When structure is made explicit.
The Stone Speakers
dir. Igor Drljaca, 2018, Canada/Bosnia-Herzegovina
genre: poetic documentary
The Stone Speakers uses a poetic form to ruminate on the economic challenges facing a nominally unified post-civil-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. To do this it provides a portrait of four Bosnian towns/cities that are attempting to attract tourists. In a savvy manner it does not focus on the bigger and more established tourist cities of Mostar or Sarajevo, which have a rich architectural heritage, but instead on four that have created their attractions: pilgrimage site Medjugorje, “pyramids” site Visoko, Ivo Andrić themed town in Višegrad, and post-industrial city of Tuzla.
There’s a critique of tourism as a culture and economic practice (environmental strain, overtourism, and cultural imperialism, to start), but The Stone Speakers is less a view of tourism than of tourist development. The challenge facing these towns/cities is not that that tourism has changed them but rather that they desperately need to change themselves for economic survival. Moreover, The Stone Speakers is also about the lingering ethnic divisions of the country.
The film does have a series of interviews, but they are short and framed in a static manner (subject facing the camera in tableau composition, with their interview acting as voice-off). The four segments have at least one interview that acts as the official voice of the town, for instance, one of the workers of Andrićgrad, and at least one that that poses a critical or interrogative tone: the Medjugorje man lamenting the building of large hotels, the Višegrad lamenting the collapse of communism, the Tuzla woman worried about the possibility of sink holes, or the Visoko resident complaining about the neglect of the government. These critical interviews help give the film thematic depth.
So there is a dialectical quality, even if I wouldn’t have minded more. But much of the thematic development takes place over the four segments. The film uses what David Bordwell calls block construction to see these four as distinct but complementary versions of a collective problem. Documentaries frequently are segmented in their structure. Television documentary series often make this segmentation explicit. I’m thinking of Ken Burns’ work, where there is often a caesura between segments. But I don’t see this too much in theatrical-length features, where structure is an undergirding but where the primary emphasis is on a continuous spectatorial experience.
I’ll have to think through that generalization but suffice to say that The Stone Speakers could have been structured differently. It could have interwoven the four locales and organized the material conceptually or dramatically. But each block seems to have a central idea. And the subsequent ones develop off the previous without directly intersecting. By highlighting a multi-part structure, the documentary paints a portrait of contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina that is divided yet with each community facing common challenges.