A singular non-human animal seems to ‘look’ at you” (Kempen, 2022: 45).
[8] Such immediacy signals its mediations: as Michael Unger contends, “the GoPro cameras constantly remind the viewer of their aesthetic placement due to the disorientating camera perspectives and remind the viewer that he or she is watching a film rather than an unmediated representation of life on the fishing vessel” (Unger, 2017: 9).
[9] Andrew Lapworth’s Deleuzian take on the film emphasizes the importance of its “‘nonhuman eye’ of cinema” to the human-nonhuman encounter in this oceanic assemblage: “with Leviathan, there is an attempt to more fully tear perception away from any discrete body to express an immanent perception of the world that renders points of view indiscernible” (Lapworth, 2021: 400).
[10] While Shukin unfolds her theory with reference to older analog processes of rendition, she recognizes the persistence of rendering’s double logic in the computational present: “Digital capitalism appears to have successfully spirited away the bad affect associated with the boiling down of animal remains, reinventing rendering as an aesthetic notation for the field of computer-generated images. The reinvention of rendering by digital capitalism arguably depoliticizes both industries, associating ongoing traffics in animal material with technological virtuality, on the one hand, while identifying computer-generated graphics with biological stock, on the other. … [W]hat seem like two wildly disparate and noncontemporaneous practices — the one pursuing the carnal recycling of animal matter, the other a representational recycling of lifelike effects whose prototypes are invariably animal — can be placed in political relation, via a theory of rendering, as concurrent and complicit logics of capital” (Shukin, 2009: 61-2).
[11] On Leviathan’s new materialist, posthumanist tendencies, see — in addition to Metzger — Lisa Stevenson and Eduardo Kohn (2015), Alana Thain (2015), Irina Chkhaidze (2017), Max Bowens (2018), Andrew Lapworth (2021), and Aldo Kempen (2022).
[12] For a suggestive account of Sekula’s use of the detail and the fragment against contemporary capitalism’s logistical grain, see Patrick Brian Smith’s ‘Counterforensics/Counterlogistics: Seeing the Rot’ (2023).
[13] In ‘Lubricity: Smooth Oil’s Political Frictions’ (Simpson, 2017) I highlight Sekula’s delivery of friction, in The Forgotten Space and other works, against petrocultural discourses of smoothness in particular.
[14] In Cartographies of the Absolute, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle supply a definitive account of the contradictions at stake: “containerisation is shorthand for a complex assemblage of labour (living and dead), capital (fixed and variable), law, politics, energy and geography. The container is widely taken to be a crucial factor in the emergence of capitalist globalisation, as it accelerates the volume, speed, and scope of trade and production through a number of politically and aesthetically significant features: standardisation, homogeneity, modularity, fungibility and efficiency. But viewed in terms of social relations of production and their geographical determinants, it also signals the devastation of port and ship-labour, the dislocation of transport and production centres in new spatio-temporal fixes, the separation of the harbour from the social life of the city, dematerialisation, as well as a kind of radical opacity or invisibility that comes to affect commerce and industry alike. The container is thus both a crucial operator and a symbol of an all-encompassing regime of materialised abstraction” (Toscano and Kinkle, 2014: 196).
[15] In later footage from the Hanjin Budapest, we will meet the Korean and Indonesian workers who make up its crew and learn their thoughts about the labor they do.
[16] Most commentary on the film associates its title with the sea, though Darrell Varga connects it instead to cargo containers: “The forgotten space of the film’s title is the steel box that transformed international shipping — meaning that it has fundamentally transformed capitalism itself” (Varga, 2012: 40). Likewise important, here, is Christina Sharpe’s provocative account of slavery’s Middle Passage as the forgotten space at the heart of The Forgotten Space (Sharpe, 2016: 25-30). For a related critique, see also Julietta Singh (2018).
[17] Recall the prescient analysis, in ‘The Culture Industry,’ offered by Adorno and Horkheimer (students of the beach, yes … but the sea?): “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. … What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time” (Adorno and Horkheimer, [1944] 1997: 137).
[18] “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians. … What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers” (Marx and Engels, [1848] 2004).
[19] As Sekula delivers the line about Pandora’s box, the film cuts to archival footage from the climax of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
[20] The Forgotten Space was released in the immediate aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis. Over a decade on, in the wake of a global pandemic and in the teeth of resurgent fascisms everywhere, supply-chain turmoil is the order of the day — and yet what Endnotes has called the holding pattern seems obdurately to persist (Endnotes, 2013). Is the current vogue for Strangelovean tariff warfare a symptom or a mutation of the conjuncture limned by The Forgotten Space? The answer to that question would require another essay — and perhaps another film.
[21] Most commentators on Leviathan foreground this segment, offering various accounts of its staging of the relation of the film to the reality TV intertext. Christopher Pavsek is withering in his critique, one that resonates most closely with my own: “At this moment, when the camera finally sits still, a critical perspective opens up, situating the film — perhaps — in the context of the contemporary mediascape; it becomes aware of its own existence as a highly mediatized object. But there seems to me to be a more plausible reading of this moment, for Deadliest Catch appears acousmatically like so much threatening cultural trash that cannot help but anesthetize the fisherman who watches, and against this degraded form, Leviathan appears to be simultaneously sublime and immediate, capable of conveying experience in all its fullness and gravity. Deadliest Catch, then, functions as a placeholder for all those forms of cinema that sensory ethnography opposes, and this moment of apparent self-reflexivity turns out to be a moment of the self-affirmation of the film’s form itself; it is as if the film were saying here that we do not have before us the fictionalized and commodified account of the world of reality TV, but instead we have the deadliest catch, experienced experience, the real real” (Pavsek, 2015: 9).
[22] Unger makes a similar point: “Leviathan is also a film about a film” (Unger, 2017: 15). The episode in Leviathan likewise recollects the amusement/work argument, mentioned above, that Adorno and Horkheimer devised well before the advent of contemporary social media.
[23] Menozzi offers a complementary perspective: “the container becomes an allegory of an uneven capitalist totality but at the same time an allegory of a form of representation, the essay film itself, which can provide a totalizing and panoramic view only as a dialectical counterpart to a realist engagement with the tensions and frictions of the global economy” (Menozzi, 2023: 185). Menozzi’s long, brilliant account of containerization’s contradictions as well as their sustained critique by Sekula alone and in collaboration with Burch has inspired and informed my own analysis of The Forgotten Space.
[24] Resonant for this argument is a point made by Nicholas Anderman and Zachary Hicks about Sekula’s image-work more generally: “Sekula’s images simultaneously demand and inspire … a particularly active mode of seeing that is also a seeking after unseen and unseeable forces. Here, then, we arrive at the covert presence of totality” (Anderman and Hicks, 2021: 12).
Mark Simpson is a professor in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta who investigates energy cultures and the politics of mobility, especially in the US American context. A co-founder of the After Oil Collective and a core member of the Petrocultures Research Group, he has authored many works on energy impasse and energy futurity, including the collectively-authored speculative manifesto Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (Minnesota 2022) and the collaborative theor-poetical book project Energy Emergency Repair Kit (Fordham 2024).
Email: dms7@ualberta.ca
Conflicts of interest
None declared
Funding
None declared
Article history
Article submitted: 24/10/2024
Date of original decision: 31/10/2024
Revised article submitted: 10/3/2025
Article accepted: 18/4/2025
Leave a Reply