Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees

A curious pot-pourri of found footage, fantasy narrative and electronic visual trickery, this is proof that stylistic innovation and a taste for the bizarre don't always add up to galvanising effect. The narrative concerns a post-WWI English beekeeper, James 'Hive' Maker (William Burroughs in his most fleeting film cameo to date), with a miraculous swarm of Mesopotamian bees, and his descendant Jacob, who works in a military computer graphics unit in New Mexico. Starting off with a stack of antique documentary footage, Blair builds up an intrigue narrative that aspires to the po-faced absurdity of Peter Greenaway's early pseudo-documentaries. But it loses momentum when Blair himself takes centre stage as the protection-suited Jacob.