Honeyland

A Docalogue

Jaimie Baron, Kristen Fuhs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367644529
• eBook ISBN: 9781000586497
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The fourth volume in the Docalogue series, this book explores the significance of the documentary Honeyland (2019) in relation to documentary ethics, the representation of human and animal relations, environmental studies, genre theory, and documentary distribution.

The film, focused on a Turkish-speaking woman in Macedonia who cultivates bees to produce honey through an ancient and environmentally sustainable method, raises important questions about the place of humans and economic activity within the broader ecosystem. The documentary also prompts critical reflection about the relationship between observation and storytelling, how the film festival circuit allows certain films to reach a wide audience, the ethics of ethnographic representation, the relationship between human and insect life, and to what extent film can allow us to experience others' life-worlds. By combining five distinct critical perspectives on a single documentary, this book acts both as an intensive scholarly treatment of the film and as a guide for how to analyze, theorize, and contextualize a documentary text.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of documentary studies, as well as those studying film and media more broadly.

1 Salvaging the bees Honeyland and the paradox of the observational fable

Andy Rice

DOI: 10.4324/9781003124573-2

Three weeks into production, Honeyland filmmakers and environmental activists Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov recorded a scene with beekeeper Hatidže Muratova that they knew would be central to their film. Hatidže kept a bee colony in the ruins of a house wall in the abandoned village of Bekirlija, where she lived alone with her aging mother Nazife. She was removing honeycombs in preparation to sell them to vendors at the open-air market in the city of Skopje, Macedonia about 12 miles away, which happened to be the hometown of Kotevska and Stefanov. As the filmmakers recorded a high angle, over-the-shoulder shot of Hatidže gently reaching into the hollow of the wall, she began to talk to the bees. “Half for you, half for me,” she whispered. Stefanov recalled the poignancy of that moment in a question-and-answer session after a screening of the film at the Lincoln Center in New York. “Her example is actually a very rare thing,” he said of Hatidže, adding that he admired that “a person that lives in such extreme circumstances, without water, without electricity, without roads and contacts with other people” could nonetheless demonstrate an important environmental message about not overusing natural resources.¹ That online promotional material for the film calls Hatidže “the last in a long line of Macedonian wild beekeepers” suggests that such an ethic is on the wane, the stuff of salvage rather than model on a capitalist planet.² As the film’s diegesis presents Hatidže as vulnerable and alone in the ruins of a former village of diasporic Macedonian Turks, urban viewers like those hearing Stefanov’s story in New York may contemplate the end of her way of life, a trope long associated with the controversial “salvage paradigm” in anthropology.

This chapter considers the re-emergence of the salvage paradigm in the form of observational films like Honeyland. Since the early 2000s, sensory ethnographic filmmakers working in ways much like those of Kotevska and Stefanov have reclaimed observational recording techniques usually associated with 1960s documentary to represent the ambiguous textures, affects, and temporalities of the precarious industrial and pastoral life-worlds of today and screened their work in high-prestige festivals and art venues like Lincoln Center.³ I argue that certain of these observational films have come to function culturally as fables, as simple stories that aim to inculcate their audience with a moral lesson. There is an irony to my argument. Unlike ethnographic filmmakers past and present who aim to explain cultural difference with expository voiceover layered upon the image, sensory ethnographic filmmakers strive to avoid didacticism. They may emphasize the sensory experience of texture and temporality, the “feeling of being there,” the observational long take as a form of resistance to conventional media pace, or the dignity of everyday life at the margins, but they do not claim to be making fables. As a group, observational cinema folks have tended to regard “message films” as statist, conservative, reductive, propagandistic, and controlling. Observing individuals, in contrast, ostensibly allows viewers to come to their own conclusions about views seen and events felt, as individuals filmed can show range and complexity.⁴ Treating the camera as an indexicality machine, argues documentary theorist Erika Balsom in her polemic for a renewed “reality-based community,” observational films created by sensory ethnographic art filmmakers prioritize the “non-coded powers of lens-based capture rather than the reductive linguistic paradigm of codedness proper to theorizations of film,” thereby enabling viewers of diverse viewpoints to encounter the ambiguous, profilmic world. Balsom aims to reconsider critiques of the observational mode as de facto voyeuristic, naïve, colonial, and pseudo-scientific, and to get over the fact of construction in all films.⁵ But when they play as fables for viewers like those at the New York screening ruminating on the end of Hatidže’s way of life, observational films do encode a moralizing message—and one that follows from the dicey impulse to salvage the exotic.

Salvage ethnographies adhere to what historian of anthropology Brian Hochman called the “fable of the mummy complex.” They purport to use inscriptive media (audio recordings, photographs, and films) to preserve the language, stories, customs, cosmologies, and values of a given society or group before encroaching modernity extinguishes it or changes it beyond recognition. Arguing that preconceived racial formations determined the development of inscriptive sound and image media rather than the other way around, Hochman identified Bazin’s famous argument in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” as the crystallization of a myth central to the development of ethnographic film: that humans carry within them an instinctive drive for medial preservation uniquely satisfied by cinematic mechanical reproduction.⁶ “Change mummified,” in the field of ethnography, might stand as synonymous with what James Clifford critiqued as “the ethnographic present,” or the disavowal of subjects’ ongoing life in favor of an imagined, unchanging pre-modern existence that media can preserve.⁷ The framework of always seeing particular subjects as pre-modern objectifies them, ignoring their agency to adapt, change, and survive. Some commenters on Honeyland have identified its salvage framework as an ethical breach along these lines. Dina Iordanova, a transnational film scholar with a specialty in Balkan film, has argued that filmmakers from relatively remote locales like North Macedonia “cannot gain attention unless they resort to self-exoticism…. If the filmmakers were to simply show the reality [of poverty], most people would not have seen this film today nor would we be talking about it here.”⁸ The geographical proximity of urbanite filmmakers and rural collaborator-subjects in a country like North Macedonia, in other words, does not change the basic dynamic of salvage ethnography here. Kotevska and Stefanov still aimed to record visual “exotics,” as they put it, that were basically the by-products of their regional compatriots’ survival struggles.⁹

