This essay considers the film Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, 2012), an experimental documentary filmed aboard a fishing trawler departed from Newport, Massachusetts— once the whaling capital of the world, made famous in Herman Melville’s (1851) Moby Dick —which the directors used as their base of operations and observations. The film is an intimate portrait of a specific human practice—fishing—which here allows for an encounter with otherness: to see how the fishes see, to dive into the raw materiality of steel, to break with all types of humanism. In this manner, the film provides a sensory journey beyond the limits of human perception and understanding.

Leviathan begins with a black screen and strident metallic noises accompanied by the sounds of the wind and the sea. Slowly, light strokes begin to appear in silvery flashes on the darkened background. We catch glimpses of motion in blue and yellow and a stretch of indistinct green shapes. As the disoriented camera continues on, it shows fish and steel chains, a yellow shape, and bright foam against the black of the night sky. From these abstract colors and shapes, figurative forms begin to resolve: the yellow gives way to a man in yellow rain gear and the blue-yellow motion becomes a glove pulling nets through the dark waters. As the camera situates the action aboard an industrial fishing trawler, viewers come to understand that the images they have just seen are fishing gear ruthlessly facing the fury of the natural elements in what resembles a battle of the Titans. For the next eighty-four minutes, the cameras are caught with the fish inside the nets, accompany the flight of the seagulls, dive with the shoals, and travel inside the killing machinery of the fishing vessel. In the absence of any apparent order, guidelines, establishing shots or perspectives, they offer close and intimate snapshots of non-human bodies and matter. The resultant cinematic experience disorients points of view, confounding night and day and underwater and areal perspectives. Everything in Leviathan, as the title suggests, is grand, violent, hallucinatory and strange.

 
In this essay, I will examine Leviathan’s aesthetic framework through philosophical perspectives on the Anthropocene, non-human and multispecies encounters, and Heidegger’s ideas on the essence of modern technology. My aim is to demonstrate that the film aligns with non-anthropocentric and non-humanistic aspects of experience, evoking the sensory understandings of other species that emerge from the convergence of two very specific materialities: the technological devices of image and sound recording, and the bodies and matter they encounter (in this case, everything to do with the sea and the action of fishing, including fish, seagulls, raw fishing machinery, nets, and steel). At the core of the documentary, I argue, is the relationship between nature and technology and the human and the non-human. As we witness an attempt to see the world from within the intimacy of bodies and matter, we explore a new sensorium that functions as a kind of eco-criticism of the Anthropocene and its logo-, anthropocentric perceptive and philosophical frameworks.

 
The essay begins in the first section by exploring how the film’s formal structure creates a “haptic way of seeing” that liberates images from a strictly human perspective and allows for the illusion of a pure encounter with matter. In section two, it probes into the way that encounter questions the philosophical perspectives of the Anthropocene, mainly its nature/culture divide. Section three brings technology into the analysis of the film’s philosophical critique, considering the way it complicates the nature/culture divide by appearing as a hybrid, or even as an ally, of nature against culture. Section four continues to analyze the issue of technology in an attempt to demonstrate that, as a whole, the film is a visual demonstration of the essence of technique as Ge-stell (Heidegger), disclosing the dominant logic of the Anthropocene, which views nature as a permanent standing reserve (Bestand). Section five then explores Leviathan’soscillation between a view of technology as the “supreme danger” and as “that which saves”—Ereignis—demonstrating how, from the depths of the technological ordering of the world, a turn can occur (die Kehre, in Heidegger’s words). In this film, such a turn is dependent on overcoming Heidegger’s strictly human-centered phenomenological perspectives towards a material conception of cinema as non-human perception. This latter idea will be addressed in section six, where we briefly track its genealogy, focusing on the works of Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein and Siegfried Kracauer, among others. Departing from the film’s underlying philosophical perspectives, this article concludes by exploring how the haptic experience of intimacy with matter can function as a form of eco-criticism, creating a new sensorium and urging non-anthropocentric ways of seeing and relating to the world.

 
 
Leviathan is a difficult work to categorize within the conventional genres of cinema. It can be described as an experimental documentary, associating two seemingly contradictory terms.[1] On the one hand, like a documentary, the film focuses on something that pre-exists and is created neither by the imagination nor by the intellect of its authors. It is not a work of fiction. On the other hand, it is an experimental piece that largely discards all cinematographic conventions. In particular, Leviathan explores the full mobility and portability of the GoPro and miniature DSLR cameras used to film it. To capture the unconventional viewpoints and angles noted earlier, cameras were affixed to the heads, chests and wrists of fishermen’s bodies; underwater poles; and fishing nets that were repeatedly submerged and pulled from the water. They were thereby able to follow schools of fish and capture diving seagulls from an underwater perspective, with a few birds even hitting the cameras. The GoPros were also set on the top of the ship’s mast, where they surveyed crewmembers working on the narrow deck and even accompanied an exhausted fisherman in a confined shower.
 

