1Between 2018 and 2019, as part of a film project, I conducted fieldwork on nomadic beekeeping in three European mountain regions: Styria (Austria), the South Pyrenees (France), and Valtellina (Italy). The partner in this project was Max Leimstättner, a trained anthropologist and filmmaker who works as a sound engineer in the Austrian national broadcasting industry. Together, we designed the entire project, discussed beekeeping praxis and knowledge, and reflected on the epistemics of our film. We planned to focus on the beehives’ seasonal migration from the plains/hills to the mountains to follow different blooming periods. Max and I assumed that filming with people among our acquaintances would facilitate dialogue and reduce the uncertainty that is often part of fieldwork, but is problematic when producing a movie. We selected from our networks three beekeepers: one working in the Pyrenees in France, one in Valtellina in Italy, and another one in the Austrian Alps. They were all male beekeepers aged 55 to 65. Two of them worked in beekeeping as an exclusive source of income, while the Italian beekeeper kept bees as a secondary job.
2On the one hand, my skills in researching beekeeping should have provided the knowledge necessary to build a relationship with beekeepers and film bees (Meloni 2018a; 2023). On the other hand, my colleague’s expertise in film production supposedly endowed a ‘good’ cinematic representation of the reality we experienced with the beekeepers. Our work on the film was not continuous; it was marked by gaps primarily due to our separate job commitments. We ‘squeezed’ the project in the interstices of our regular schedules. Significant intervals elapsed between filming in Styria and conducting the subsequent fieldwork in the Pyrenees and in Valtellina. The latter fieldwork—undertaken during the Easter break—represented the sole concentrated period when we could dedicate ourselves fully to the work, without interruption from other professional obligations.
3After a considerable hiatus, Max and I reconvened in 2021 to review our footage and begin editing, ultimately producing the film The Journey of the Bees: Nomadic Beekeeping in Europe (Meloni and Leimstättner 2022). The final cut incorporated the footage material from our fieldwork in France and Austria. We decided to exclude the footage filmed in Valtellina. This choice carried significant weight and was not made lightly. Its primary driver was a fundamental disruption to the movie’s narrative caused by unforeseen and adverse weather conditions. The heavy, persistent rains in spring 2019 had entirely prevented us from capturing the core activity we had set out to document—the seasonal transhumance of the beehives. The narrative inconsistency in the Italian footage was one of the central reasons for the prolonged interval between filming and completing the edit. The array of challenges we encountered in the field, epitomized by this weather-related setback, generated ongoing tensions between my filming partner and me. Furthermore, the situation prompted me to reflect critically on the film’s core objectives and, on a broader level, on the very practice of ethnographic filmmaking.
4Drawing from the personal sense of awkwardness that emerged within this context, I reflect on how anthropologists/filmmakers seem to arrange the composition, exposure, cinematic style, sound equipment, and type of camera to fulfil the viewer’s expectations. The self-reflection highlights possible connections between a ‘habitus’ that seems to emerge in current cinematic production and the research practices activated during fieldwork. Thus, I question what the implicit requirement is for producing a ‘good movie’ in visual anthropology. In doing so, I try to trace the visual standards that shape the contemporary visual ‘habitus’ of the so-called cinema of the ‘real.’ I argue that the overwhelming presence of a specific type and genre of images and visual products in our everyday life seems connected to the contemporary way we see the world and interpret reality before our eyes.
5Finally, I question the filmmaker’s intentionality in making an ethnographic movie and address the meaning of ‘ethnographic’ itself in making a ‘good’ ethnographic movie in today’s film production.
6When I first met with Max in 2017, he was teaching different modules at the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. I was doing my first year as a Ph.D. candidate researching beekeeping in Sardinia (Italy) in the same Department. At this time, beekeeping and bees were emerging as a promising field of research in cultural anthropology and social sciences (Fenske 2017). Beyond the STEM disciplines, bees have long been relevant to social and cultural scientists. Drawing from Karl von Frisch’s discoveries on honeybees’ behaviour, philosophers have reflected on how bees’ colonies may mirror humans’ language, societies, and socializing (Benveniste 1953; Sebeok 1967; Marx 1997; Hoffmann 2014).
