Antenna 2026: Aaron Brookner talks NOVA 78
Directed by Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias, Nova ’78 plays at Antenna Documentary Film Festival 2026 in Sydney. Addy Fong speaks to Aaron:
Firstly with Nova 78, I noticed it spoke about the function of art, that art needs an audience to exist or to be valid. Did that shape how you approached the making of this film, the idea that art needs an audience?
The moment you’re referring to was a great moment when Allen Ginsberg talks about when he first met Burroughs and they asked him ‘what is art?’ expecting some kind of big answer. Burroughs said ‘that’s the dumbest question I’ve ever heard. Art is a three-letter word. It’s whatever you want it to mean. It’s not like the label of the thing is just a label. It doesn’t mean anything beyond that.’ I was aware of that and that spirit was the whole spirit of this event, the free-flowing nature of it. I was very much aware of making something that was in a shape, in a form that would embody that, if that makes sense, and not try to pin it down or label it into something. That approach kind of led into the storytelling approach which was to see how to immerse the audience in this space where this sense of discovery is very kind of organic and where whatever might be coming up next is going to take you by surprise.
From the film I get this sense that the music of the 70s, 80s was used as a form of rebellion, with the advancement of technology and experimentation. In one of the scenes there’s a lady who uses effects with her voice, she makes her voice sound robotic. I remember vaguely learning that vocal distortion was invented as a way of scrambling war messages, encrypting them, but now a lot of experimental musicians use distortion effects as part of performance. Was that something you were aware of when you included these kinds of performances in this film?
That performance you’re talking about was Laurie Anderson, a super well-known and amazing artist. She’s done many things with voice modulation, pitches, and electronics. The whole Nova 78 event was to honour William Burroughs and his influence. Burroughs, whether you like his writing or not, transformed the idea of literature profoundly and uniquely by making ‘cut-up’ literature. This influenced so many people from artists like The Beatles to David Bowie.
Burroughs did a lot with audio recordings himself. He had this theory of the universe being pre-recorded. Everything is the way it is, unless you start to tamper with it and mess with it. You can do that by making recordings and cutting them up, like text. To change things and push into new terrain was very much what Burroughs represented to all of the artists performing at the Nova Convention. They were all doing something different and unexpected. Patti Smith was putting rock and roll to poetry that hadn’t been done before at that time of poetry, Laurie Anderson was doing a lot of electronic experiments with her voice, with her violin, in her dress appearing in a tuxedo, Julia Hayward, Ed Sanders, working on these electrodes connected to his hands, Frank Zappa’s doing something he never did before, which is read aloud, he talks about not being a reader, that’s not his thing. Everyone is pushing into a new space and that is very much about what the thing (the Nova convention) was and I would extend that to filmmaking.
All of this was in 1978 in the fall, originally filmed by my uncle who was at NYU film school at the time. Nowadays, maybe we take for granted people recording, we’re used to seeing everyone with their phones. This wasn’t a normal thing to do at all. This was kind of crazy to take four different film crews, position them around and record on 16mm, just free flowing and follow this thing. So even the idea of putting filmmaking on the ground in that space, with the intent to make something, even that was very new. It is amazing to me going through it, on one hand, I felt like this is the closest thing I could get to travelling through time being in another era, on the other hand, it was sort of like in the past, but also way advanced because again, this idea of like, no labels, not being restricted, art being pushed into new directions into new spaces. There was a very kind of high watermark at that point for feminism, for ideas against fundamentalism, alternate ways of broader acceptance, things were very kind of far advanced, in a lot of ways then and that’s really kind of extraordinary across all of these areas.
Speaking of experimentation, has watching the footage, filmed by your uncle, influenced your own practice? Is there stuff you’ve taken on watching or been inspired by?
Yeah, definitely. Initially, this whole broad endeavour around this topic began for me in 2011-2012 when I just wanted to search for the first film on William Burroughs that my uncle did. Like The Big Lebowski, all the dude ever wanted was to get his rug back, I just wanted that one thing, but it led to this whole other world exploding and opening up before me. I very much took on board that kind of spirit, that approach. I often would start working with sound first, mixing it with image and music. This has always been a space I’m comfortable working with, and I still work that way. To me every film I work on, you’re following a feeling and there’s sort of a truth to that feeling. It can move off and you have to guide it back, you’re listening to it. So whatever one can do to get there, I think is important. Sometimes if you lock into, oh, things need to be this way, it’s very rigid, I find that it can take you off the truth. The beautiful thing about the nature of this footage is that it wasn’t handed to me, organised or synced. I found this in instalments in 2013-2014, just a pile of film, a pile of sound separate, 16mm negative magnetic sound, no guides, no shot list. I wasn’t there, so it was a huge task to make sense of it and piece it together. It was all sort of like a process of experimenting to get it to a place that would make sense.