The action of removing the cameras from the standard, eye-level point of view liberates the film from the human perspective and creates de-anthropomorphized imagery. The formal options seem to acknowledge that the multiplicity of species and (living and non-living) entities in this ecosystem necessarily have different points of view. As the cameras take various perspectives, they refrain from privileging any one species in particular. All beings have the same status, are treated in the same way, and are given the same importance. This is confirmed by a detail at the end of the film; as Pat Dowell observes, “in the credits Leviathan lists not only the fishermen, unnamed in the course of the film, but also each bird species, the moon (‘Luna’), the sea (‘Mare’), and every fish species” (2013). By de-centralizing the points of view of human characters, the narrator, and directors, Leviathon inverts the conventional parameters of cinema. The holders of the point of view are not the human characters, the narrator, or even the directors. As Bégin notes, referring to the use of GoPro cameras in Leviathan,: “The GoPro camera is a recording device that emancipates the sensitivity of human and non-human bodies from the intelligible discourse normally expressed on their subject by an interpreter’s gaze” (2016, 112). This radical shift away from human perspective is what we see in the first moments of the film, when we struggle to make sense of the light and sounds referred to in the introduction. The focus on sensorial experiences urges an abandonment of all attempts at rational interpretation of the pro-filmic material, creating an eminently haptic experience.

 
Before turning to the many characteristics of the haptic experience in Leviathan, let us briefly define the haptic and explain its conceptualization throughout the history of the visual arts. In Late Roman Art Industry ,first publish in 1901, Alois Riegl (1985) uses the term in contrasting a haptic to an optical perception. For him, the haptic or tactile refers to the lack of perspective or depth in Egyptian art, which he attributes not to the artists’ lack of awareness of the mathematical rules of perspective, but to their lack of interest in the presentation of empty space. Egyptians considered space a mere absence of materiality, or emptiness. Since for them space connoted an absence—of bodies and matter—they didn’t see the relevance of representing it. Rather, (deep) space was an obstacle to understanding the absolute individuality and materiality of an object. For this reason, Egyptian artists ignored depth, representing objects in a way that repressed foreshortening and shadows in what Riegl called a tactile perception (1985, 25). Focusing on the tactile would allow viewers to grasp separate entities in their material inviolability and presence. That is, touch, not sight, provided information about the closed surface of objects. From here, Riegl concludes that ancient art was predominantly tactile, engaging the eye to work like the hand, as exemplified in the Egyptians’ bas-reliefs, which, according to Gilles Deleuze, Riegl describes as follows: “Bas-relief brings about the most rigid link between the eye and the hand because its element is the flat surface, which allows the eye to function like the sense of touch; furthermore, it confers, and indeed imposes, upon the eye a tactile, or rather haptic, function; it thereby ensures, in the Egyptian “will to art,” the joining together of the two senses of touch and sight, like the soil and the horizon” (2005, 85). In other words, the haptic establishes a link between the eye and the hand, training the eye to touch.
 

 
In opposition to haptic art, Riegl describes optical art of the late Roman period.  Optical art seeks to inscribe objects within an infinite and unified space. Governed by geometrical and mathematical rules, this space is abstract and deprived of materiality. Rather than emptiness, optical art sees space as the frame that organizes the relationship between objects. While haptic art focuses on the concrete, unique materiality of objects, optical art is more preoccupied with abstract rules and seeing from a distance (1985, 67). More specifically, it tends to home in on a single, object-independent space, equal in all circumstances and internally consistent, in which entities stand in their proper relationships. Riegl further explains that haptic vision emphasizes touch while optical vision minimizes it (1985, 26)  His contrast of haptic versus optical art articulates the objective/abstract and tactile/optical binaries that go on to govern his analysis.
Based on Riegl’s pioneering analysis, the notion of the haptic has been further developed by Walter Benjamin (1935)in relation to the tactile quality of cinema Gilles Deleuze (2005) through his concept of the “logic of sensation,” and, more recently, Laura Marks (2000; 2002). It has been used to define a kind of perception that subverts optical-spatial organization, including that facilitated by Renaissance perspective, camera obscura, and photographic optical devices with linear coordinates and exterior and fixed viewpoints that offer a distant view.[2] Erwin Panofsky (1991) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) have also offered analyses of the Renaissance perspective that relate to the rediscovery of the haptic and its critique of modernity. Broadly speaking, Panofsky argues that because the optical mimesis based on Alberti’s perspective was founded on an eminently mathematical model, it acquired the status of truth. He explains that perspective mathematized visual space and, in doing so, raised art to the status of truth, establishing the paradigm of both visuality and mimesis that would last for almost five centuries. During the Renaissance, the image of visual space was fully rationalized on a mathematical level. The era succeeded in accomplishing what had not previously been possible—a unitary and non-contradictory spatial construction of infinite extension in which bodies and intervals of empty space were united according to certain laws. Through Panofsky’s argument, we can infer that by raising representative images to the status of “truth,” the fifteenth-century visual model opened the door to the coronation of vision. The eye was treated as infinitely richer, more opulent, more magnificent—and above all, more “real”—than any other sense. In the Renaissance, the Enlightenment’s equation of vision with reason (the eye and the rational mind) was already anticipated (1991, 29-31).
 

