Leviathan and the Experience of Sensory Ethnography

This article explores the genre of "sensory ethnography" through an investigation of the film Leviathan (2012, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel) and the critical discourse that has arisen around the film. It argues that even as the film dynamically explores new aesthetic territory, some of its basic presuppositions about the ability for film to convey experience and to represent the sensory world remain unexamined for the ways in which they are themselves conventional. [experience, phenomenology, sensory ethnography, thick description]