Honeyland · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She goes up the cliff alone. A flat stone is wedged into the rock face, and behind it, in the dark of the mountain, lives a wild hive. Hatidze lifts the slab and the bees pour out around her bare face. She doesn't flinch. She sings to them, low and unhurried, breaks off one dripping slab of comb, and — this is the whole film folded into a motion of the hand — she leaves the rest. Take half, leave half. The bees keep enough to live; she keeps enough to sell. It is the oldest contract there is, and she may be the last person in Europe still keeping it.

Hold on that gesture. Everything in Honeyland is measured against it.

Deleuze had a word for cinema in which the polite surface of life suddenly shows you the raw appetite working underneath it: naturalism. Its engine is what he called the impulse-image — not a character choosing and acting, but a drive feeding, grabbing, exhausting. Watch the Hussein Sam family arrive and the concept arrives with them. Seven or eight children, a herd of cattle, noise spilling across the slope. A buyer dangles a price for more honey than the land can give, and the father simply takes it — robs his own hives, robs the season, robs the future to settle a debt now. That is the impulse-image in its purest form: appetite that cannot stop at half. Deleuze said such a world has two layers. There is the derived milieu — the actual place, the stone house, the tents, the fence between them — and beneath it the originary world, a savage field of pure hunger that the milieu only thins over. The dry, enormous, depopulated uplands the camera keeps pulling back to are that originary world made visible. The landscape isn't scenery. It is the law underneath the manners.

And a naturalist world runs only one direction. Deleuze called it the line of slope, an entropy that pitches everything toward ruin once the brake comes off. Honeyland is built as exactly this descent. The Husseins' over-collection starves their own colony; their desperate bees attack Hatidze's; her hives collapse; the family decamps; her mother Nazife, who has been a near-constant murmur on the soundtrack, falls quiet, and then is gone. The film's elliptical editing — a season crossed in a single cut, a worsening between one scene and the next with nothing explained — is the slope rendered as rhythm. Nothing can be reacted-against fast enough to stop it. Which tells you why Hatidze, for long stretches, is not an agent at all but what Deleuze named the seer: a figure who can only watch and endure a situation no action will repair. Sitting in firelight with her dying mother, she is in a pure optical and sound situation — the screen offers her nothing to do, only something to behold. The film's most devastating beat is an absence of sound: Nazife stops, and there is no act available, only the looking.

Set against that stillness, the way Hatidze moves becomes legible as argument. Deleuze, late, turned to a cinema of the body, and to the gest — a posture that lays bare a whole social relation without a word spoken. Hatidze's deliberateness with the comb, her patience, her unhurried hands, are a gest of measure; the family's sprawl and grab is a gest of appetite. The improvised, insufficient fence between the two camps is where these two bodily grammars meet. The film never lectures the difference. It composes it, in space.

There is one more turn, and it is the reason Honeyland matters to documentary as an art. The cliff sequence, the wordless scenes in the dark — the directors have admitted these were partly staged, reconstructed, shot across takes. By the old contract that a documentary "doesn't lie," this should be a scandal. Deleuze gives us a better frame: the powers of the false. Real cinema, he argued, doesn't report a pre-existing truth; it forges one, and the forging is the art. Honeyland takes a found woman in her actual life and shapes her into the protagonist of a classical tragedy — three acts, antagonist, catharsis — out of footage that arrived with no story in it. The truth it tells (a tragedy of the commons; what greed does to a shared world) is truer for being composed. This is the line that runs straight back through the dossier's own lineage. Flaherty had Nanook restage the walrus hunt; Herzog cut Treadwell's tapes into a morality play; Kopple and Wang Bing pressed years of actuality into dramatic shape. Honeyland is the most refined heir of that tradition, and Daut and Ljuma's two-camera intimacy — the Maysles' method from Grey Gardens — is what let the forgery feel like pure witness.

Which returns us to the cliff, and to the largest claim the film quietly makes. Hatidze is, the film says, the last of her kind — and Deleuze would hear in that the political note he called fabulation, where the story passes through the fact that a people is missing, vanishing, not yet or no longer there. She keeps a covenant almost no one is left to keep. The film grieves not only a woman and her mother and her bees, but a way of living in measure with the world that we are, on the evidence of the slope, busy losing.

Watch it again for the half she leaves behind. That restraint is the whole moral universe, and the camera knew it before we did.