"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is set in Alamogordo, New Mexico (1983), where the main character, Jacob Maker, designs gunsight displays at a flight simulation factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His hives are filled with "Mesopotamian" bees that he has inherited from his grandfather. Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to appear, introducing Jacob to a type of destiny that pushes him away from the normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities. The bees show Jacob the story of his grandfather's acquisition and fatal association with the "Mesopotamian" bees, in the years following the First World War.
The bees also lead Jacob away from his home, out to the Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing to him their synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the haze of his own thoughts. Passing through Trinity Site, birthplace of the Plutonium bomb, Jacob arrives at a gigantic cave beneath the desert. There, he enters the odd world of the bees, and fulfills his destiny. Traveling both to the past and the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he meets a victim that he must kill.
Independently executed over six years, "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" combines compelling narrative, in the realistic/fantastic vein of Thomas Pynchon or Salman Rushdie, with the graphic fluidity of video technique. The result is an odd, new type of story experience, where smooth and sudden transpositions of picture and sound can nimbly follow and fuse with fantastical, suddenly changing, and often accelerated narrative. The result resembles story-telling in animated film. Yet location photography and archive research form the backbone of the piece.
Jacob Maker is a beekeeper who designs flight simulators. One day, the past arrives out of the future, and Jacob enters WAXWEB.
Waxweb is created by David Blair (1993-1999, final version). It is the hypermedia version of the electronic feature film "WAX or the discovery among the bees". Visitors of the website can play the movie from beginning to end, as an 85 minute theatrical feature, or click the "hypervideo" at any time. The movie has 1200 shots. Every shot is recomposed inside 25 unique pages/spaces.
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Review from the magazine "MONDO 2000" Volume 7, August 1992
by Richard Kadrey
Throughout the history of the film biz there have been occasional attempts to shoot whole novels. The silent era gave us Greed, a 12-hour misery-fest that was ultimately chopped up and sold as guitar picks by the studio heads. Fassbinder was more successful with his 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that was shown in installments on TV, so the accumulation of action and information was greatly diminished.
In the literary world, J.G. Ballard experimented with "condensed novels" in his book The Atrocity Exhibition. The idea was to boil away all character and plot and leave just the steaming residue of motive, action and response, to create the cumulative effect of novel-like density in just a few pages.
David Blair's video, WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, is sort of a combination of these earlier experiments, and yet is something wholly new. Through a combination of archival film footage, new video and computer animation WAX achieves the effect of a novel (density, the passage of time, dramatic changes in character), and it does so in the 85 minute running-time of a regular feature film.
It's almost impossible to describe the plot of WAX; it's a Zen koan told as a Burroughs cut-up. We open with experimental cinematographer James Maker, a member of the Supernormal Film Society who accompanies a British Royal expedition to Antarctica in hopes of filming the spirits of the dead. Flashfoward to James Maker's grandson, Jacob Maker, a computer programmer working on targeting systems for the Air Force at their Alamagordo test range. Jacob keeps bees, the bees that once belonged to his father and grandfather, a semi-famous keeper of bees himself, friend of the man who first imported Mesopotamian bees to England. Jacob grows unsure of the work he is doing for the Air Force, telling us that "To hit a simulated target was to prepare murder against a real target." As his uncertainty grows, he spends more and more time with the bees. He has blackouts; time turns liquid, and he loses hours at a time. The hives are endlessly fascinating to him. And then one day, he thinks he can hear voices speaking to him from inside the hives....
After that, Jacob quickly leaves behind almost everything we would consider normal life and embarks on a Ballardian quest that takes him from his home in Alamagordo, to Trinity site (location of the first nuclear bomb was detonation, coincidentally on the day of Jacob's birth), to the underground lair that is the real home of the bees (where the bees commune with the dead, and prepare new bodies for them), to the Land of the Dead itself and to Iraq during the Gulf War where Jacob is reborn briefly as a bomb, guiding himself with the same targeting system he worked on back when he was a programmer.
Blair labored for six years to finish WAX, working when he could from grant to grant, scrounging and convincing people to contribute to the project through the force of his vision, the strength of which is evident in the extraordinary production quality of WAX. The scenes set in Alamagordo and Trinity Site were really filmed at those locations. Blair convinced the Air Force to let him take his video crew deep inside the highly restricted WSMR bomb range. On the day Blair and company were shooting, a celebration was on nearby, an annual party marking the anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test. Technicians set off a small chemical explosive, sending up a tall, white mushroom cloud, a moment captured by chance by cinematographer Mark Kaplan, and incorporated by Blair into the finished film. Stealth bombers practiced bomb runs over the shooting site, using the Trinity marker as ground zero on their targeting grids-- Blair and his crew were being virtually bombed the whole time they were filming.
Another striking sequence in WAX is the underground cavern where the bees make wax bodies for the dead to inhabit. Blair shot these scenes in off-limit locations inside Carlsbad Caverns, conning and cajoling his way into sectors of cave that even the park rangers generally avoid. It's during this act that Jacob enters the Land of the Dead, and the audience gets a tour of the afterlife via Florence Ormezzano's lovely computer graphics. WAX neatly avoids the problems of mainstream films like Lawnmower Man where films and effects live and die by their flash quotient. WAX refuses to compete with Hollywood's ideas of special effects. The computer images we get are startling, from the bat-winged and multi-skulled spirit guide to the biomorphic squiggles that are the alphabet of the dead. These are dream images from a lost digital tribe, pixelated runes and hieroglyphs. Imagine what the Maya might have left behind if they had vanished into a virtual world instead of the Mexican jungle.
WAX is the first generation of a new video-based artform that Blair calls is "independent electronic cinema." Like home-recording studios and the zine world (like the zine you hold in your hands) recent advances in technology have put powerful editing tools into the hands of anyone with the need and desire to use them. WAX was assembled using the Montage Picture Processor, a relatively new "non-linear" video editing system, which allowed Blair to work quickly and intuitively, digitally cutting and pasting the work together from as many as six video segments at once.
Both Blair and WAX, however, are having to pay a price for their ambition. Nobody wants to show or distribute WAX. The art video crowd has rejected it because it's too long and too expensive, a PC no-no. The film community is strictly hands-off because WAX is video-based. This is almost always the fate of the new. Tuxedoed and tiaraed royals rioted at the premier of the Rite.
ISSUE #18