7In cultural anthropology and ethnology, scholarly attention to bees and beekeeping has historically centered on two principal aspects: the material culture associated with apiculture and the rituals and myths connected to ‘traditional’ forms of animal husbandry (e.g., Becker 1991; Spiggia 1997). Notably, Anna Tsing’s work, which critically examines how discourses surrounding bees frequently intersect with underlying racist and colonial narratives within human societies (Tsing 1995; 2003), represents an exception. On a similar vein, is the reflection on human-insect relationships developed by Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia (2011). This suggests that in 2017, the ethnographic inquiry on human-bees relationships remained sparse, and the research conducted by Mary Kosut and Lisa J. Moore stood as the only prominent ethnographic study explicitly dedicated to beekeeping (Moore and Kosut 2013). This academic situation has undergone a rapid and significant transformation over the past ten to fifteen years, a shift driven primarily by two interconnected developments. On the one hand, the escalating phenomenon of bee losses, which began severely impacting apiculture in the United States around 2006 and was later termed Colony Collapse Disorder, captured substantial media attention. This widespread coverage played a crucial role in gradually altering public and scholarly perceptions of bees, reframing them not merely as agricultural assets or subjects of folklore but as vital indicators of ecological health and as beings entangled in complex socio-environmental crises (see Fenske 2015; 2017; Lorenz and Stark 2015). Simultaneously, the emergence of multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Ogden et al. 2013) as a new approach to the study of humans and non-humans offered a theoretical and epistemological framework for studying bees and beekeeping. Ever since, ethnographic works on bees and beekeeping have multiplied, generating a new body of knowledge that benefits from interdisciplinarity and a multispecies theoretical approach (Jansen 2018; 2023; Meloni 2018a; 2018b; Meloni 2023; Remter 2021; Jasarevic 2024).
8Yet, from a visual perspective, the recent popularity of bees is changing how we ‘see’ and ‘film’ these insects. Not only are bees everywhere. They occupy spaces and places that were simply impossible to imagine before 2006. From stinging pests (Moore and Kosut 2013), bees have become flying companions of fragile and unstable environments. It does not surprise us to see bees and beekeepers displayed on a rooftop to advertise a brew brand.
Advertisement of a beer in Vienna.
Photo by Greca N. Meloni, 2019.
- 1 In 1956, entomologist Warwick Estevam Kerr imported a few colonies of honeybees from East Africa lo (...)
9Yet before 2006, cinematic productions depicted honeybees as buzzing killers rather than flying companions. Hence, except for a few examples, such as The Beekeeper (Ο Μελισσοκόμος, 1986) by Theodoros Angelopoulos, horror movies narrated stories about Africanized bees whose sole goal was to kill humans1 (Tsing 1995; Fenske 2015; 2017). After 2006, bees took on a different role in cinema and documentary filmmaking, becoming tokens for the eco-political discourse about human responsibility for the extinction of various species. To name a few, Le berger des abeilles (Moulin and Pellissier 2006), Vanishing of the Bees (Langworthy and Henein 2009), Colony. The Endangered World of Bees (Gunn and McDonnell 2010), More than Honey (Imhof 2012), Bee Movie (Smith and Hickner 2007), The secret life of bees (Prince-Bythewood 2008), Il tempo delle api (Anitori and Di Gregorio 2017), Tell It to the Bees (Jankel 2018), The Pollinators (Nelson 2019), Honeyland (Kotevska and Stefanov 2019), offer a good example of the new narrative around honeybees and beekeeping. Many of these movies show a genuine interest among directors and DOPs in the sensorial dimension of beekeeping: the camera eye explores the nuances of the honeycombs and the bees’ buzzing, turning the beekeeper into a sort of ‘warlock’ who knows the language of bees. It is worth mentioning that, given its focus on a traditional form of Macedonian beekeeping, Honeyland circulated at a few ethnographic film festivals in Europe.
10In contrast to the more sensorial aesthetics of these mundane movies, the visual anthropological gaze on beekeeping has focused more on practical techniques and the material culture of beekeeping. The movie Gbaya: Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (2015) by visual anthropologist Martin Gruber represents a good example of ethnographic and collaborative filmmaking in beekeeping. The film is a product of the Beekeeping Research Unit established at the University of Bremen and offers the opportunity to observe how honey is harvested and sold in Central Cameroon. It follows a Gbaya beekeeper preparing skep hives positioned on tree branches to house honeybee colonies. The cinematography suggests that the director shares a close intimacy with beekeepers and holds a deep knowledge of beekeeping. Gruber builds his personal collaborative filmmaking inspired by David MacDougall’s cinematography and notion of collaboration, and by Jean Rouch’s collaborative practices.
