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

Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991) More at IMDbPro »

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Overview

User Rating:
6.5/10   118 votes
MOVIEmeter: ?
Up 159% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.
Director:
Writer:
David Blair (writer)
Contact:
View company contact information for Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees on IMDbPro.
Release Date:
21 October 1991 (Germany) more
Genre:
User Reviews:
"2001: A Space Odyssey" on a home movie budget more (10 total)

Cast

  (Credited cast)
Father Bessarion ... Himself
David Blair ... Jacob Maker
William S. Burroughs ... James 'Hive' Maker
Florence Ormezzano ... Allellee Zillah
Meg Savlov ... Melissa Maker
Dr. Clyde Tombaugh ... Himself
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Additional Details

Also Known As:
Wax oder Die Entdeckung des Fernsehens unter den Bienen (Germany)
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Runtime:
85 min
Country:
Language:
Color:
Sound Mix:

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" on a home movie budget, 4 April 2008
10/10
Author: from United States

"Wax" is very likely the oddest film I've ever seen. Marvelously, beautifully, lyrically, and profoundly intellectually stimulating in all respects. Breathtaking in its scope and achievement. But very odd.

I have read medical reports containing sodium pentathol interviews and transcripts of schizophrenics' monologues. I have read memoirs and fiction by schizophrenics and hard drug users. I have read Surrealist and Beat Movement literature. I have read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. I have read the visionary poetry of Charles Williams and H.D.

I have watched films by Kenneth Anger and David Lynch and Maya Daren. I have read Yoruba ethnic literature from West Africa and studied Aleister Crowley's skryings on the Enochian aethyrs. I have read H. P. Lovecraft and also Kenneth Grant's post-Crowleyan magickal writings describing journeys behind the Tree of Life which would have preempted H.P.L.'s usual nightmares had he but known of them.

"Wax" stands tall in that company. A hypnotic, hallucinatory, purely poetic fusion of words, images, political ideas, and mystical transformations, nothing quite resembles it. "Pi" (1998) tried for something as distinctive, but that film gave us a glowering, paranoid, tortured vision shot in deliberately painful close-ups. "Wax" makes a complete contrast in its joyful freedom of eloquence in narration and visuals.

"Wax" enhances life while critiquing it. The film employs early, simple computer graphics. It juggles idiosyncratic desert architecture, prosaic photography, and absurd juxtapositions of common images.

It tells a story of Middle Eastern honey bees along with offering a hard view of the original U.S. military actions against Iraq in 1991 (a time so simple in retrospect as to seem the good old days). It links Los Alamos with transformations in consciousness. "Wax" leaps beyond the merely political in its luminous metaphors for human existence.

You can find stronger films, more beautiful films, more linguistically spry films, but you will probably never find anything quite like this fireworks display of language and image. Think "2001: A Space Odyssey" on a home movie budget. Your grasp of reality (and cinema) may never feel the same.

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