Honeyland

[osprey_archer]

There are two kinds of documentary: the Woman in Motion kind, where the filmmakers go around and interview lots of people and incorporate found footage, and then there are documentaries like Honeyland, where the filmmaker goes somewhere and films for a while and then stitches a movie together out of the footage.

I tend to prefer the first kind, partly because they tend to be more fast-paced, but also because I tend to be less awkwardly aware of the filmmaker. Or rather, in the first kind of documentary the camera crew’s presence is both more obvious and less invasive: if a camera crew goes to interview George Takei for an afternoon, for instance, you don’t feel that their presence is likely to have a big warping effect on his life, because it is just an afternoon and he’s George Takei.

A camera crew that sets up shop for months and months in a remote Macedonian village, on the other hand, is going to change things. In fact, a lot of the action in Honeyland arises from a new family that settles in the village for a few months: their presence completely changes Hatidze’s life. First the changes are positive: they give her companions other than her aged, dying mother. Then, the changes turn negative: the new people set up beehives of their own, and because they don’t leave enough honey when they harvest, their bees kill Hatidze’s.

Now, obviously a film crew is not going to set up a bunch of beehives, but all the same, their presence must have had a huge effect on Hatidze’s life - but they have no presence in the film. When Hatidze’s mother dies, and Hatidze is keening over the body, and the camera is about two feet from her face, I can’t help thinking about how the camera crew is right there, filming like a pack of vultures when the human thing to do would be to set aside the camera for a minute and try to comfort her.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that they did just that after they got their clip, but all the same, the lack of acknowledgment that the film crew is there creates an absence in the film that bothers me.

This is something that I’ve experienced with other documentaries, too, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on what bothered me before, which is why poor Honeyland is bearing the brunt of my realization. If the phantom film crew doesn’t bother you, it’s doing what it’s doing very well: recording the life of a beekeeper in a remote mountain village in Macedonian (it appears to be occupied only by Hatidze and her mother until the other family arrives) as she harvests not only her own hive, but the wild hives in the mountains around her.

The beekeeping scenes are all particularly well done. The documentary starts with a particularly stunning shot of Hatidze making her way along a narrow mountain ledge to harvest a hive that the bees have built up among the rocks.

Comments

[taelle]

I often think about the presence of the person with the camera when I watch travel documentaries - my favorites are when that presence is acknowledged. Like the one with a very old Japanese lady who is showing her chickens and how one just brought an egg, and she's going to eat this egg for breakfast. Look, she says to the interviewer. It's still warm! Here, hold it, see how warm it is! (he complies). And you hold it too, she says into the camera, and we see a hand extending into our view to obediently hold that egg.

[osprey_archer]

That sounds adorable! The old lady telling the interviewer to hold the egg, and the interviewer does it.

[asakiyume]

Yeah--I like this acknowledgement of the presence of the crew.