11Another recent anthropological movie about beekeeping is Eine Frage der Haltung (2020) by Felix and Miriam Remter. Their movie takes a close look at the intimate and problematic interaction between honeybees, beekeepers, scientists, and the varroa mite. The latter, a parasite that attacks honeybee colonies, often leading to their collapse, since the 1970s become a fundamental concern shared among the community of beekeepers worldwide. The Remters unfold their ethnographic case observing three stories of human-bee-mite relationships in different contexts. Yet none of the movies actually reflects on the ontological positionality the filmmaker adopts when filming non-humans.
12These movies proved interesting in reflecting on the different representations of honeybees and their relationship with humans. From a visual anthropological standpoint, all these cinematic productions contribute to influence how we ‘see’ and ‘look’ at bees today, particularly through the camera’s eye. Hence, how we ‘see’ and how we ‘look’ is not neutral (Favero 2018; Favero and Lehmuskallio 2025). When we view through the camera’s eye, the ethnographer/filmmaker’s positionality is part of the relationship with the filmed subjects (MacDougall 1998; 2020; Grimshaw 2001). Our vision is embedded in a binocular, human-centric perspective, and the tools we use carry their own ontological framing (Favero 2018; Westmoreland 2025). The rectangular frame of the camera reproduces and empowers a binocular standpoint typical of a hunter (Meloni 2025), separating the viewer from the viewed and subtly reinforcing a nature/culture divide. Doing visual ethnography with non-humans requires a profound attentiveness to their sensorial nature and a critical awareness of the positionality of our own gaze. Scholars like Anna Grimshaw have long stressed the need to cultivate the ‘ethnographer’s eye’ to visualize anthropology, while Andrew Causey provocatively argues that we simply ‘don’t see well’ (Causey 2017). Cultivating an ethnographic gaze, filming non-humans, necessarily requires reflection on the ontological implications of the media we use and the language associated with it. Further, cultivating an ethnographic gaze on multispecies contexts cannot escape from reflecting on how technical and equipment choices are often influenced to meet the ‘good movie’ visual standards requirements to access festivals, rather than to seek a truly attuned engagement with non-humans. While audio-visual equipment may foster transcendence of the limits of human body senses, the new aesthetic canon emerging from digital media and high-resolution, emotive cinematography risks creating a polished, almost pre-prepared visual set that the viewer is primed to accept. This ‘visual standard’ shapes a filmmaker’s habitus, influencing choices in composition, sound, and narrative long before entering the field, and becomes particularly pronounced when aiming for festival screens.
13What follows is a reflection on the experience of negotiating the ethnographic gaze with a ‘visual standard’ to make a ‘good movie’ about nomadic beekeeping in Europe.
14Max and I began filming in the spring of 2018 in Styria, Austria. In the initial stages of production, we operated simultaneously, each with distinct and well-defined roles. I assumed the role of the camera operator—or Kamerafrau—while Max managed the microphones and the entire sound recording system. For our primary filming fieldwork, we employed fixed-length optics mounted on mirrorless digital cameras, specifically the Panasonic GH5. Max configured the setup so that I could shoulder-mount the camera. This arrangement proved physically demanding: the combined weight of the camera, lens, and support equipment totaled approximately five kilograms, a significant load to carry and stabilize for an extended period.
15This technical configuration introduced a notable physical and operational constraint. Given the size of the gear relative to my comparatively small hands, I was unable to manipulate the lens’s focus ring while filming. We then established a cable connection that allowed Max to control the camera’s focus remotely. Consequently, our roles became intricately interdependent: I was responsible for framing and composing the image through the viewfinder and dictating the camera’s movement through my own bodily positioning. Simultaneously, Max bore the dual responsibility of monitoring audio levels and ensuring the image’s sharpness by adjusting focus in response to my movements and the subjects’ actions.
16We soon recognized the limitations of this entangled setup. To achieve greater flexibility and autonomy, we decided to streamline our equipment and divide our responsibilities more cleanly. We eliminated unnecessary gear and, significantly, decoupled our operational duties. This shift liberated Max from the demanding task of attending to two sensory channels—sound and visual focus—at once. It also granted me much greater freedom and safety at the apiary. As I have noted in previous work (Meloni 2023), my allergy to bee venom necessitates attentiveness to the insects’ behavior; I need to be able to step back quickly if I sense that bees don’t appreciate my presence. A less clumsy, independent camera setup allowed me to move with more agility and respond intuitively to the bees’ cues.
17Freed from the constraints of a shared technical apparatus, both of us could interact more directly and physically with the beekeepers, even participating in some of the beekeeping chores, thereby cultivating a different kind of observational and embodied relationship with our research partners. It transformed our mode of engagement with our participants. Finally, we mounted an additional camera—a Panasonic GH4—on a tripod. This change enabled us to capture multiple, concurrent perspectives of the same scene.
