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.[1]

Briefly discussed by Brooks Landon, in the context of WAXWEB[2] "which deconstructs and hypertext it," in his critical essay Bodies in Cyberspace, p. 209.

Augmented RDE 29Ap19