linear thought struggles with warped axes of time and space

April 30, 2018 1:53 PM

The first film ever streamed on the internet is kind of crazy: Beekeeping, alien planets, and the limits of narrative as technology.

The movie is called Wax, Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees written and directed by David Blair. You can stream it on the internet right now, free except for the fee of sanity. Most people watch for about two minutes before clicking away because Wax does not immediately seem a movie of worthwhile quality. Grainy archival film is mashed up with low-fi home video interspersed with rudimentary computer graphics that, even when the movie was released in 1991, were less than breathtaking.
Wax is like Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil if the travel budget had been only a few hundred bucks and it had been shot by Agnes Varda, written by late-stage-paranoiac Philip K. Dick, translated from English to English by the guileless singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston, then projected via rotoscope onto a napkin in the atrium bathroom of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. There is a very small subset of audiences for which that will sound orgasmic. Count me in.

Wax previously.

posted by sapagan (24 comments total)

the first video I remember watching on the internet was a professor lighting a grill with liquid oxygen. A Youtube commenter says: "He's since been told by the West Lafayette (Indiana) fire department to never bring liquid oxygen near a charcoal grill again."
posted by thelonius at 1:59 PM on April 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

So, this is definitely where Chris Carter got his ideas for the X-Files myth arc, right?
posted by tobascodagama at 2:06 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

the bees flourished
and quickly took root
in the hives
of the dead bees.

at that moment
a sudden love grew between Ellen Spiralen and Zoltan Abbasen

the two were married in the early winter
for their honymoon
Zoltan Abbasen took his new wife to America
to see the cowboys

they stopped


in Alamogordo


New Mexico
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:16 PM on April 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

i was ready to be mad at the article's author but instead i am full of joy. Wax is one of my favorite movies for all the reasons he presents.
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 2:42 PM on April 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

This film was whispered of in my circles when I was in college and I remember renting it as a bootleg video, years before anything was streamed online.

I think I got about 15 minutes into it. Perhaps I should have consumed more beverages beforehand.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 3:08 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I tried to watch Wax at least once. Maybe more? A few minutes of trying to wrangle its Quicktime-over-the-internet after reading about it in Mondo 2000 soon after its release aren't unlikely, and I know my animation school roomie rented it from Vidiots.

Maybe, twenty years and at least one or two nights of climbing out of deep wells of chemically-induced ego dissolution later, I'm ready to try and watch Wax again.
posted by egypturnash at 3:12 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: Dazzling... A Cyberpunk Extravaganza
posted by bleep at 4:02 PM on April 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Huh, I never knew it was the first film streamed on the Internet. I first saw it in 1994 or 1995 on VHS. It was very popular among my stoner friends and was in constant rotation on the TV in their house.

this is definitely where Chris Carter got his ideas for the X-Files myth arc, right?

This is funny because we actually talked about that among the same friends at the time.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:06 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

How can I have read two articles and two Wikipedia pages about this and no one even gives a hint as to the technology beneath "the first film on the internet".

There was no h.264, only MPEG-2/h.262, there was no bowser support for a video tag, there was at best XAnim and Quicktime 1.x. I'm really curious how this worked.
posted by GuyZero at 4:15 PM on April 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

A few minutes of trying to wrangle its Quicktime-over-the-internet

So it was Quicktime and I'm going to assume they used Cinepak as the codec which ran at 320×240 resolution video at 1× cdrom speed - 150 kbyte/s. Sustaining 150kBps over the internet would have been a pretty rare thing back in those days when the average user was at the slow end of the 56kbps modem connection at best. Crazy.
posted by GuyZero at 4:18 PM on April 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh man. I wore the local movie rental place’s VHS copy of this out. Then I got to college and we had Ethernet to the room, and I watched it again on my Mac LCII. Mind == blown. Good times, good times.
posted by cyclotronboy at 4:29 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm not 100% sure it was Quicktime to be honest, it's just what sounds about right.
posted by egypturnash at 4:31 PM on April 30, 2018

For some reasons I remember it being real player video but it’s been... 23years ;(
posted by cyclotronboy at 4:35 PM on April 30, 2018

RealPlayer Audio released 1995 and RealVideo, the server component, released 1997. I think Quicktime or straight MPEG-2 are the only possibilities.
posted by GuyZero at 4:48 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Very likely that someone transcoded it to RealVideo at some point, though. I recall that RV was a step up in bandwidth reduction when it came out.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:19 PM on April 30, 2018

I've seen Wax.