18After each filming session, we reviewed the footage collaboratively, using these viewings as a basis for reflection and planning the project’s subsequent stages.
19Since the beginning, a subtle tension has emerged in the field. The inherent uncertainty of beekeeping (which relies entirely on unpredictable factors such as weather, social context, and threats from other animals) challenged us to rethink the original project, creating tensions in our approach to visual ethnography. I was fully aware of these underlying challenges as they characterized my fieldwork in Sardinia. However, our rigid filming schedule offered very little flexibility to adapt to them adequately. To put it simply, the fundamental premise of documenting nomadic beekeeping is that beekeepers must physically relocate their hives from one location to another, following the blooming of flowers. Yet, this process is far from a simple, mechanical transfer of hives from a location to another. Beekeepers operate within a complex web of natural contingencies—they must patiently wait for weather conditions that permit the bees to leave the colonies safely and successfully harvest nectar. The spring of 2019 in Northern Italy presented a severe case of these challenges. It was an exceptionally disastrous season for Acacia honey production. Late frosts followed by persistent rains devastated the trees’ blooming, resulting in a near-total collapse of the Acacia honey harvest across the entire region (Pappalardo and Naldi 2020).
20The more my partner and I engaged with the challenges of the fieldwork, the more a sense of discomfort took over me. A third uninvited partner seemed to steer our technical and theoretical choices toward them, influencing our way of filming and our response to these challenges. Max and I were not simply negotiating our expertise and expectations with the beekeepers. I found ourselves negotiating our gazes with the potential viewer whose expectations generated tensions over different understandings of the camera’s role in conducting a visual ethnographic investigation in beekeeping. Further, the question for our film project, then, became not only how to represent beekeeping but how to negotiate between this compelling, visual language and an ethnographic practice that seeks to see with bees, not just at them—a practice that might require re-embodying our engagement with the world beyond the confines of the cinematic frame.
- 2 See the page: https://www.landschaftshonig.at/
21I met with Johannes at an evening organized by a group of Italians living in Vienna. Mario, an Italian beekeeper living in Vienna friend of mine, introduced him to me. ‘You must know him; he’s a master in honey-tasting. He just published a book about different honey kinds and the landscapes that produce this wonderful buzzing thought of honeybees.’ And there I saw a tall, charming man in his fifties, wearing a green apron over a turtleneck sweater before a table covered with honey jars and plastic teaspoons. He was offering a honey-tasting tour through Austrian honey. A few copies of his book Die Reise des Wanderimkers. Wie Guter Honig zu Seinem Geschmak kommt (Gruber et al. 2017) laid on the table. As usual, when I meet beekeepers, Johannes and I speak immediately about the blooming season in Austria and Sardinia, the weather conditions, and the kind of honey from Sardinia. I took a copy of his book at home and started to unfold the astonishing pictures. I met with Mario and Johannes several times, mainly during special evenings at the Italian bookshop in Vienna. These meetings allowed me to explore Johannes’ concept of beekeeping, his philosophy of honey, and his concept of Landschaftshonig or landscapes’ honey. Both Mario and Johannes form part of the Landschaftshonig association of beekeepers.2 They both introduced me to how they conceive honey as an elixir food whose taste embeds the complex bouquet of a specific landscape. Mario does not practice nomadic beekeeping. Instead, Johannes moves his bees across mountains and hills in Styria. He was enthusiastic about the idea of taking part in an ethnographic movie about nomadic beekeeping.
22During the fieldwork, Max and I slept at his house for a couple of days. We shared breakfast and lunch together with Johanne’s partner. I took advantage of the situation to shadow Johannes’ way of leaving, looking for similarities and differences with Sardinian beekeepers. He lives in a tidy wooden house with only the necessary furniture in it. He re-functionalized a wooden hive super to create the bookshelves for his little studio, perched above the steep stairs leading to the living room. This is where he studies to write his books. ‘There is so much knowledge about beekeeping and so less about honey,’ he states. Johannes explained to us that he learned beekeeping from his father, who was one of the first commercial beekeepers in the area. He studied enology, and he uses the concept of terroir to describe his honey. ‘You need to know the quality of your product to sell it to customers. I could say the best years of honey by tasting them. In this way, I can tell people the story behind the jar.’
23While we work outside, I notice his wife taking care of the vegetables she planted in their garden. A few ducks and chickens run free outside, close to the bees.