In 2022, when I thought I was done with all of this, I found there was more footage held in another storage unit. It was pretty crazy because I got the original footage out of the bunker in 2013, where Burroughs lived, there’s some scenes of Nova 78, then Valentine’s Day 2022, I got a call from the archivist of John Giorno, a poet who performs in the film, who used to live in and be the guardian of the bunker. They told me he died in 2019 and they found more boxes of my uncle’s film at another storage unit. It turned out to be 44 negative rolls, 440 minutes, which is a lot of footage. A lot of that was the missing components of the Nova convention, in particular, the audience. So this is a roundabout way of saying, it’s one thing to see the performers on stage with a black background, it’s another to see it within the context of audience, audience reaction shots, and the interplay of that because the space started to flesh out. So in a way, this whole thing is one big experiment but by putting all these things together and seeing it, a kind of fuller picture started to emerge. I still work that way on other projects that I’m doing even now, you know, experimenting.
William Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch, right? Has he written anything else? Obviously, as this film shows, he had quite an influence on culture. What was his personal relationship with your uncle?
Burroughs wrote many books. He wrote Junkie, Queer, Naked Lunch, two trilogies, cut up trilogies, Exterminator! Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express, and Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads, Western Lands. He spent the last 15 years of his life as a painter, he did records with Kurt Cobain, artworks with Keith Haring, he’s in a U2 music video, he was a really wide-reaching figure.
At the time my uncle met him, he was a very kind of mysterious figure, who had just returned to the US after living in South America, North Africa, and Europe for about 25 years. He didn’t know that he had become kind of famous but what happened was the Naked Lunch was such a radical book. You’ve heard of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, On the Road and Howl, they became the main beat literature guys, their teacher and their mentor was Burroughs but he was living abroad, so when beat literature exploded in the 50s and 60s, it was all about Kerouac and Ginsberg. Burroughs was this mysterious guy in the background. He somehow became this cult hero of punk rock counterculture, rock and roll world. He came back to New York in the mid-70s and suddenly he’s living in downtown New York where all these punk rock clubs were happening. He had a manager/partner, who later became kind of like his family, really, James Grauerholz, the same age as my uncle, who said to Burroughs, ‘the same people who are going to hear the Ramones at CBGBs will pay to hear you too.’ He started to get Burroughs out performing his work and that naturally led to the Nova Convention, sort of the product, the build up of many other performances he was doing. He was really like this huge hero of this world.
People got together to make this whole three day event to honour him and it sold out. It sold out for a weekend to pay tribute, to perform, to exchange ideas. I even met a taxicab driver who was there as a teenager in the audience. Everyone was there. Thurston Moore, the guitarist from Sonic Youth, when he was 19 he went, he’s in the footage, queuing up, going in, so it was really an extraordinary moment. My uncle (Howard Brookner) was looking for a topic to do something on for his senior thesis film at NYU. He knew James and Burroughs were living right around there and so they started filming together and they just really connected artistically, had a similar sense of humour. A lot of people didn’t understand that Burroughs was very funny. My uncle certainly understood that and felt very at ease.
This started in 1978, I only used footage in Nova 78 from 1978, a trip to Colorado in October, just Howard and Jim Jarmusch, Howard’s best friend at film school. They had done a lot of two man crew stuff around New York City together. In October they did a trip to Colorado, my uncle doing camera, Jim doing sound. Then the Nova convention happened end of November, early December. Howard decided, ‘OK, let’s just document this whole thing. Let’s shoot this whole event.’
The original slates were (titled) ‘Novacon’ so I think he was going to make a film about the Nova convention but what happened was he went on and his relationship with Burroughs deepened, he ended up filming with Burroughs for four years to make a kind of definitive biography on Burroughs. All of this footage was left to the wayside, just seeming kind of bits, and that was the nature of their bond. They stayed very close until my uncle died. In fact, my uncle cast Burroughs as a butler in his movie Bloodhounds of Broadway with Madonna and Matt Dillon and all these people. Howard also introduced Burroughs to Gus Van Sant who cast him in Drugstore Cowboy, a famous movie that Burroughs was in with Matt Dillon.
It’s really interesting how many areas Burroughs touched. He’s one of the faces on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts, by The Beatles. I mean, everyone kind of sought him out, it was just kind of extraordinary how many things he did.
It’s like I know of him, but I don’t know him. Now I have this new person I’m going to do a Wikipedia deep dive into.
