Action camera : L'occhio dell'Antropocene?

Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel is a film about offshore fishing, shot in particularly risky conditions through a special technical equipment: durable and impermeable shooting lights and the so-called ‘action cameras’ (GoPro cameras). The Hobbesian figure of Leviathan mentioned in the title echoes the contractual and commercial power of the techno-capitalist device capable of operating a reification of nature in the open sea for the purposes of consumption. To such figure the monstrous character of the Old Testament is opposed: Leviathan is a sea monster, a figure of chaos that is against the establishment and is capable of fleeing any attempts of capture. The work carried out by the two filmmakers seems to deal with the twofold meanings of the sea monster, giving the film the status of an ethical and political meditation on the natural history of the emergence of humanity: an ethical and political reflection on the Antropocene, a term which identifies the geological epoch corresponding to the emergence of Homo sapiens. But there is more: the film is also an aesthetic celebration of the great potentialities of action camera in exploring the relationship between humans and the environment. The search for control as a way of subordination and reification; the inexhaustibility and the abyss; the forces of origin and of chaos. Can the action camera be hence intended as the eye of the Anthropocene?