24During one of our trips to Styria, Max helped Johannes to move the bees from his garden to a location in the mountains to forage a delicious honeydew and some other flowers. The landscape’s view was astonishing, and we could film very nice pictures of his hives, despite the aggressive tendency of his bees to attack our black equipment.
25However compelling these trips were, Max and I started to doubt the ‘ethnographiness’ of our material. The fieldwork urged us to reflect on how to negotiate the quality of ethnographic inquiry with the reasons for making a ‘good’ movie, that is, an interesting movie.
26We visited Ignatius in April 2019, during the Easter break. When we arrived at the railway station of Perpignan, Ignatius and his girlfriend were waiting for us. The 60-year-old beekeeper wore brown fustian trousers, a checkered shirt, and mountain boots. They drive us for one hour to go to the National Reserve of Nohèdes, where Ignatius built a cabin and the beekeeping laboratory. This is a region of the Southern Pyrenees, at the border with Spain. Most of the landscape is Mediterranean, with some compelling mountain-scape. Ignatius and his girlfriend hosted us in the cabin while we were filming them. The house is very isolated, and the closest village is still far. The beekeeper does everything by himself, from growing veggies and baking bread to repairing the house. He told us that he moved here from Northern France twenty years ago and started keeping bees because he liked the calmness and serenity of working surrounded by nature. In the cabin, a small, crowded bookshelf is the only living room decoration. I spotted classic books about beekeeping. L’Abeille (et le) Philosophe (Tavoillot and Tavoillot 2015) seems to be very used, and I wondered what this book could tell me about its reader.
Fieldwork in France
Ignatius was positioning honey supers for the acacia honey, and I was filming him in the process.
Photo by Max Leimstättner.
27The next day, we had breakfast altogether. We spoke about the program for the day, and Ignatius made me taste the different kinds of honey he made. Then he chose which one to use for our breakfast. Each honey was labelled with a tag indicating the place of origin: garrigue, haute montagne, montagne. We packed a small dinner at noon and headed to film him and his helper moving the beehives in three different apiaries. Max and I split. I went in the truck with Ignatius, and Max was with Pedro. We drove for about two hours across windmills and agricultural landscapes to arrive at a small, tidy apiary immersed in Mediterranean shrubs.
28A distinctive smell of lavender mixed with the pungent scent of rockroses. Ignatius and Pedro prepared the equipment for later. Then, they put dinner for all of us. In the meantime, Max and I set up our equipment, seeking to anticipate the next steps while exploring the apiary and the beekeepers’ movements. We ate slowly, enjoying the company and making some jokes. As soon as the sun came down, Ignatius and Pedro’s pace changed drastically, and everything became fast. The two beekeepers kept their dialogue to a minimum. Ignatius prepared the smoker with some grain and grass. Pedro fastened the beehives and quickly placed them on the back of the truck, arranging the cubic boxes precisely. Max focused on collecting the soundscape of this activity. I followed the gestures and movements of the two beekeepers, looking for differences from what I witnessed in Sardinia. When they finished, we drove to another apiary to collect more beehives. It was already dark when we arrived at a third location where Pedro and Ignatius put all the beehives they had taken from the previous apiaries. This was the location for the black locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia) from which a pale-yellow light honey is produced, very popular in the European market. The tree characterizes the landscape of many European regions from the Far East to Portugal.
29We returned to the cabin around midnight, and the next day we followed Ignatius, checking how the bees were doing in this new home and the blooming conditions in nearby apiaries. The Winter and Spring of 2019 were very dry in the Pyrenees. This allowed us to see how climate change affected the landscape, bees, and their keeper. The utter disappointment of Ignatius lifting an empty super instead of adding a new one was eloquent. He was not merely concerned with producing less honey and thus earning less money. He was profoundly worried about the insects’ future, and this feeling interfered with the happiness he felt while taking care of them.
30The insights we collected with Ignatius appeared promising for our movie. Yet the question of how to present them accompanied Max and me on our trip to the Valtellina in Italy.
