n 1978, writer William S. Burroughs moved back to New York, and the city’s creative community decided to celebrate his return with a festival. Nova ’78 featured an impressive line-up of talent, including Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, John Giorno, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Zappa and, of course, William S. Burroughs.
Filming the event was director Howard Brookner, who deployed several camera crews to capture the action. He would go on to create the 1983 documentary Burroughs after spending considerable time with the writer. He later made an acclaimed documentary about theatre director Robert Wilson and his unfinished The Civil Wars project before moving into the dramatic realm with Bloodhounds of Broadway, starring Madonna, Matt Dillon and Jennifer Grey.
Footage from that 1978 gathering was long thought lost until Brookner’s nephew, documentary director Aaron Brookner, managed to track it down. From the reassembled footage, alongside co-director Rodrigo Areias, he has created Nova ’78, which is currently screening as part of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival.
OUTinPerth chatted to Aaron Brookner about finding the footage and making the new film.
The footage you have used to make this film was lost for a long time. Where did you eventually find it?
“Well, it started in two places really, across the span of a decade. I found the bulk of the negatives that my uncle shot while he was making his Burroughs film between 1978 and 1982. I found them in William Burroughs’ bunker, where he lived in New York City. Those negatives had sat on the shelf for 30 years, so I came along and recovered them in 2013.
“I had a long printout of all the negatives that had been shot, and they weren’t all there, so I assumed some had simply been lost. At that time I had remastered my uncle’s Burroughs film and also made a film called Uncle Howard, which was all about recovering Howard’s archive.
“Then, on Valentine’s Day in 2022, after the pandemic, I got a call from the archivist for John Giorno, the poet who had died in 2019 and who was very much a central figure in Burroughs’ world. They told me they had found more boxes of my uncle’s films.
“It was very shocking to me. They were in a storage unit that John had on Long Island, so I was cautiously optimistic that these might be some of the missing negatives. I went to New York, but old negatives are not like a disc you can just put in and play. They have to be carefully treated. It’s a long process to restore the film and sound and sync it all.
“They contained a lot of very important missing components from the Nova Convention. Some of the really significant material was in there, including backstage footage and, most importantly, shots of the audience.”
There is an extraordinary line-up of legendary people captured in this film. It’s almost hard to believe they were all in the same place at the same time. A lot of them were already major figures then, while others went on to become legendary names.
“I recognised the very unique opportunity with this material because a lot of people have written or talked about William Burroughs’ influence on other artists, and the cross-pollination of artists and ideas in the Lower East Side of New York City during the late 1970s. But it’s another thing entirely to actually see it.
“For example, we see Ann Waldman, William Burroughs and Frank Zappa backstage, and Ann Waldman asks Frank Zappa, ‘How did you discover William Burroughs?’ He’s talking about finding Naked Lunch when he was in high school, and his response was, ‘I didn’t know someone could say that in a book.’ If you know Frank Zappa and how he went on to champion free speech throughout his unfortunately short life, you can draw a straight line back to discovering William’s work.”
This documentary also captures New York in the late ’70s. It’s such a different city from the New York we know today.
“It’s another planet! Every time I went into that world, I felt like this is probably as close to time travel as one can get. Now it looks completely different. It sounds completely different.
“I’m a native New Yorker. I’ve grown up there. New York is definitely loud, and it’s built up river to river. All the tall buildings trap sound. Downtown, the sound is different. It’s kind of thin and spreads out.
“It was a very important year. At the end of 1978 there was a big mayoral election. New York was bankrupt. It was really heading for disaster, and Mayor Koch won and came up with this idea to offer tax abatements to property developers to give the city a facelift. In January 1979, The New York Times wrote for the first time about this new trend happening. It was actually given a term in England that’s now widely used. It’s called gentrification. New York started to physically change after that.”
Howard, your uncle, was, I’m assuming, a really big influence on you becoming a filmmaker?
“He was a very big influence on me, and he was the first person to inspire me to become a filmmaker. I was about six or seven years old when I was on the set of Bloodhounds of Broadway. I sat with him in his director’s chair while he directed a scene with Madonna and Randy Quaid. In my film Uncle Howard you can see scenes of us playing with a video camera and him filming me.
“It was kind of part of our dynamic, so he was certainly a big influence on me as a filmmaker, not just in giving me the bug, but in showing me what was possible with filmmaking. I was always very inspired by how Howard could navigate different environments and different subjects while always remaining authentic to himself.”
How does it feel to finish a project that he began?
“Well, it was interesting. There are about 10 hours of footage that he shot around the Nova Convention event, and he left that behind while making his biography of Burroughs. I actually found a recording Howard made in an interview from 1985 where he talked about wanting to make two more films about Burroughs — one about his life in Kansas and another later in his life.
“When I received all this additional footage from the Nova Convention, it really did feel like both a responsibility and an opportunity to do justice to what he had captured there. By that point, after working with this Burroughs material for the better part of a decade, I’d become very well versed in Burroughs’ ideas, the universe around him and all the people who inhabited it.
“On the one hand, it was very difficult to make a film without the filmmaker who shot the footage. But I had learned so much by then, so it was fascinating to write with his material, interpret it and find my own rhythm — and decide what I wanted to say to a contemporary audience using his work.
“It was a very challenging, but rewarding, experience to take something from the past, shape it with craft and present it for today, so that I can move on.”
Nova ’78 is playing at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival – see when’s it is screening.
