WAX, OR THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BEES

WAX, OR THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BEES. David Blair, auteur, star. Florence Ormezzano, editing/graphics assistant. USA: ZDF-TV (Germany), © 1991 David Blair and ZDF. 85 min.

If taken seriously, the narrative suggests a kind of spiritualism like unto that of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); therefore we suggest not taking the narrative seriously and looking instead at the interesting militantly modern, avant-garde montage and strongly postmodern graphic SpFx. In this viewing, WAX yields a present-day world with flashbacks and trips to alternative realities, relating through juxtaposition, insertion, and superimposition the spirits of the dead (suggested and symbolized), movie cameras and other early high-tech equipment, bees and bee hives, the eye of God, weapons scientists, warfare, computers, rockets, space shuttles, missiles, VR military simulations, A-bombs, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel (and other twinning), Death, the Tower of Babel (including the Tower as visualized in METROPOLIS), civilization as urbanization, and television. WAX is a topic of discussion at an active site on the Internet.

Briefly discussed by Brooks Landon, in the context of WAXWEB "which deconstructs and hypertext it," in his critical essay Bodies in Cyberspace, p. 209.

Augmented RDE 29Ap19