 
Following Panofsky’s critique of the Renaissance, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) views the construction of the image according to perspective rules as a tendency to replace “lived-space” with a mathematical, dematerialized, geometric, logical visual simulacrum. Rather than “naturalness,” Merleau-Ponty associates these efforts with a cyclopean eye that is completely detached from the senses and the sensible world. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism extends to Alberti’s construccione legittima and to the Cartesian conception of space (1964, 50). Both seek to transform “lived space” into a network of relationships between objects seen by an external witness or a geometer that looks down, up and reconstructs them from a distance. The fixity, immobility, organization, continuity and spatial uniformity that we find in Renaissance images legitimates the fantasy of omnivision and the illusion of a single point of view according to which the perceiving subject can relate to the objective world, which is neutrally detached from the subject and stands as an object or thing. In this manner, the fifteenth-century optical image prefigures modern objectivity.
More recently, Laura Marks has been exploring the haptic quality of film and video images. Rather than pull us into abstracted space, these haptic images “encourage a bodily relation to the screen itself before the point at which the viewer is pulled into the figures of the image and the exhortation of the narrative” (2002, 17). Marks further argues that haptic visuality has a strong sense of the material connection between vision, the viewer’s body, and the object.
 

 
 
The haptic qualities of Leviathan rely on the consistent use of disorienting close-ups, taken as the GoPro cameras literally dive into matter, immersing themselves in the material entities of fishing. The decentered perspectives that result liberate images from the standard, fixed point of view of the human eye. Impregnated with matter, the filmic angle establishes relationships with the entities (human and non-human) it encounters, embodying their movement and rhythm. The eye functions like the hand, “touching” the material entities and developing a strong proximity to the pro-filmic world. The viewer experiences the boat moving at an accelerated pace, the fish swimming swiftly, the nets ripping the animals from the sea, and the relentless slicing and cutting of the machines. In this manner, at its core Leviathan is an insubordinate celebration of flow, disorganization and material existence. In addition to these formal elements, the film’s hallucinatory montage offers an experience of fragmentation, as the editing dispenses with any external logos according to which images might be organized. Diverse points of view proliferate through the constant shift in perspective. 

 
Christopher Pavsek stresses the extent to which Leviathan puts Castaing-Taylor’s “visceral distrust of words or discursivity, a logophobia” into filmic practice (2015, 4). This logophobia, argues Pavsek, “appears in Castaing-Taylor (and Paravel’s) interviews in terms very familiar with ‘Iconophobia’; as a distaste for, variously, propositional knowledge, narrative voiceover, the preresearched and the pretextualized, the false clarity of explanation, and didacticism more generally” (5). The “logophobia” that Pavsek discovers in Leviathan is manifest not only in the quasi-total absence of words, but also in the film’s annulment of the very logic that structures and allows for discursive thinking. In the place of such logic, or logos, it offers unfamiliar images filmed through disorientating perspectives and chaotic movements. The hegemony of the interpretive subject as the structuring basis of cinema gives way to a configuration centered neither on ideas, plot, dialogue, nor rational organization of any kind, but on the presence and movement of bodies. We are left with physical sensations, disintegrated perceptions, flashes of light and glances of movement that reunite the spectator with the material world.
 
 

 
Through the haptic qualities of Leviathan, viewers are called to abandon their usual, optical ways of seeing. The film proposes not a set of ideas about industrial fishing nor even an appreciation of the clash provoked by the invasion of nature by human activity, but rather something much deeper: it invites us to embark on a sensory journey beyond the human gaze. Paravel (2013) confirms that it was an anthropological imperative for her that the footage be created without anyone looking through the viewfinder of the camera. This allowed the film to be “embodied,” as though “the body is the eye, basically” (2013). That said, although it is true that the film addresses the “body as eye,” the perspective of the cameras does not completely overlap with that of the fish or with the fisherman’s body. Nor does it coincide with the body of the waves or of the boat.  The cameras have a material body of their own. In this light, the non-human images are not simply “embodied.” As technological material entities in their own right, the cameras offer their perspective on encounters with other entities, the most fascinating and vigorous of which occur at border crossings, such as the perspectives of the fish or the entanglement of the cameras with the flow of the fishing nets. Through the role of the camera, cinema provides a constant reminder of the role technological agency plays in configuring our worldview Through its own form of embodiment, the camera in Leviathan eschews the imposition of an outside and abstract subject that assumes authoritative knowledge of the pro-filmic world and its ocularcentric conventions. It immerses itself in matter through technology, demonstrating that cinema is not merely a tool but a body in its own right. The resultant haptic experience is not simply one of embodiment but one of encounter, proximity, or intimacy among bodies taken as pure material entities.