Honeyland thus brings together impulses usually thought to be in tension: that of the “message film” about global environmental collapse, that of the observational documentary exploring the ambiguous textures of everyday life, and that of the salvage ethnography aiming to use media to preserve aspects of fading life practices. Reviewer Michael O’Sullivan noted that something like this tension led the film to become “a strange and curious thing: part fly-on-the-wall anthropology, part ecological fable,” especially after a second family moves into the village.¹⁰ When Hussein and Ljutvie Sam and their seven children arrive about 14 minutes into the film, they bring noise, cows, and a baseline level of chaos and hunger—grist for comparison to the peaceable Hatidže and her mother. Hussein tries to emulate Hatidže’s beekeeping practice to provide for his family, but he breaks from her advice to leave half of the honey for the bees when an itinerant trader offers good money for an order of honey in bulk—200 kilos—that the family cannot sustainably produce. During a frantic stretch of honey extraction, panicked bees sting the Sam children and then devastate all other bee colonies in the village, including Hatidže’s, ruining what seemed to be an amicable enough relationship between the two households. The tale seems to demonstrate a 21st-century truth about capitalism and social relations, like a fable about how greed destroys fellowship as well as ecological balance. But there is also something paradoxical to the notion of the “observational fable,” which would seem to suggest that we can have non-judgmental sensory experiences and a moral, too. How and why in 2019 is this observational salvage film functioning in such a way?

The fable form in Honeyland: juxtaposition, excision, and structure

While historically signifying “a fictitious narrative or statement” or “a fiction invented to deceive,” the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term “fable” primarily refers to a genre of short story “devised to convey some useful lesson,” often involving animals or inanimate things that speak and act, as in those of Aesop.¹¹ Neither meaning would seem emblematic of intent, ethic, or camera technique in observational cinema. A fable is short; durational observational filming is long. A fable aims to communicate clearly using words; observational films offer ambiguous sensations. A fable is skimpy on details and forward-projecting rather than thick and made of records of the past. Fables require conflict, while the structure of observational cinema does not, if the world viewed refuses to oblige. Yet Honeyland’s observational style hews to both the narrative and moral qualities of the fable.

Russian literary scholar Lidiya Vindt, writing an incisive genre analysis of the fable in the 1920s (translated into English in 1987), identified three key characteristics that cut across fables from many different times and places. First, Vindt argues, the fable is an allegorical form that signifies on a narrative plane as well as a moral plane. The genre generates expectations for readers that they will receive a lesson, a bit of wisdom applicable to life in general.¹² While it is not immediately evident that Honeyland will offer such a lesson, the film suggests it visually throughout and delivers that lesson by the film’s end. From early on, it is clear that the lesson will be something about the destructiveness of modern ideas about efficiency. Many scenes show signifiers of modernity seeming to encroach into Hatidže’s space. They especially recur in shots that provide a contemplative buffer between scenes more immediate to plot. Men wear sunglasses and look at their iPhones at a festival Hatidže and the Sams attend in the mountains outside the village. Airplanes fly overhead in the background of everyday activity in the village. The filmmakers also juxtapose natural and manufactured elements in the landscape, like a shot of vultures circling in the sky edited adjacent to a shot of one of the Sam daughters sitting on the roof of the family house with jet exhaust visible in the background (Figure 1.1). The continuous sound of rumbling jet engines across the cut suggests a constructed juxtaposition rather than a profilmic co-presence between the Sam daughter and the circling vultures. The editing visually communicates the fable’s lesson: modernity circles like a vulture over the tenuous ecological balance for which Hatidže and her bee colonies stand. Similarly, the Sams’ animal management practices contrast sharply with those of Hatidže throughout the film. Though the observational style may sometimes communicate sensory immersion and abundance, the filmmakers of Honeyland find ways for their imagery to function allegorically along the lines of Vindt’s characterization of the fable.

Figure 1.1 A shot of the Sam daughter sitting on top of the family house with plane exhaust in the background (top, a) precedes a shot of vultures circling in the sky (bottom, b), communicating allegorical meaning about the precarity of ecological balance.

Second, Vindt points out that the characters in a fable (human or animal) “must serve as symbols of human relationships.” In this way, the fable plays on types and tropes which stand in for abstract values. Too much humanization and concreteness “makes [the story] ponderous, hampering its transference to other particular instances and shielding the general outline which must be apparent behind it,” she notes.¹³ While Honeyland focuses on the organic narratives that arise in the midst of filming concrete individuals, there are nonetheless telling e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Introduction: The I and Thou of Honeyland
• 1 Salvaging the bees: Honeyland and the paradox of the observational fable
• 2 Ethological realism in Honeyland
• 3 “In Europe, no one was paying attention”: Honeyland on the festival circuit
• 4 Observational time zones: The ethics of Honeyland
• 5 Feeling a life: Sympoietic aesthetics in Honeyland
• Bibliography
• Contributor Bios
• Index