William S. Burroughs Takes Center Stage In An Arty New York Time Capsule

Imagine going to a gig where The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards couldn’t make it, so Patti Smith stepped up to break the news, read you a poem, offered you your money back from her own pocket, and Frank Zappa filled in for him instead. Let’s go even further. Imagine it wasn’t really a gig at all, but a multimedia celebration of an author — William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) — a superstar counterculture writer whose shadow loomed large over the ’60s in ways that could never be replicated today. Compiled from original footage of the three-day event that took place in 1978 at Manhattan’s Entermedia Theater (now the Village East, a shortish walk to CBGB’s), Nova ’78 is an immersive time capsule that captures the arty essence of New York in the aftermath of punk and offers yet more proof that Burroughs was way ahead of anyone else in terms of political futurology.

All of this was shot, at the time and on the hoof, at the gnomically titled Nova Convention by Howard Brookner, subject of co-director Aaron Brookner’s personal 2016 documentary Uncle Howard, and, if you don’t know much about the art-rock-lit scene of the time, there are no concessions made. Even if you do know, there are surprises: a cringingly awkward interpretive dance performed to a tone poem turns out to be a collaboration between… oh, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Directors Brookner and Rodrigo Areias wisely leave that kind of information to the end, which is perhaps how it should be, since the event itself unfolded that way (Brookner’s sound man was a then-very-unknown Jim Jarmusch). This, after all, was a time when a new kind of culture was emerging from the ashes of the ’60s, and, certainly, some of the names popping up — Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Brion Gysin — were pretty long in the tooth by then.

Thankfully, American punk wasn’t quite so myopic on the subject of age, compared to the youth-focused rebellion engendered in the U.K. by The Sex Pistols. This is reflected in Easy Rider screenwriter Terry Southern’s now-famous introduction to the event, describing Burroughs as “grand, groovy and beloved” before referencing the then-recent mass suicide that had just taken place at Jonestown in Guyana. Taking the stage, in a very dark and punk-inflected moment, Burroughs then riffs on that, pretending to read a note from Dr. Benway, a notorious character from his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, and making a dark excuse for his non-appearance (“I have a few more calls to make tonight…”).

There’s not much explanation as to what the Nova Convention actually is, and, at the start of the film, Burroughs is asked to to describe it. He can’t, most likely because the film is very much a reflection of New York in that instant; at the age of 64, he’s just there, in the middle of this strange cultural moment, at a time when the country is experiencing an identity crisis and his more recent readers are finally starting to understand what he’s always been on about. In the’60s, his past heroin addiction was seen as rebellious and somehow even cool, but in the post-Watergate ’70s it had become a very chilling metaphor for societal control.

In that respect, as a documentary, some may find Nova ’78 somewhat forbidding, especially when Burroughs finally lays out his manifesto, which is basically that space is the future, but not quite for the same reason Elon Musk thinks it is. Citing mankind’s dependence on “the aqualung of time”, Burroughs suggests that we need a whole new dimension, not just more of the same in different surroundings. “It is necessary to travel,” he says. “It is not necessary — and it’s becoming increasingly difficult — to live.” All of this, however, goes over everybody’s heads because it seems, well, like science fiction, which is the area of the bookshop that most of Burroughs’s books used to end up in.

But while it is very much a look back at history, Nova ’78 also shows Burroughs as a prognosticator; though he seems stoically bewildered by some of the tributes performed in his name back then, there is not a chance in hell that he would be surprised by the state of the world today. He wanted out years ago.

Title: Nova ’78’
Festival: Locarno (Out of Competition)
Directors: Aaron Brookner, Rodrigo Areias
International sales: Pinball London
Running time: 1 hr 18 mins