Arts & Culture

UVP Highlights Special Indoor Screening of ‘Leviathan’ with Filmmaker in Person

Monday, September 28, 2015, By Anneka Herre

Urban Video Project (UVP) and parent organization Light Work, in collaboration with the Syracuse International Film Festival and the Everson Museum of Art, have announced a special indoor screening of “Leviathan” by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab on Thursday, Oct. 15, at 6:30 p.m. The event will feature Castaing-Taylor in person.

The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow on the plaza.

The indoor screening of “Leviathan” is an official part of the Syracuse International Film Festival program. To view the entire schedule of SIFF events, go to: http://www.filminsyracuse.com/.

This special event is held in conjunction with the exhibition of “Leviathan” from Sept. 17-Oct. 24 at UVP’s outdoor architectural projection venue at the Everson Museum of Art. The related piece, “He Maketh a Path to Shine after Him; One Would Think the Deep to Be Hoary,” is being shown in the Everson Museum’s Cloud-Wampler Gallery from Sept. 19- Nov. 29.

This exhibition is the first installment of “We Were Never Human,” a year-long program of exhibitions and events at Urban Video Project and partner organizations exploring the shifting idea of what it means to be human, feature the work of established and emerging artists who explore the shifting idea of what it means to human, the notion of posthumanism and encounters with the non-human.

About ‘Leviathan’

“Leviathan” (2012) is a groundbreaking, immersive portrait of the contemporary commercial fishing industry. Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Mass., “Leviathan” follows a hulking groundfish trawler into the surrounding murky black waters on a weeks-long fishing expedition. But instead of romanticizing the labor, filmmakers Castaing-Taylor (“Sweetgrass”) and Paravel (“Foreign Parts”) present a vivid, almost kaleidoscopic representation of the work, the sea, the machinery and the players, both human and marine. The film that emerges is unlike anything that has been seen before. Entirely dialogue-free, but mesmerizing and gripping throughout, it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors. “Leviathan” will be on view as an outdoor projection at Urban Video Project (UVP) on the north facade of the north Everson Museum of Art through Oct. 24, every Thursday-Saturday, dusk to 11 p.m.

About ‘He Maketh a Path to Shine after Him; One Would Think the Deep to Be Hoary’

The related video installation, “He Maketh a Path to Shine after Him; One Would Think the Deep to Be Hoary” (2013), is a meditative, durational piece that came out of Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s desire to return to and re-work the thousands of hours of footage shot for “Leviathan.” Where “Leviathan” is intensely visceral, even brutal, in its depiction of the lived reality of deep-sea fishing, “Hoary” opens up space for reflective encounter. Slowed down to 1/50 of the original recording speed, much of the imagery in “Hoary” borders on pure, almost painterly abstraction. In the filmmakers’ own words, “In this flux, one beholds a netherworld of aqueous forms that appear in one frame and disappear or transmogrify into something else in the next.”