Being as that it was available for streaming in 1993, it's entirely possible that I saw it via streaming on a black and white monitor attached to a NeXT. It's also entirely possible I rented the video in a completely common 1993 sort of way.

Perhaps if I rewatch the movie I'll remember... but on the other hand, the narrative isn't really important here.
posted by yohko at 5:57 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I helped run an art festival in '92 in Vienna, Austria. David came and screened the film. To give you an idea of the times, I conducted a live video-projected interview with Howard Rheingold (then at Wired Magazine I believe) in MIT's MediaMOO. If you remember MOO's and MUD's then you, my friend, are very old.
posted by misterpatrick at 8:50 PM on April 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

LambdaMoo 4 evar
posted by GuyZero at 9:31 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ctrl-F for "mbone" did not find. Here it is.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:01 PM on April 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

More details about audio/video encoding:

Each form ot media can be encoded and compressed in several ways. Audio is usually encoded in PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) at 8KHz with 8-bit resolution giving 64Kb per second bandwidth for audio. Including packet overhead it raises to about 75Kb per second. By using Groupe Special Mobile (GSM), a cellular phone standard, one can get down to about 18Kb per second including overhead.

Video is more demanding. The ivs tool uses the CCITG (Consultative Committee of International Telephone and Telegraph) standard H.261 [2] whereas the nv tool uses a unique compression scheme. It is possible to limit the amount of bandwidth that should be produced in both tools. The usual bandwidth setting is 128Kb per second. How this translates into quality depends on the kind of scene that is captured.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:04 PM on April 30, 2018

Mbone, of course. And h.261. Those are some lost technologies.
posted by GuyZero at 10:13 PM on April 30, 2018

(My wife and I met on a MST3K-oriented MOO, so yeah, I remember them. Back when everyone you met online was a serial killer, or so it seemed when you'd tell people where you met...)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 2:23 AM on May 1, 2018

I hope nobody's getting the idea from the framing ("free except for the fee of sanity. Most people watch for about two minutes before clicking away because Wax does not immediately seem a movie of worthwhile quality") that this is a terrible, amateurish movie enjoyable only under the influence of drugs, a sort of filmic equivalent of The Eye of Argon. The comparison to Chris Marker is a good one, and I would think anyone who enjoys La Jetée wouldn't have much trouble with this—in fact, I'd be very surprised if that wasn't an important influence (along with the end of 2001). The voiceover is effective and well delivered, with good use of narrative transitions ("That night, Melissa and I made love for the last time"; "I had reached the land of the dead"; "Then I saw the bees directly for the first time"). The "worst" bit is the first two minutes, which I can understand causing people to give up, but hey, it's the opening credits, and surely we all know not to judge a movie by that. Anyway, I appreciate the post and the chance to experience a strange, thoughtful, and ultimately sad meditation on life and death. (By the way, the name Melissa is from the Greek word μέλισσα 'bee.')

Speaking of death, I had assumed that the Gulf War, and with its long-distance and excessive slaughter of Iraqis, was the inspiration for the movie, but apparently, according to the excellent interview RobotVoodooPower linked to, the war came along at the last moment to provide the final narrative touch:

The Mesopotamian bees in the movie are “television bees.” The existence of television requires one to become involved in all the problematic ethics of action at a distance. Taking television as a sort of trope, to make ethical sense inside the trope, you have to have two-way television; you not only have to have improbable transmission from but also improbable transmission to places that are far away. In the original versions of the story, back before the Gulf War, I created a two-way television between the military base in New Mexico and Basra, Iraq. Unfortunately, the reality of that television was closer than I imagined when I made my personal space-time imagining of what might be bad in America, which was simply based on what I guessed was all around, and not so far away—and though actually far away, turned out to be near.

posted by languagehat at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

A classic experimental feature length production. It even has a sort of plot, but a very loose, fragmented, and dream-like plot. I can see the Chris Marker comparison.
posted by ovvl at 1:57 PM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]