Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

A fascinating if numbing feature-length narrative video by David Blair with remarkable computer graphics and other special effects. The intricate science-fantasy plot, which is narrated in an offscreen monotone by Blair, involves, among many other things, a beekeeper and cinematographer (represented by a photo of William S. Burroughs) who films “the moving spirits of the dead” circa 1914; his grandson (played by Blair), half sister, and brother-in-law; the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, including the Trinity nuclear test site; the moon; the “planet of television”; the Tower of Babel; the “Garden of Eden Cave” (“a town the size of Manhattan beneath the New Mexican desert”); and the gulf war. The images obliquely illustrate the narrative, and the constant visual flux often suggests a graphic novel translated into MTV, which helps to account for the numbing effect. The results are highly watchable, though more intellectually than emotionally involving (1990). Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, January 17 and 18, 7:00 and 9:00, and Sunday, January 19, 5:30 and 7:30, 281-4114. Read more

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

A fascinating postmortem on the making of Francis Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, mainly consisting of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola in the 7Os that has been intelligently selected, augmented, and arranged by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. Like the Coppola film itself, this documentary at times seems to value self-styled profundity and rhetoric over observation and common sense–one especially regrets the absence of any thoroughgoing political or historical critique of Apocalypse Now in relation to the Vietnam war–but the various personalities involved–including Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Coppola himself–keep this compulsively watchable. Too bad that Michael Herr, who wrote Apocalypse’s effective narration after the film was shot, is overlooked in the kaleidoscopic clashes of male egos, but it’s nice to see that Orson Welles’s radio and screenplay adaptations of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are acknowledged as precedents and probable influences. (Fine Arts) Read more