 
 
The film’s title, Leviathan, refers simultaneously to a biblical maritime monster of fearful proportions, to the sea and its sublime features, and to the great Hobbesian Titan composed of human powers and governed by the logic of domination through force. But it also designates the film itself, as the technological devices of cinema function like a titan toward which spectators are sensorially dragged and submerged. As Scott MacDonald argues: “The film’s title seems to be a reference to the Biblical Leviathan, a large sea monster or whale, but the leviathan in Leviathan is the film itself” (2013, 299). Like the Titans of Greek mythology, the biblical Leviathan is in conflict with the spiritual forces of culture. The reference confirms the way the film’s entanglement with the nature/culture divide places it in dialogue with one of the most important pillars of Western culture: the belief that there is an irreducible difference between culture and nature and an ongoing conflict between the two. This conception and its role in the Anthropocene’s dominant worldview has been much debated.[3] As Donna Haraway observes: “The distinction between nature and culture has been a sacred one [in Western culture]; it lies at the heart of the great narratives of salvation history and their genetic transmutation into sagas of secular progress” (1997, 60). In particular, Greek cosmogony conceived of the world as a continuing war between the Titans (natural forces) and the spiritual gods of Olympus. The latter are the founders of the very same culture that was delivered to humans by Prometheus’s fire. In its turn, the Judeo-Christian religion is based on the idea that humans are different from the rest of creation. God, having created the universe and all living things, also created the masterpiece that is the human being, made in his image. It posits humankind as an exceptional species among the rest of creation and urges humans to uphold spirituality over their natural side, animalitas, which is frequently regarded as a source of evil and menace.
[i] See, among others, Latour 1993; Descola 2013; and Viveiros de Castro 1996.

 
With the dawn of modernity, the difference between culture and nature began to rely on a distinction between humans and non-humans, opposing what the latter lacks (spirit) and the former retains (reason). The Cartesian cogito, or Kant’s transcendental subject, developed into an idea of human reason as a pure subject that relates to the world taken as a pure object. As such, modernity’s idea of progress rests on the belief that nature, deprived of spirituality, is a stable and constant standing reserve upon which humanity can exercise its domination and power. Juxtaposed to this conception of human exceptionalism is the idea that nature is “without world.” As Bruno Latour highlights, since nature and things have no world, they are also conceived of as being without agency: “Most of the social sciences and most of philosophy since Kant have been without a world. Things do nothing. What you learn at the beginning of sociology, especially if it’s continental theory, Bourdieu or Frankfurt, is precisely that things do not act. Are we so naive as to think that things act? No, we know very well that it’s the projection of our own society and value onto things which do nothing” (2003, 79).Because nature has no world, it is considered a pure object, a mere setting without agency, spirit or logos. As Derrida writes in his reflections on the use of the word “animal”:

 
 
Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give. These humans are found giving it to themselves, this word, but as if they had received it as an inheritance. They have given themselves the word in order to corral a large number of human beings within a single concept: ‘the Animal’, they say. And they have given it to themselves, this word, at the same time according themselves, reserving for them, for humans, the right to the word, the name, the naming noun (nom), the verb, the attribute, to a language of words, in short to the very thing that the others in question would be deprived of, those that are corralled within the grand territory of the beasts: The Animal. All the philosophers we will investigate (from Aristotle to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas), all them say the same thing: the animal is deprived of language. (2008, 32)
 
 

 
 
Leviathan unfolds within this worldview, revolving around the encounter between the human and the non-human, which takes the form of a series of confrontations between the ocean and the boat’s hull; the fish’s living bodies and the serial-killing machines on-board the trawler; and the flight of the seagulls and the industrial treatment of living matter. The resultant imagery illustrates the disruption caused by the intrusion of industrial fishing devices in the Ocean and their encounter with the material bodies (living and non-living) in the sea’s natural ecosystem.
The montage of images in the film also facilitates a cinematic enquiry into the possibility of multispecies encounters. Castaing-Taylor explains that the film’s main aim was to question “where to situate humanity in the cosmos we were constructing.” As he continues, “For all of the inherent anthropomorphism of cinema, we had a kind of post-humanist ambition to relativize the human in a larger physical and metaphysical domain of both interspecies bestiality and of animate-inanimate promiscuity, one in which humans, fish, birds, machines, and the elements would have a kind of restless ontological parity” (MacDonald 2013, 327). He further explains: “We still wanted to create this multiplicity of perspectives that would relativize the human,” perspectives that “would make the spectator rethink humanity’s relationship to nature, in relationship to a plethora of other beings, of other animals, of other kinds of inanimate objects—the elements, the earth, the sky, the sea, the boat, mechanization, fish, crustaceans, starfish—everything that is involved in the ecology of what’s going on in industrial fishing today” (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel 2013).
 
