From: mcphil@med.unc.edu (Philip McNamara)
Subject: WAX or the discovery of television among the bees
Originator: mcphil@addor
Organization: UNC-CH School of Medicine
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 17:42:04 GMT

==========================================
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO REPOST

8.1.92

DESCRIPTIVE PACKAGE FOR :
"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" 
(85:00, mono) (copyright 1991: Blair)

CONTACT:
David Blair 
P.O. Box 174, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276   


		"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.
		"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees"
(85:00, mono) provides an example of a new type of independent
"electronic cinema" that will become more common as the 1990's
progress.




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Review for 
"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" 

from the magazine "MONDO 2000"
(Volume 7, August 1992)
article 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
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