31After traveling across France, we arrived at the Sondrio station on time, without missing any train. During the trip, I enjoyed the view of the landscape from the train’s window, muting from dry to green. Giampaolo was waiting for us, kindly smiling. I met him in 2018 in Rome, at a conference ‘Apididattica’ where the organizers, the Italian association AMI–Ambasciatori dei mieli, invited me to present my research on beekeeping in Sardinia. Giampaolo was a 60-year-old part-time beekeeper whose primary job was an employee at the local territorial administration of Valtellina. A passionate beekeeper and fervent lover of art history, Giampaolo is an active member and decision-maker in his community. He kept bees for all his life and taught his daughter to keep bees. In 2018, she oversaw the family’s beekeeping operation, and her expertise was well known among Italian beekeepers. Max and I expected to follow her during our visit in the region. Some unexpected personal matter caused us to change the plan. Unlike the other beekeepers who hosted us in their homes, Giampaolo organized our stay at a local B&B, and every day he accompanied us to visit a different beekeeper. This aspect limited our ability to build an intimate relationship with him or his daughter. These were not the only variations to our expectations. Although we welcomed the possibility of filming more than a single beekeeper, we hoped to record the seasonal movement of the beehives from the apiaries near the apple orchards to the Valtellina’s lowlands, where bees collect nectar from the black locust tree. Acacia honey is one of the key products of European beekeeping (see Kárpáti et al. 2010; Schievano et al. 2019). Lombardy, where Valtellina is located, is one of Italy’s leading regions for producing this honey. The blooming period lasts from April to May. Unfortunately, spring 2019 saw the worst drop in acacia honey production on record, driven by climate change. Hence, when we arrived, late rains and cold prevented the plants from blooming, and beekeepers had to feed their colonies instead of collecting supers. The national reports on honey production recorded up to 100% losses that year (Pappalardo and Naldi 2020). Max and I arrived just in time to film beekeepers coping with this unexpected event.
Fieldwork in Valtellina
Photo by Max Leimstättner
32From a beekeeping standpoint, I must note that Valtellina and Valtellinese beekeepers are distinct from those in my previous fields of research. From my field experience, beekeepers are rather introverted persons for whom beekeeping represents a way out from human relationships. Notably, male beekeepers in Italy tend to be aggressive against each other, pride of their knowledge, and inclined to consider their way of beekeeping the best way compared to others (Meloni 2018). In contrast, Valtellinese beekeepers appeared to share their knowledge and competencies between masters and apprentices, and between females and males. The local association of beekeepers appeared to offer crucial support to both commercial and part-time beekeepers. Finally, in Valtellina, many commercial and part-time beekeepers appeared to master highly specialized beekeeping practices, like queen rearing and artificial queen mating. That is, honey was surely a crucial aspect of Valtellinese beekeeping; however, it represented only a limited aspect of their know-how.
33Valtellina represented a breaking point in our filming. The plurality of voices of Valtellinese beekeepers was hard to combine with the pace and intimacy we experienced in our previous journeys. To me, it represented a crucial opportunity to reflect on doing visual ethnography.
Fieldwork in Valtellina
Photo by Greca N. Meloni
34What could I learn from this experience? How could I translate the Valtellinese experience into ethnographic data? How could they be combined in the storyline of a movie? What did I bring home from our European journey with beekeepers? These questions framed more urgent queries: how could Max and I create a compelling story, grounded in ethnographic theories, that is good to be seen by anthropologists and not? Where is the ethnography in an ethnographic movie? It lies on the subject or on the way of approaching a certain subject, the way of looking, we could say.
35To whom did I owe reflexivity when creating the story? This latter question implied considering the influence of the potential viewer’s expectations on the elaboration of the field experience and footage to create a consistent movie.
36These reflections accompanied me during the break period that Max and I took before the post-production phase.
37Max and I started to discuss how to edit the footage in 2021, after a relatively long break from our fieldwork. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic prevented us from attending ethnographic film festivals during this time. Yet we spoke a lot about what we had seen at the 2019 RAI Film Festival and about other movies we watched at other European film festivals that focused on human-nature relationships. These movies became a sort of visual point of reference for defining what to select from the footage we collected and how to do so. In Bristol, we noticed that the public attendees and the committee board appreciated movies that appeared to build on compelling photography but a weaker, deeper ethnographic commitment (Meloni 2019). In contrast, the films that clearly build on solid research inquiries showed a greater intimate relationship between the filmmaker and the subjects, but less polished photography. Even when these movies received awards, the public appeared less engaged with the stories told in films with less mesmerising photography. While both Max and I integrated these reflections in the editing phase, here I offer my personal standpoint.
