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“His Eyes Are Like the Rays of Dawn” : Color Vision and Embodiment in L eviathan
Author(s) -
Hanssen Eirik Frisvold
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
visual anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.346
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1548-7458
pISSN - 1058-7187
DOI - 10.1111/var.12058
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , movie theater , duality (order theory) , aesthetics , art , abstraction , visual arts , philosophy , epistemology , mathematics , pure mathematics
L ucien C astaing‐ T aylor and Véréna P aravel, the filmmakers behind L eviathan (2012), have described the effect of the film's images as seeming both completely disembodied and yet connected to a subjective, embodied experience. The aim of this essay is to address how this duality of embodiment and disembodiment also can be a useful angle to examine the color aesthetics of the film. Focusing on the subjective and unstable nature of color vision, a documentary such as L eviathan becomes an exploration of how both our bodies and different technologies register, reconfigure, and structure external reality. The muddled boundaries between documentary and experimental film that L eviathan exemplifies also fit in with dominant discourses on color and cinema, equally preoccupied with the reproduction of reality as with the aesthetic possibilities for chromatic experimentation and abstraction. In addition to exploring color in L eviathan in terms of moving between the subjective and the disembodied, and the implications of this duality with regard to visual anthropology, I will emphasize how the color aesthetics of the film is a markedly digital one, reflecting the properties of color in digital moving images.