As with the pioneering anthropological works of Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner, the founder of Harvard’s Film Study Center (which Mr. Castaing-Taylor now directs), the best films to have emerged from the lab are potent reminders that documentary and art are not mutually incompatible. As Mr. Castaing-Taylor put it: “What does it mean to try to produce an artwork after months of doing field work and when you get really close to people? What kind of art can be generated by that?”

The answers are as striking as they are varied. Mr. Castaing-Taylor’s “Sweetgrass” (2009), which he made with Ilisa Barbash, also an anthropologist and a curator at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, is a visually majestic chronicle of Montana sheep ranchers, filmed over the course of three summer pastures. Véréna Paravel’s and J. P. Sniadecki’s “Foreign Parts” (2010) is a lived-in portrait, tender but unsentimental, of an endangered junkyard neighborhood in Willets Point, Queens.

Stephanie Spray has worked extensively in Nepal, producing intricate sound pieces and intimate family portraits like “As Long as There’s Breath” (2009). Mr. Sniadecki’s latest, “People’s Park,” which he directed with Libbie Dina Cohn, is a single-shot tour of a bustling park in Chengdu, China, achieved through careful planning, multiple takes and an evident rapport with the park’s denizens.

“Leviathan,” a new film by Ms. Paravel and Mr. Castaing-Taylor, is perhaps the most radical work yet to emerge from the lab and certainly the one that goes furthest in striving for an immersive cinematic experience. Shot entirely aboard a fishing trawler off the Massachusetts coast, largely with small, waterproof digital cameras that were variously tethered to the fishermen, tossed in with their dead or dying catch and plunged into the roiling ocean, the film had its premiere in competition last month at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where it won the international critics’ prize. It will be shown next week at the Toronto International Film Festival, in the Wavelengths section for innovative cinema and at the New York Film Festival.

A portrait of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic as the written word alone could never render it, “Leviathan” conveys the brutal toll that the enterprise takes on the workers and on the ocean, and it could even be read as an environmental parable in which the sea threatens to exact its revenge on humanity. But none of this is explicit in the film, which avoids exposition and context, unfolds almost entirely in the dark and often verges on hallucinatory abstraction. Where most documentaries prize clarity, this one attests to the power of estrangement.