Imagine to go to a concert where Keith Richards of Rolling Stones could not do it, so Patti Smith intensified to announce the news, read you a poem, offered you your money on his own pocket, and Frank Zappa rather filled him. Let’s go even further. Imagine that it was not really a concert, but a multimedia celebration of a author – William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)- A superstar counter-culture writer whose shadow was looming in the 1960s in a way that could never be reproduced today. Compiled from the original sequences of the three -day event which took place in 1978 at the Entermedia theater in Manhattan (now the village of the East, a short walk from CBGB), Nova ’78 is an immersive temporal capsule that captures New York A arty essence in the aftermath of punk and offers even more evidence than Burroughs was path In advance on anyone in terms of political future.
All this was turned, at the time and on the hoof, during the Nova convention entitled Gnomically by Howard Brookner, subject of the 2016 personal documentary of the Aaron Brookner co -director Uncle HowardAnd, if you don’t know much about the art-rock stage of the time, there are no concessions. Even if you know, there are surprises: a clumsy interpretative dance with a poem of your turns out to be a collaboration between … Oh, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The directors Brookner and Rodrigo Areias judiciously leave this kind of information at the end, it may be like that, since the event itself took place in this way (Brookner’s Sound Man was thenvery-Unknown jim jarmusch). After all, it was a time when a new type of culture emerged from the ashes of the 1960s, and certainly, some of the names that appeared – Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Brion Gysin – were quite long in the tooth by then.
Fortunately, the American punk was not as myopic on the subject of age, compared to the rebellion focused on young people caused in the United Kingdom by the Sex Pistols. This is reflected in Easy rider The now famous introduction of the Terry Southern screenwriter to the event, describing Burroughs as “Grand, Groovy and Aimé” before referenced the then recent mass suicide which had just occurred in Jonestown in Guyana. By taking the scene, in a very dark moment and informed punk, Burroughs Riffs then on this subject, pretending to read a note from Dr. Benway, a notorious character of his 1959 novel Lunch nakedAnd make a dark excuse for his non-comparison (“I have a few other calls to make this evening …”).
There are not many explanations on what the Nova Convention EastAnd, at the start of the film, Burroughs is invited to describe it. He cannot, most likely because the film is really a reflection of New York at this moment; At the age of 64, he was just thereIn the midst of this strange cultural moment, at a time when the country is experiencing an identity crisis and its most recent readers are Finally Start understanding what it has always been. In the 1960s, her dependence on past heroin was considered rebellious and even cool, but in the 1970s post-waergate, she had become a very Frightening metaphor for societal control.
In this regard, as a documentary, some may find Nova ’78 A little forbidden, especially when Burroughs finally exposes its manifesto, which is essentially that space is the future, but not quite for the same reason, Elon Musk thinks. Citing the dependence of humanity with regard to “the Aqualung of Time”, Burroughs suggests that we need a whole new dimension, not just the same thing in different surroundings. “It is necessary to travel,” he says. “It is not necessary – and it becomes more and more difficult – to live.” All this, however, reviews everyone’s head because it seems, well, like science fiction, which is the domain of the bookstore in which most of the books of burroch are found.
But even if it’s really a look at the story, Nova ’78 also shows burrochs as a prognosis; Although it seems stoically disconcerted by some of the tributes to its name at the time, there is no chance in hell that it was surprised by the state of the world today. He wanted to go out for years ago.
Title: Nova ’78’
Festival: Locarno (out of competition)
Directors: Aaron Brookner, Rodrigo Areias
International sales: Pinball London
Operating time: 1 h 18 minutes