 

 
 
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, technology acquired a profound emancipatory meaning, onthe one hand liberating humankind from hard labor and on the other guaranteeing its increased sovereignty over the natural world. It became the great ally of the human project of dominating nature. As a result of this framework, in Western cultures, humans have come to see culture as unmistakably separate from nature and “progress” as the development of the technological and scientific knowledge that guarantees their continued supremacy over the natural world. In Leviathan, this very conception reveals some of its most brutal features. At first, technology seems to be on the side of culture in conquering the natural world. As the film unfolds, however, that perspective begins to weaken. The camera aligns itself more with a non-human point of view, stressing the violent yet sublime sides of the technological enterprise, which, in this sense, parallels the force of the ocean. It shows that an act like fishing is not only violent from the perspective of non-human entities, but that the humans involved are also technologically mobilized and forced to adjust to the very same willingness that invades the natural environment.
In this vein, the film also oscillates between showing technological agency as a human activity, which is manifest in its portrayal of industrial fishing machinery, and stressing its overwhelming power as a force that transcends humans. It emphasizes that humans themselves are deeply technologically ordered and managed, situated within a logic where their actions are enmeshed with those of industrial machinery. As filmic techniques level the distinction between humans and other objects, they become an integral part of a gear that transcends human subjectivity. It is here where the film stages its critique of the role that technology plays within the Anthropocene’s nature/culture divide, giving rise to the questions: Is technology in fact a mere instrument in the hands of humanity for dominating nature? Or does it hide other attributions, other essences, other agencies?

 
 
Ernst Jünger’s conception of technology as a manifestation of the “natural will to power,” which he borrowed from Nietzsche, can help us further interpret the role technology plays in the film. Jünger (2017) believes that technology, like a storm, is a natural force committed to power, not an instrument of human culture. Rather than create new technological forms, he argues that the pursuit of technological “progress” brings natural forces, which have been unveiled by science, into the cultural realm. In this manner, technology becomes a tool or a “Trojan horse” by which nature, in the passionate will to power at work in all of life, conquers culture (2017). Applied to Leviathan, Jünger’s insights underlie the experience of technology as a natural force or a non-human potency, which are echoed by Martin Heidegger’s conception of modern technology both as “the supreme danger” and as “that which saves.” (1977, 28).[4] Interpreted through Heidegger and Jünger’s theories on technology, the film seems to endorse the view that “modern technology is no merely human doing” (Heidegger 1977, 19). But, what exactly does this mean? What does it mean to say that modern technology is “no merely human doing,” and how does this idea apply to Leviathan?
 

 
 
According to Heidegger, the question, “what is technology?” usually results in one of two answers: “One says: technology is a means to an end. The other says: technology is a human activity” (1977, 4). The former corresponds to the instrumental conception of technology, the latter to the anthropocentric. Both endorse all of the misinterpretations of the humanistic/modernist project of ruling and dominating the natural world. In addition, Heidegger argues that the essence of technique (techné) has changed since the advent of modernity: it is characterized not by production or making (Her-stell), but by enframing (Ge-stell).
In German, the term stell—common to all kinds of techné—denotes making; in the Heideggerian context, it therefore takes on the meaning of disclosure, bringing into presence, or putting into work, and acquires a provocative, violent connotation when applied to technology. While nature is forced to release or supply its energy, the energy of Ge-stell, or modern technology, is a “violent setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth” (Heidegger 1973, 479 It is a “provocation” in which all that is disclosed is forced to take a pre-determinate configuration: “Nature, made available to provide energy, now appears as a ‘reservoir’ of energy.” If nature supplies its energy, man is forced (gestellt) to respond and correspond to the energies that are produced, to the point that we can say: “The greater the provocation of nature, the greater the provocation to which man himself is subjected” (1973, 480). It’s important to stress that the disclosure carried out by modern technology does not simply produce, it provokes. It thus denotes an ordering (Bestellen)[5]  and a provocation (Herausforderung). We see this combination in the term Herausfordern, which comprises the verb fordern (to provoke, to intimidate, to demand) and the prefixes her (to here) and aus (out, uncovered). It literally means to demand the exit (the appearance) here. What does this mean? What precisely does it mean to say that modern technology does not produce, but rather provokes? According to Heidegger, modern technology orders in the double sense of the verb “to order”: it commands, and therefore necessarily intimidates, and it puts things in a specific organization. Everything it discloses is automatically framed in a previous configuration. There is no space for the unexpected or for the indeterminate; there is no production in which entities are simply allowed to disclose or unveil themselves freely. Rather, humans enter a field in which entities are violently forced to disclose what is hidden according to a previous frame. The provocation is maximal.
 

