‘Nova ’78’ Locarno Review: Burroughs Leads a New York Creative Explosion

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but at some point in this century—mid-2010s, I’d venture—something broke in what we might call the “evolution” of culture and art. Over the past decade or so, amid a growing neoconservative backlash, there’s been, for the first time, a sense that in these fields we are in a process of constant, unstoppable regression. Watching films like Nova ’78 and what it depicts turns that suspicion into evidence. This coverage of an event—conference, concert, recital, happening—that took place in New York in 1978 captures a moment of creativity, invention, challenge, and risk, spiritually led by William S. Burroughs. What we see is a creative space in which everything seems to be in the process of being discovered.

A portrait of an era and a particular segment of that culture (let’s call it, broadly speaking, “rock culture”), Nova ’78 is a documentary built from the footage filmed by Howard Brookner (uncle of the co-director) in Manhattan before, during, and after an event called the Nova Convention, held at the Entermedia Theater between November 30 and December 2, 1978, as a tribute to Burroughs. The convention included round tables, seminars, poetry readings, multimedia performances, experimental concerts, and other assorted happenings. On and off stage, musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers mingled in a heady mix that ranged from Beat poets to the newly emerged punks.

The film by Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias, made from that recovered footage, is an extraordinary reflection of what happened there and the universe surrounding it. Alongside Burroughs, the camera and theater stage are graced by Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, John Cage, Timothy Leary, Terry Southern, Peter Orlovsky, Julie Heyward, and many others—including a very young Jim Jarmusch working as a director’s assistant. Keith Richards, promised by the organizers, never arrived, sparking a minor incident that Patti Smith, at least as seen here, seemed to handle brilliantly on stage.

Beyond the shows and performances, Nova ’78 fascinates for its behind-the-scenes view of the event: debates and conversations among the participants and organizers, discussions about contemporary political events (the looming revolution in Iran, opposition to a clause banning homosexual teachers from working in universities), as well as practical matters of organization. And, above all, the omnipresent, commanding figure of Burroughs, the focal point and philosophical—if not moral—compass of the gathering.

Aaron Brookner had previously made Uncle Howard, telling the story of his uncle Howard Brookner, the director of Bloodhounds of Broadway, who died at 35 in 1989. Howard not only made a little-seen film about the writer (Burroughs: The Movie, which Aaron helped rescue and re-release in 2014) but had also filmed and stored all this material from the Nova Convention in his vast archive. By restoring and organizing that footage, Brookner and Areias make Nova ’78 work as a testament to an era of forward-thinking creativity, in which art was being made and experimented with constantly. You might like some of the performances more than others, but that’s beside the point. The mission and ambition were to stretch the limits of the possible.

Although the filmmakers save the “who’s who” details for the end, certain performances stand out for their uniqueness: Zappa reading an unusual passage from Naked Lunch, Anderson distorting her voice for her own reading on the future, Glass in his most experimental mode (reportedly booed by the audience, though this is not shown), Smith and Kaye giving the event a noisy edge, and above all Burroughs himself, with his always sharp, enigmatic texts. One is a particularly shrewd reflection on what is sought—and what should be sought—in space exploration; another, on the fundamentalist revolution in Iran, comes close to predicting the bitter political present we now live in.