Review: More Than Honey (2012) - Essential Viewing

Director: Markus Imhoof
Country: Switzerland | Germany | Austria
Genre: Documentary
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: More Than Honey opens in limited release tomorrow, June 14th

Eyebrows inevitably arch upward in surprise as Fred Jaggi, seasoned Swiss beekeeper, happily clambers his rickety ladder and—peacefully puffing on the cigar dangling casually from his lip—hacks a hive from the tree branch above, never so much as flinching as dozens of bees land right on his bare skin. What curious creatures we humans are, commandeering nature as though it were ours to control. It is far beyond it, Markus Imhoof’s enlightening documentary determinedly points out as it bears witness to the frightening phenomenon of colony collapse disorder, occurring with equally disturbing frequency in communities as different as Jaggi’s mountaintop farm and American keeper John Miller’s massive swarms of pollinate-for-pay insects.

…Imhoof’s move from dramatist to documentarian—this is his first non-fiction feature—attests the discovery of a true story all the more gripping than those invented by the imagination.

It’s not solely for the harsh Germanic lyricism of his voice that Imhoof, who narrates throughout, calls to mind Werner Herzog: this is a bleakly-inclined tale of man versus nature in the vein of Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, somehow able to make powerfully poetic a mounding body of evidence that we are the agents of our own end. Much like Herzog, whose move toward an almost exclusively factual filmmaking career in the last decade has been steered by the discovery of real-world eccentricities equal to—perhaps even surpassing—his own fictions, Imhoof’s move from dramatist to documentarian—this is his first non-fiction feature—attests the discovery of a true story all the more gripping than those invented by the imagination.

It’s easy to forget, as it plays, that More Than Honey is indeed a documentary: Imhoof creates an eerie atmosphere of apocalyptic proportions that invokes alarming parallels to The Fifth Season, a film in which nature simply stops serving human needs. There’s a sense of that to the scenes where these beekeepers open yet another hive to be greeted only by a sea of tiny corpses. “I’m getting real comfortable with death on an epic scale,” sighs Miller. Jaggi just looks on solemnly as the dead hives, piled high, burn before him. These sequences are almost horrific, whole waves of lifeless insects brushed into the flames, livelihoods lost as the natural world seems to turn upon us with its inexplicable genocides. It’s telling that the terminal tone of the film arrives explicitly from the material itself; Imhoof is above such forceful contextualisation, using only the astonishing imagery of cinematography team Attila Boa and Jörg Jeshel and the strangely affecting classical compositions of Peter Scherer to lend cinematic scale to the truths he unearths.

More Than Honey is not the nature documentary the cute little bee imagery adorning its posters might suggest, not some cheery piece of DIY-activism that ends with a singsong and a web address. It is, like any great film, whether fact or fiction, a glimpse at truth.

It’s the mark of a great documentarian to simply observe; to sit back and let the story tell itself. His voiceover only contributing contextualising facts—as much as a third of human food production depends on bee pollination, he tells us—Imhoof proves himself just that, delivering this narrative he discovered buried in the natural world. Einstein, he remind us, theorised the disappearance of humanity would follow as soon as four years after the disappearance of bees; travelling to “the future” that is China, where they have already become all-but extinct, he shows us a world where workers line the fields, painstakingly painting pollen on each flower in the bees’ stead. There is no sombre existential commentary, no attraction of our attention to the ashen blackness of the landscape, no invocation of apocalyptic tidings as many lesser documentaries might opt to include: the images and the buzz-free silence speak clearly enough for themselves.

There’s a twist of sorts—if that word can be considered appropriate here—to the film’s final “act” that shows just how beneficial the presence of a dramatic storyteller like Imhoof is to this material. More Than Honey is not the nature documentary the cute little bee imagery adorning its posters might suggest, not some cheery piece of DIY-activism that ends with a singsong and a web address. It is, like any great film, whether fact or fiction, a glimpse at truth. Imhoof’s camera is like the illusionist’s hand—flying through the air, trailing the bees as they mate in-flight; following them inside the hive, watching as they birth new queens; trained on a screen, seeing it illuminate with a bee brain scan—distracting our eye as he prepares to wow us. And wow he does, as much as any other film this year.

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Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Having spent the vast majority of my life sharing in the all too prevalent belief than cinema is merely dumbed-down weekend escapism for the masses, I was lucky enough to turn on a television at the exact right moment to have my perspectives on the medium completely transformed. Those first two and a half hours marked the beginning of a new life revolving around—maybe even depending upon—the screen and the depth of artistry, intellectual stimulation, and emotional exhilaration it can provide.

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