 
In Leviathan, Heidegger’s description of modern technology is evoked through the ordering of all entities according to the external logic of industrial fishing: the ocean is reduced to a mere standing reserve; the serialized fish-killing machines serve as the frames within which all entities are filtered, organized and put in order; and the cinematic devices capture the world and rearrange it according to a pre-given structure. All beings in the film thus appear under the aegis of technological ordering and provocation. Through the recurrent shots from inside the fishing nets, animals are forcibly removed from the vast, fluid habitat of the ocean and placed into serial production machines, where their bodies are cut according to the logic of industrial organization. The provocation and ordering of fish then extends to all entities in this environment. The ocean, waves, seagulls, and even humans and their fishing gear all appear under what Heidegger would describe as Bestand (standing reserve),[6] which refers to the way entities are disclosed under technological enframing. As stressed, Heidegger argues that with modern technology, humans (who are the agents of provocation toward the world) are also strongly provoked. Thus, he argues that Ge-stell is the “reciprocal provocation of man and being for the calculation of what is calculable” (1991, 146). With modern technology, entities are provoked to disclose what is hidden in them in a non-harmonious way, nullifying any other possibilities of disclosure.
Having already analyzed the meaning of the term Stellen in this context, the key to further understanding this process is an analysis of the prefix Ge- in the term Ge-stell. Heidegger (1973, 479) clarifies that the Ge– in Ge-stell serves as a concentration of all modes of stellen. It strives to express the gathering of all forms of setting upon and disclosing, the assembling of all possibilities of configuration into a single point. Thus, Ge-stell aims to denote a specific constellation in which all other forms of making disappear. As explained, in modern technology, everything is standardized, ordered and provoked. This explains why the Ge-stell, or the essence of modern technology, is seen as the “supreme danger,” annihilating any other possibilities of stellen. [7] As a result, the provocation carried out by technology also entails the total closure of the Real. Only that which occupies a pre-given position in a previously established structure is disclosed; only that which fits on the in-formative grid of the Real can be unveiled. Thus, the Ge-stell is “the danger” because it obliterates any other forms of disclosing. It also hides itself as a form of unveiling, disguising its essence under the cover of “instrumentality” to appear instead as an instrument of progress, a tool for the inevitable drive of culture towards development, power and domination over nature.

 

 
 
As we have seen, the attributions of modern technology as the “supreme danger” are clear in Leviathan. The film vividly embodies the essence of modern technology as Ge-stell. However, Leviathan also effects a rupture, perhaps opening the door to what Heidegger, borrowing from Hölderlin, would designate as that which saves. As Heidegger theorizes later in his career, the “saving power” emerges from within the ever-growing danger in modern technology. Whereas in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger (1977) first described the main characteristic of Bestand as a “stable position,” fifteen years later he believed that this “stable position” was in a process of deep transformation. He came to view the main characteristics of Bestand as consisting of “permanent availability” and Eretzbarkeit, or the “fact that each entity becomes essentially replaceable, in a generalized game where everything takes the place of everything” (1973, 456). As technology develops, the stable position becomes more of a “permanent availability,” where things lose all identity. Thus, “Bestand’s ontological determination (of the entity as standing reserve) is not Beständigkeit (stable position), but Beistellbarkeit, the constant possibility of being commanded and commanded, that is, of being permanently available. In Bestellbarkeit, the entity is presented as fundamentally and exclusively available—available for consummation in the global calculation” (1973, 456). This reformulation of the characteristics of the standing reserve is concomitant with the development of new electronic and digital technologies as opposed to mechanical ones. But it is also dependent on a strategy that is internal to the very development of Heidegger’s thought. For Heidegger, overcoming the “supreme danger” corresponds to the “emergence” of a new stage in the relationship between man and being, and is theorized in the idea of Ereignis.[8]
 

 
 
As Heidegger posits later in his life, technology also introduces disruptive elements in relation to modernity’s logical-scientific thinking. Through technological agency, a new fluidity replaces the objectivity characteristic of modern thought. Liberating the fixed, stable attributions of objects, Ge-stell sets forth an impulse that dissolves objects into an indistinct mass, the standing reserve, that combines object and subject, nature and culture, natural beings and artifacts, and the pro-filmic world and that created by cinematic devices. Modern technology is thereby part of a process of endless disintegration, redistribution and re-aggregation. Dreyfus and Spinosa describe the Heideggerian dissolution of subject and object as “a corollary of the rapid changes in identity and technologically assisted multi-perspectivism in this post-human era that can also be an announcing sign of ‘that which saves’” (1997, 173). Stressing that Heidegger’s diagnosis of modern technology is thus not totally negative, they write that it “free[s] us from having a total fixed identity so that we may experience ourselves as multiple identities disclosing multiple worlds is what Heidegger calls technology’s saving power” (173). In the same vein, Arthur Kroker (2004, 33-73) posits that what he terms a “hyper-Heidegger” would help us see that contemporary “hyper-technologies” can, through a permanent deconstruction of the realm in which they move, open the door to a new type of relation to the world.
It is this type of relation that comes forth in Leviathan. Through Heidegger, we can understand the film’s technologically assisted multi-perspectivism as what makes possible the multispecies encounters, non-anthropocentric views and haptic experience. The decentralization of the senses that occurs during the viewing experience uncouples perception from the hegemony of the eye’s abstract and logocentric liaisons. Analyzing the extent to which the particular ordering and provocation brought by the technological fishing activity becomes visible and can be recognized as such, as Heidegger envisages, would allow us to more precisely locate the Ereignis in the film. It is clear that the entire film is a visual demonstration of the essence of the technique as Ge-stell that addresses nature as a permanent standing reserve (Bestand). It relies on raw images of violent encounters between living beings and machinery, disclosing the predatory logic of industrial fishing from a non-human perspective. Deprived of all anthropocentrism, what stands out is the brutality of the provocation directed against all beings in that environment. In this case, technology ceases to hide its essence as Ge-stell, which Heidegger describes as a first step toward radical change, a turn. The brutal logic of the Ge-stell that we experience cannot leave us indifferent. Its titanic dimensions appear as a “supreme danger” to both human and non-human beings. 

