Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d7/
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Director: David Blair

Screenplay: David Blair

Cast: Father Bessarion; David Blair as Jacob Maker; William S. Burroughs as James 'Hive' Maker; Florence Ormezzano as Allellee Zillah; Meg Savlov as Melissa Maker; Clyde Tombaugh

In the annuals of American avant-garde cinema, David Blair's film has many distinctions. One of the first edited with digital equipment; when converted to a hypertext known as Waxweb, it was one of the first ever world wide web sites in existence; and it was the first film streamed online in the early days of the internet. Blair, still working into the modern day, took six years on the kind of delirious work here Thomas Pynchon would look at with bafflement. As if symbolic to this kind of post-modern reference, as you follow protagonist Jqacob Maker (the director himself) through hyper intelligent Mesopotamian bees, the dead living on the moon, and turning into a living missile to kill a previous incarnation, William S. Burroughs has a small none speaking role as the protagonist's ancestor, as if to mark this film with greater credibility.

Wax... whilst made with the technology of the time, with crude CGI denizens of the world of the dead and an emphasis on an essay film structure for its fictional and surreal plot, feels ahead of its time in these presidents and also its subject matter. David Blair, whilst this is his most well known film, is a figure who still works within this spectrum outside of conventional cinema, making a sequel of sorts in 2017 with a fifteen episode web series streamed online called The Lost Tribe, and is clearly someone who is always on in terms of ideas to his work. Wax... in content is just as unique, not just enough to have this premise of the dead rebelling and bee television, but in its language and style too, a beauty to its weirdness.

As mentioned, the film is structured closer to an audio-video essay, most of the actual footage that isn't pre-existing material, polygon shapes or photos silent with narration, tracking of course how James 'Hive' Maker (Burroughs), a spiritualist who used camera technology to capture the images of ghosts and a beekeeper, will link to his ancestor Jacob Maker, who helps design intelligent missile guidance systems, Jacob's own life literally absorbing back into his forefather's through what is mainly footage of him wandering locations in a bee keepers suit. From there, as Jacob develops the ability to communicate with bees and begins slowly to transform, this is depicted in a barrage of stock footage, overlaid images and basic computer animation, all of which adds an appropriate dissolution of the barrier between you the viewer and the material as, trying to absorb it all, the strange narration makes "sense" in terms of mood, rather than logic, and you find yourself investing in the material emotionally as a result of the grasping for space within all this information.

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And it becomes more frenzied and surreal as it goes on. Spoiling plot points is actually difficult because the experience is not the same as describing it second hand, as Jacob has the aforementioned "bee television" implanted in his brain by his own hive of bees, culminating between the story of Cain & Abel being retold in his family, learnt to be his descendents and Jacob's work on intelligent missile guidance software being symbolic, as he himself becomes a living missile in the end who, rather than fleeing to the moon like others, must literally kill himself in one of his multiple co-existing reincarnations in the middle of the first Gulf War. Reality is broken early on, and its actually pathetic for me personally, as a surrealist in mind, for this film to purposely decimate the foundations of it, allowing for Jacob to hop between times, including his grandfather's home of the Garden of Eden, to the idea that souls actually split into multiple living pieces after death like the bees in a hive, all with a soberly spoken narration that is almost deadpan at times with lines that cannot be viewed as anything but intentionally ridiculous from Flair's part.

Frankly, why not love a film where mad, weird ideas come off this freely, as abstract poetry that just makes sense, especially as it's still intelligently put together with sub textual links rather than a word salad of a z-movie. Blair riffs on real concepts, from the religious to links like Mesopotamia, where the bees are linked to, being argued to be where Iraq now exists, not lost that this film was being made in the time of the first Gulf War with a damning view of military weaponry, more so as the ending has all of our protagonist's forms and their enemies becoming one and forgoing hatred in a unity. Adding a new ominous side that, David Flair not knowing this would happen, intelligent missile guidance systems predate drone technology, now used in military service and emphasising this sense of violence committed from a distance the director-writer plays with here.

Blair himself, by accounts, isn't religious but his mix of Christian and New Age ideas is also compelling, not coming off as a mess but delirious in a haunting ode of the dead being restless, the weight of the past burdening the living and crimes having to be dealt with in the afterlife even if it means breaking reality. Again, the surrealistic side of my heart cheers the later, transcending physical logic for a profound point, a man able to be both his victim, the killer, the revenger, two twin women and their siblings, and all within a film that talks of it with a wise, clever attitude. The density of the material is like another creator, Jean-Luc Godard, in how it plays with the form of materials like video and stock footage, but is its own rich and amazing creation. It is the kind where the technical obsoletion of some of the materials has actually made its virtues even stronger in fact.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Mindbender/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Personal Opinion:

Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, available to watch legally on (what else?) the internet without any cost from the director himself, is a very strange film to say the least. Absolutely unique but also a fascinating document in how, made in tandem with the new creation called the World Wide Web, it is arguably one of the first abstract films ever made to reflect this new medium which would have a profound impact over the next few decades. Whilst alien to many internet videos in tone and ideas, its effectively the grandfather to many odd experimental works like it, somewhat befitting considering it itself is a film where a man can be his own grandfather and himself as these films online form a curious heritage to each other.  

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