38We discussed at length how to build a consistent story from the material we had collected in the field. We wanted to remain committed to our human partners and to deliver a visual representation of their approach to beekeeping. Yet the material filmed in Valtellina appeared rather inhomogeneous compared with the intimacy we captured in Austria and France. In a first attempt to extract a personal story from the Italian material that could be even partially consistent with the rest of the footage failed. It was a hard decision not to include this part in the final movie. More than with our field partners, we negotiated the editing phase with the potential viewers. That is, we reflected on how spectators might have perceived a shift in the story's flow and how they might have understood a disruption to the human-bee-filmmaker intimacy created in Austria and France. The Italian context represented a simultaneous break in the relationship between the filmmakers and the research partners, and an opportunity to film a form of beekeeping in which a plurality of humans engage with a plurality of super-organisms within a given territory. Yet, our implicit research partner, the viewer, required a more linear story about bees and humans. The Valtellina case could be a story in its own right. Or at least, this is what we thought.
39In this paper, I drew on personal fieldwork experience filming nomadic beekeeping practices to examine whether a pervasive ‘visual standard’ influences the ‘habitus’ of the ethnographer-filmmaker during both the pre- and post-production phases of a film. While the final filmic product represents one possible way of addressing the questions that guided our production practices, I argue that, in ethnographic movies, technical choices—from frame composition and exposure to the selection of audiovisual equipment—are often arranged to fulfil what I term the viewer’s expectations. This viewer becomes a sort of implicit research partner, with whom the filmmaker must negotiate their positionality, both during the filming and later, when transforming raw footage into a coherent storyline. Their visual expectations are shaped by the overwhelming presence of visuality in our everyday lives. The circulation of visual content on social media affects how we perceive images and their relationship to movie narratives. This is much more evident with the development of visual technologies. Not only are Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality proposing a fundamental disruption with our Western-centered relationship with images (see Favero 2018). The relatively low price of mirrorless cameras with high-sensitivity sensors makes them suitable for filming. The filming produced with such technologies appeared polished, noiseless, impeccable. To obtain a similar image with a proper camcorder would require a definitely more expensive tool. This is often not possible given the economic constraints of producing an ethnographic film. Yet a fundamental aspect remains implicit. The mirrorless cameras are primarily designed for photography. Using them for filming completely reshapes the relationship between the person filming and the person being filmed. I am not arguing that it is impossible to make an ethnographic movie without a proper camcorder. However, I want to stress the role of the visual ‘standards’ associated with these different kinds of objects. Polished images and even 4K footage populate our everyday lives, and they are becoming a fundamental prerequisite for a ‘good’ movie. Our eyes (and, by extension, the audience’s eyes) are so used to perfect images on perfect screens that we are beginning to fail to recognize the noisy images produced by a less-performing camcorder. This also means that our attention is shifting from the narrative and content of the movie, what the author(s) may want to convey with it, what kind of message is being communicated, to how the image looks. This, unfortunately, often applies to many allegedly ‘ethnographic’ movies, which ‘ethnographicness’ seems more an empty label (see Franco 2025). In this regard, the expectations of the potential audience and its ability to understand the images before their eyes appear to be a ‘de facto’ requirement for producing a ‘good’ movie.
40I believe this critique is illustrated by the circumstances that led us to omit the Valtellina footage from the final movie. This fact highlights the limits of a filmic ‘habitus’ geared toward human-centric perspectives that foster linear storytelling, despite the use of several technologies that could have enabled a more nuanced film narrative.
41Recently, I experimented with a different form of visual and ‘silent’ ethnography using drawing to bypass verbal narration to reveal the reciprocal shaping of humans and non-humans. to or graphic ethnography (Meloni 2025). This approach seeks to combine multispecies theories with visual ethnographic methods, and I believe it could offer a way to critically engage with the ethnographer’s positionality and their ethnographic gaze in the field. This approach was primarily informed by the questions that arose during my experience filming with non-humans and that form part of this contribution. I question here whether the implicit (visual) standards for a ‘good movie’ prevent the ethnographer from developing a ‘skilled vision’ attuned to non-human and, by extension, the possibility of cultivating an ethnographic gaze.
42Hence, I demonstrated how the presence of a ‘third’ research partner—the viewer—imposes a human-centric narrative logic and aesthetic standard. In doing so, it not only shapes our negotiation with human participants, such as the beekeepers, but also forecloses alternative visual strategies that might better attend to the multispecies dynamics we witness in the field. The central challenge, therefore, lies in navigating the tension between the communicative demands of the cinematic form and the ethical and epistemological imperative to cultivate a gaze capable of witnessing and representing more-than-human realities.