 
 
The idea that the Ge-stell can bring about its own overcoming is embodied in this film not only through the unveiling of technology’s essence, but also through the dissolution of the division between object and subject, or nature and culture. The immersion into non-human points of view brought on through the film’s haptic imagery initiates an abandonment of the anthropocentric, pointing towards a way out of modernity’s thinking and towards a new relationship to nature and other species. Nonetheless, it remains important to stress that even as Leviathan incorporates much of Heidegger’s critiques of technology (and some of his hopes), it distances itself from key Heideggerian views—mainly from his accounts of animals as being wordless, understood as a deficient mode of human existence. In this sense, the film’s main aspiration is not a Heideggerian project of reencountering the Anthropos, but of overcoming it. Seen in this way, Leviathan embodies the way in which modern technology can transform and pervert not only ocular- and logocentrism, but also anthropocentrism, as images expand beyond the limits of the human body and human “unveiling.” 

 
 
Leviathan demonstrates the extent to which film has the capacity to create non-human images that emerge from the convergence of two materialities: the technological devices of image recording and editing, and the bodies and matter they encounter in the process. This idea is not new to the long history of cinema. Early film theorists of the twenties and thirties, including Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein and Siegfried Kracauer, all posited that the technological essence of cinema allows us to see and hear beyond the human eye and ear. All three located cinema’s most important quality in its ability to uncover features of reality that are otherwise invisible to human perception. Vertov famously summarizes this idea through his description of film as a “mechanical” or “kino-eye”:
 
 

 
 
I am a kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility. I am in constant motion. I draw near, then away from objects. I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies…. Free from the sixteen-seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you. (1984, 17-18)
 
 

 
 
The GoPro cameras and other filming and editing devices in Leviathan indeed function as a “kino-eye,” making visible aspects of the world that the stable human point of view cannot grasp.
Epstein along with other filmmakers of the first French avant-garde, shared Vertov’s premise through the idea of the “intelligence of the machine.” (2014), Epstein saw film in particular as a thinking machine, or an eye outside of the eye, whose power to see both surpasses and adds to the power of the human eye. By showing us the world from a non-subjective, non-human perspective, film becomes a “revelatory medium.” [9] Both the mechanical eye of the camera and cinema’s ability to highlight motion contribute to this capacity, since they can capture the mobility of reality, as opposed to the human tendency to immobilize through perception. Epstein summarizes these theories in the concept of Photogenie, which he considers to be “the purest expression of cinema” (1924, 6). During the first decades of cinema, photogénie was defined as a relationship involving the mediation and transformation of the Real through the camera, editing and the screen. It acquired a quasi-magical quality that rendered previously unknown visions—inconceivable without the technological union of the lens and reality—and offered non-human visions and perspectives. Epstein’s photogenie more specifically condenses the pro-filmic world with the mechanical (camera, editing and projection) and the filmmaker’s subjectivity, summarizing film’s revelatory quality: “Cinema can get a new power that, renouncing the logic of facts, engenders a sequence of unknown visions—inconceivable outside the union of objective and the mobile film” (1924, 6). Photogenie offers a pleasure that the viewer can neither describe verbally nor rationalize cognitively. It permits the association of film with the experience of the irrational and incommensurable, facilitating access to realities and dimensions that did not exist prior to the encounter between the lens, celluloid, light and the object being filmed. Germaine Dulac also famously used the term photogénie to summarize the potential of cinematographic technological devices that fuse the technological with “reality” through “the shot and the shooting angles, the fade, the dissolve, superimposition, soft focus, and distortions” (1924, 306). Rather than eliminating reality, Dulac’s version of photogénietransforms it into something completely new (Delluc 1920).
 

 
 
In the same line of thought, and more than a decade later, Siegfried Kracauer will criticize Modernity’s emphasis on abstractions, for which science is the main responsible (1997, 50), and will praise cinema’s capacity to address and deal directly with matter.  Bresson will  also refer to: “That which no human eye is capable of capturing, any pencil, brush, feather of fixing, your camera captures without knowing what it is and fixes it with the scrupulous indifference of a machine” (1986, 26). He further explains: “Your camera catches not only physical movements that are inapprehensible by pencil, brush or pen, but also certain states of soul recognizable by indices which it alone can reveal” (97). In the same spirit, almost a century later, Leviathan finds a non-human perspective through the mechanical eye of the GoPro. Liberated from a human perspective, a fluidity forms in the material dimensions of the world, allowing for a surfacing of the non-human presence in what seems hostile and foreign. While understanding that the non-human can never be entirely integrated into subjectivity or human meaning, Leviathan aims to situate it into a particular expression of life that unfolds independently of human perception.
The film, in this sense, is an aesthetic experiment that questions the extent to which it is possible to access the non-human world without reducing it to an inhumane humanity or glorifying it as a kind of underlying structure whose connection to the human can be found in embodied perception. The constant dismemberment of images, the successive temporal and spatial collapses, and the dizzying visual and sound montage all contribute to the film’s aim of resisting anthropocentric thinking. The filmic experience struggles permanently against the urge to settle into a fixed viewpoint, concept, or interpretation, looking for meaning beyond the physicality of matter. It achieves this through the dual process of creating the imagery with the GoPro cameras and organizing the images and sounds in editing. It is via these two levels that the film effectively “touches” the spectator and provides him or her with the uncanny sensory experience of being beyond the human. In this manner, the visuality of Leviathan conditions the possibility of encounters between the human and the non-human. Its haptic experience functions as the place in which bodies—technological devices, the vessel, the sea water, the human bodies of the spectators, and the marine bodies of the ocean animals—can resonate without being reduced either to each other or to the Anthropos.