Yeah, you can and it’s amazing. I’ve met a lot of people who have never read his books. You almost don’t even need to read his books, you can if you want, some are more accessible than others, but people know about him and know about him through these connections and these terms that he came up with. Someone described him once as the grandfather who wouldn’t judge you or a CIA agent in reverse, a very fascinating character.
Interesting. I just remembered I have a copy of David Cronenberg’s The Naked Lunch on DVD, that’s why things felt familiar. In Nova 78 there’s talk about how in the past the church told everyone to believe the earth was flat but then art and enlightenment brought forth these new ideas. Do you think the stuff touched on in Nova 78 is this rebellion against the rigidity of religious culture and artistic elitism?
Yeah, everything in the movie is there for a reason. What he’s talking about is, which I find to be true, you can’t convince anyone of anything. He says art and pure science makes you aware of what you already know and don’t know that you know. There is this feeling within all of us, we know what’s true. So the point with ‘the earth is flat’ He’s saying, people living on the coast could see when the ships came in, the slope, people knew it. They had at that time the church telling them, this is his example, ‘no, no, it’s flat, it’s flat’ but at some point, art and science, gave people the permission or the encouragement to embrace what they already really knew, deep down, and you kind of break free of that. To me, I think that is a central point of art. Art having a point and having an agenda, it’s a different kind of thing. In some ways, that’s kind of like the church telling you the earth is flat, you’re telling someone something. In my experience, great art connects with me on a much deeper level and just feels correct. It’s a much deeper, profound human thing. I think he articulates well, it makes you aware of what you already know and can feel. I very much wanted to put that in the movie and champion that.
This film is a sort of tip of the iceberg of this crazy, huge archive with Burroughs and all of these people and lots of ideas. It was a very conscious thing. I wanted to do two things with this movie. I wanted to put you in the NOVA convention to experience that, and I wanted to weave from the archive, put together, write with it, if you will, ideas that would speak to things that I thought were relevant and useful for today cause I’m still making this movie for today’s audience in today’s world.
Does that mean that you’ll use more of the footage cause you’ve got so much of it?
Yeah, possibly. It’s very interesting because it’s not all I do. I work on a lot of things. Usually, one makes a movie on something and then you move on from it. What I found with this material, and it’s a credit to Burroughs and the many different artists in it, is the intersection of really great thinkers and ideas. It’s a credit to my uncle as a filmmaker at that time. There’s always new things to be discovered, it’s astounding. Nova 78 felt like it needed to happen to show people this. I thought a lot of ideas that are expressed there are so useful for today. Sometimes it’s almost easier to be able to think clearly about the present by looking at something from before. Any kind of period movie is really a movie for today, but it’s been put in another context and through that kind of distance can give you perspective. It’s hard to always look around you in the present day and make sense of it because you’re in it, you’re so close to it. The ability to look back into another space, another time, you can see the things that resonate with you, the things that you’re picking up on are actually things that are probably resonating with you for today, naturally, which is a cool thing about this project in general, I think.
It feels like there’s a sense of nostalgia and wisdom, you’re wiser having lived through your experiences, who you are now is different to who you were before. With that in mind, do you have any advice would you have for filmmakers/artists?
In my experience, I would say there’s value in being patient and staying in tune with what’s going on around you and what you respond to. The best stories I’ve connected with kind of found me. It’s a little bit magical, but it’s sort of like Kung Fu. There’s this idea of the kind of snake, you’re kind of like, relaxed but alert. It’s not about being passive, you have to be engaged in the process and doing the work, not being afraid when things kind of appear to you, and they feel correct to you to follow them. To follow an idea, a feeling of something that feels truthful to you. I think all the best filmmakers follow that feeling. You can feel a film when it doesn’t feel authentic and it feels contrived in some way. It’s obvious, it’s almost like food. You can’t fake a good meal, you love it or you don’t, that comes from within. All the steps along the way of making a film, there’s that feeling of what you choose to make a film about. The best films are authentic to that filmmaker, only that filmmaker could have told that story.
There’s many ways to make a film. I still love filmmaking because it combines all of these amazing things. It combines picture, sound, movement, music, performance, edit, rhythm, whatever, and you can see it in Nova 78, all these different things going on in there. If you’re following a feeling and you’re following a story that feels authentic to you, have confidence that you have all of these different means of creating that movie and being free and authentic to that process. I think that’s a great way to get a lot of authentic movies told in a very authentic way. As a film goer myself, I love going to a movie where I’m gonna see something I have never seen before, an approach that’s totally new. Not new for the sake of being new, new for the sake of being authentic to that story.
Nova 78 plays on Sat 7 Feb 7:15pm at Dendy Newtown and Fri 13 Feb 8:45pm Dendy Newtown.
For tickets and information, go here: https://antennafestival.org/films/nova-78/
Interview by Addy Fong.
