manufacturer presumably able to commune with the dead works better
when viewed as video art than as a fully developed motion picture, but
its historic significance is mainly technological: In 1993, "Wax"
became the first movie distributed on the Internet. Blair, who began
experimenting with video in the late 1970s, streamed the movie over
the World Wide Web (which had yet to enter popular usage) from a room
in the CBS building on 57th Street. (Here's the original New York
Times article covering the event:
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/24/business/cult-film-is-a-first-on-internet.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print).
A few hundred people, mainly engineers and academics, tuned into the
broadcast and watched the movie around the country. The Times report
suggests that video quality was terrible, the sound frequently cut and
other distractions prohibited this "screening" from truly displaying a
new medium for cinema. However, looking back on the occasion from our
perspective in the age of iTunes and Netflix Watch Instantly, it's
impossible not to view Blair's distribution experiment as incredibly
prescient.
(You can watch the bizarre opening minutes of "Wax" here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBto_xnz2tw)
--Eric Kohn
1 comment:
I haven't seen WAX, but it seems like a contender for Registry status in the not too distant future.
Wikipedia says it was also the "first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system." With three qualifiers (first, independent, and feature) it's a hard claim to take at face value. But if WAX was a pioneering work in this respect, it only adds to the strength of the case to Register it.
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