 
 
In opposition to erudite art forms, which foster the optical perception that accepts the authoritarian “aura” of an object, Benjamin (1935) allows us to view the tactile possibilities of popular cinema that initiate a haptic viewing experience. Through “tactile perception,” the contemplative value of optical art is replaced by a use value that inhabits a work of art. The audience becomes involved in the work, playing an active role in the interpretation of meaning and, in the process, acknowledging the lack of a pre-given reality or natural order. In other words, the process of viewing a film facilitates the realization that “reality” and “meaning” are constructions, created in tandem by filmmakers and spectators. Even if not fully aware of the process, a state that Benjamin describes as “absent-minded,” audiences produce interpretations and criticism continually as they watch a film (1935, 19). They are not passive viewers, but active players whose perception of reality is being challenged through perceptive shocks even if they are not aware of the critical embodied processes they are performing (1935, 17). Cinema’s spectator, Benjamin stresses, integrates criticism in the very act of perception. The perception of film’s perception is critical in itself.
Before Benjamin’s theory on film, this idea was already an important aesthetic value in Dadaism, which aimed to generate moral shocks that would challenge social, political and cultural values. Futurism viewed “perceptive shocks” as signs of a new era dominated by mechanistic relationships and machines. Movements like the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands and Constructivism in Russia all thought that technological shocks accompanied the development of modern technology and could be instruments of social liberation. Influenced by these ideas, experimental filmmakers believed that cinema held a privileged position when it came to questioning old conceptions and views. As a medium of the senses, it works directly on the nervous system, creating physical disruptions and a new kind of viewer. It is able to produce not only moral shocks but also physical ones. In this sense, avant-garde artists anticipated (and likely inspired) Benjamin’s ideas about the physical disruption produced by cinema and its tactile dimension. All of these strategies are closely connected to the exploration and development of the technological aspect of cinema and its facilitation of a non-human vision.

 
 
Following in the vein of the non-human, post-anthropocentric perspectives such as that of Leviathan undermine the notion of humans as “unique, isolated entities,” drawing us instead, as Robert Pepperell argues, “towards a conception of existence in which the human is totally integrated with the world in all its manifestations, including nature, technology, and other beings” (quoted in King and Page 2017, 164). Because Leviathan dwells in human and non-human encounters, it leads to an understanding of human culture according to a model of distributed agency that transcends divisions between the human and the non-human. It reminds us that humans are not outside observers of the world. Nor are “they simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity” (181). Due to its experimental features, Leviathan raises deep questions on the subject of perception, offering real possibilities beyond the usual ways of interpreting the world and the images that prompt perceptual shocks. The film struggles to disrupt our usual perceptions by challenging our viewing habits and expectations. In doing so, it contributes to our wider ecological awareness, grasping a new ecological sensorium that will be able to question the Anthropocene at its very heart, that is, in its own perceptual and cognitive relation to the non-human.
As we have seen, Leviathan’s aim of de-anthropomorphizing our point of view leads us to abandon the human logos, overcoming ocularcentrism and moving within a haptic visuality that promotes immersion, proximity, intimacy, non-human points of view and the abandonment of anthropocentric relations to the world. The abandonment of logos is achieved not only through focusing on the haptic, but also through the succession of physically disturbing experiences. Loud noises, clashes of images, hallucinatory montages, the confusion of day and night, and disorienting points of view all prompt the total abandonment of reflexive thinking, welcoming a subversion of orientation. The film therebydemonstrates that in our careful distinctions between nature and culture, there exists another seemingly contrary phenomenon: the entanglement of technology and nature, of humans and non-humans. As images and sounds proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture (the two Leviathans in the film) in separate chambers becomes increasingly unlikely. We experience a new kind of bodily entanglement. As such, what Leviathan ultimately offers is a new challenge to an art form that has the capacity to reveal the connections between matter, providing a glimpse into a post-Anthropocene era.

 
 
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First published in Courtney Vail Fletcher; Alexa MacKellar Dare  (eds), Intimate Relations: Communicating in the Anthropocene. Lanham : Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield.  pp. 299-320.