43Further, adherence to current ‘visual standards’ is not merely an implicit suggestion but often an explicit prerequisite, particularly for gaining access to film festivals. Here, technical quality—frequently linked to the camera’s sensor capabilities—is a stringent criterion. Increasingly, ethnographic film festivals screen technically flawless movies about anthropological themes made by professional filmmakers who may have little to no training in anthropological inquiry. This trend risks privileging cinematic content and narrative polish over a critical reflection on the interpretive frameworks that should constitute the ethnographic gaze beyond the camera (Grimshaw 2022, 216–17). In other words, how a movie looks in relation to an implicit aesthetic standard can become more important than how—and indeed, if—an ethnographic sensibility was cultivated to explore its subject matter.
44I am not suggesting that ethnographic movies can be technically less accurate, far from it. However, I want to stress how this mechanism threatens to undermine the visibility of rigorously ethnographic works, especially when their circulation depends on festival selectors whose power to accept or deny access is often exercised without explanation or peer-review feedback that could foster growth. Thus, if conforming to a ‘visual standard’ to make a ‘good movie’ is fundamental, we must ask: what, then, makes a movie ethnographic? To phrase it differently, where does the ‘ethnographicness’ of an ethnographic film reside? Does a film become ethnographic simply because it visually explores a situation of anthropological interest, or is it the filmmaker’s ‘ethnographic gaze’ upon everyday experience that constitutes it as such? These questions fundamentally problematize the intentionality and positionality of the ethnographer behind the camera.
45I contend that every technical choice a filmmaker makes, from the type of camcorder to the framing and sound equipment, is intrinsically connected to their intentionality—to how they look at the world and choose to represent it. A specific audio-visual format might be selected to create a thick description of an encounter’s sensorial dimension. Yet, the implicit prospect of public screening introduces the potential viewer as a force that interferes with this intentionality. As MacDougall notes, ‘Filmmakers want their work to have a life of its own’ (2020, 2), which necessitates using a cinematic language that spectators can understand.
46Following Sarah Pink, while visual ethnography is not always obligatory (2013), when we undertake it, we must ask: to what extent does equipment selection respond to the needs of the field and the case study, and when is it instead influenced by a preconceived notion of what makes a movie ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’?
47Filmmaking has always been in dialogue with the visual standards of its era, as evidenced by the connection between painting and neorealist cinema, for instance. It is undeniable that the plethora of visual artifacts we encounter daily through ever-more-refined screens and sensors trains our perception of colour, light, saturation, and composition. Today, our visual senses are overstimulated by an overwhelming availability of content from cinema, television, and social media. New technologies, such as 360º cameras, actively challenge our ways of seeing. Even the standard flat, widescreen image is based on a Renaissance perspective that emerged from a philosophical context, positioning the human as the master of the visual field. We are thus both challenged and compelled to engage with these evolving visual materials. Filmmakers often feel pressured to employ a polished, accessible visual language—reminiscent of high-end television—that viewers can easily comprehend. I believe economic incentives underpin many of these choices, as creating a film that meets broad public expectations increases its chances of winning prizes or securing funding from outside the academic world. Since cameras with highly sensitive sensors are typically the most expensive, ethnographers—especially early-career ones—often lack the substantial funding needed for such equipment. I argue that the film festival system institutionalises and reinforces this ‘visual standard’, as evidenced by the curated programmes of selected films.
48These combined factors can create a fracture in the commitment between the ethnographer-filmmaker and their research partners. I agree with filmmaker Laurent Van Lancker’s statement at the 2019 RAI Film Festival in Bristol: any methodological decision should emerge from a thick research process. This includes careful, reflexive choices about equipment, grounded in a deep consideration of the implications of using one medium over another, our positioning in the field, and our relationships with subjects. Nevertheless, I believe new technologies and the contemporary ‘habitus’ of visual production also offer an opportunity to rethink visual anthropology anew. This might allow us to explore fresh approaches to enduring questions, such as those posed decades ago by David MacDougall regarding the crucial relationship between filmmaker and subjects in making an ‘ethnographic’ film (MacDougall 1998).
49The quest for a ‘good’ ethnographic movie is thus fraught not only with the economies of film festivals but also with the deeper ontological constraints of the cinematic apparatus itself. For instance, if we acknowledge that the camera eye imposes a distancing, controlling perspective, then the very equipment chosen to fulfil viewer expectations may prevent the ‘ethnographic gaze’ from becoming an attuned, reciprocal engagement with a more-than-human world. Thus, rethinking the visual ‘habitus’ requires not merely resisting polished aesthetics but also critically questioning the perspectival foundations of our tools and exploring alternative, more participatory or immersive visual methods.
RSS feed
