Salvaging the bees

Abstract

This chapter considers the re-emergence of the “salvage paradigm,” the ethically dubious filming of societies on the wane, 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. I argue that in the digital era, 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. 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.” But when Honeyland plays as an “ecological fable” for urban viewers ruminating on the end of the characters’ ways of life, this observational film does encode a moralizing message—and one that follows from the dicey impulse to salvage the exotic. By strategically using techniques of juxtaposition, excision, and abstraction, this paradoxical “observational fable” challenges contemporary assumptions about observational cinema and the object of salvage in light of global environmental collapse.