Six Knots

To reduce ambient noise when approaching a cetacean, a vessel should not exceed six knots. A long-standing symbol of the distance between human and animal, the whale is a site of mystery, fascination and exploitation.

Six knots is the maximum speed recommended when approaching a whale. Six, like the number of chapters that Ali Vanderkruyk deploys around a fascination with this mythical mammal – the same obsession that inspired works now assigned the stature of giants, above all, Moby Dick, which provides the quote that opens the film. In the distance recommended for the whales’ protection, image and sound are impressively rich and diverse: archive footage from whaling campaigns, scientists transporting carcasses, IRM and LIDAR scanners used to understand how whales die: engravings, skeletons, all kinds of cross-sectional imaging. In the almost total absence of images of living whales, Six Knots mainly focuses on the relationship to their capture: how they were caught in fishing nets and the meshes of science, direct prey or collateral victims of an extractive relationship to the living. The six chapters depict the various approaches to the study of the death and conservation of the cetaceans off the west coast of Canada; as many ways of highlighting the scientific, industrial, military or colonial encroachments on their existence, but also questioning documentary film about a similar sort of exploitation of its subjects. Celebrating distance through a complex, precise form and an open, fragmented structure, to disentangle the gaze from predatory ambitions, untie some knots and liberate the mysteries of the images that claim to capture them.

Antoine Thirion