 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(February 2013) |
| Burroughs | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Howard Brookner |
| Produced by | Howard Brookner |
| Starring | William S. Burroughs |
Release date |
|
Running time | 90 minutes |
| Countries | United States United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Burroughs is a 1983 documentary film directed by Howard Brookner about the Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs. [1]
Burroughs is the first and only documentary to be made about and with the full participation of writer William S. Burroughs. In a collaboration between Burroughs and director Howard Brookner the film explores Burroughs’ life story along with many of his contemporaries including Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Francis Bacon, Herbert Huncke, Patti Smith, Terry Southern, and Lauren Hutton.
Brookner managed to obtain 5 years of unparalleled access and enthusiastic participation from William S Burroughs. As a result, Burroughs: The Movie documents Burroughs’ long, controversial and productive life in great detail. The film travels from the American Midwest to North Africa, through defining moments of his wildly unconventional life, including several personal tragedies, ultimately charting the development of Burroughs’ unique literary style.
Howard Brookner began shooting the film in 1978 as his senior thesis at NYU; with Burroughs’ cooperation it subsequently expanded into a feature completed 5 years later in 1983. The film was shot by Tom DiCillo and Richard L. Camp. The sound was recorded by Jim Jarmusch. DiCillo and Jarmusch were fellow NYU classmates and both very close friends of Brookner's.
Towards the end of shooting BBC Arena approached Brookner and provided funds to complete the film. As a result, the film was screened as part of the BBC Arena television series.
In the process of making the film Brookner became close friends with Burroughs. Their friendship would endure for many years more and Burroughs would go on to play a cameo role in Brookner's final film Bloodhounds of Broadway .
The film premiered at the 1983 New York Film Festival. In Britain the film was released as part of the BBC Arena television series. It screened in both 1983 and was repeated following Burroughs’ death in 1997.
Burroughs: The Movie was released to generally positive reviews and was reviewed by some of the most influential film critics in the United States.
Janet Maslin of The New York Times said of the film: "The quality of discovery about Burroughs was very much the director’s doing, and Mr. Brookner demonstrates an unusual degree of liveliness and curiosity in exploring his subject." [1]
Roger Ebert wrote "Burroughs is a documentary portrait of a man who was willing to try everything, and who has so far survived everything. The one thing you miss in the film is the sound of laughter." [2]
In 2012 Howard Brookner's archive was discovered in a number of locations in both the United States and Europe.
The collection included 16mm film, reel to reel and mag sound, cassette tapes, 8mm film, VHS, video 8, and personal documents including letters, photos and writings. Some of the material contained never before seen out-takes of Burroughs: The Movie, including those with Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Brian Jones and Brion Gysin.
On November 28, 2012, Howard Brookner's nephew Aaron Brookner launched a Kickstarter campaign with company Pinball London to finance digital restoration of Burroughs: The Movie. The campaign was successful, gaining $21,360 from 283 backers, beating the initial goal of $20,000. Originally, the Kickstart had planned on premiering the film in NYC. Deciding to coincide with the Burroughs Century, [3] however, the film was instead premiered for the first time in its restored condition at the Indiana University Cinema [4] in Bloomington, Indiana on February 6, a day after William S. Burroughs' birthday. Aaron Brookner had a Q & A panel after the movie, and was also filming for his upcoming documentary entitled Uncle Howard .
The re-release of Burroughs: The Movie coincided with celebrations of William S. Burroughs’ one-hundredth birthday in 2014. [5]
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Naked Lunch is a 1991 surrealist science fiction drama film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. It is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs's 1959 novel of the same name, and an international co-production of Canada, Britain, and Japan.
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century.
Herbert Edwin Huncke was an American writer and poet, and an active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America. He was a member of the Beat Generation and is reputed to have coined the term.
No wave cinema was an underground filmmaking movement that flourished on the Lower East Side of New York City from about 1976 to 1985. Associated with the artists’ group Collaborative Projects, no wave cinema was a stripped-down style of guerrilla filmmaking that emphasized dark edgy mood and unrehearsed immediacy above many other artistic concerns – similar to the parallel no wave music movement in its raw and rapid style.
Richard Nelson Corliss was an American film critic and magazine editor for Time. He focused on movies, with occasional articles on other subjects.
Thomas A. DiCillo is an American film director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and musician.
Antony Balch was an English film director and distributor, best known for his screen collaborations with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs in the 1960s and for the 1970s horror film, Horror Hospital.
Ira Cohen was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker.
Founded by poet and performance artist John Giorno in 1965, Giorno Poetry Systems is a non-profit organization where artists, poets, and musicians present the work of other artists, poets, and musicians.
The Dreamachine, invented in 1959 by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, is a stroboscopic flickering light art device that produces eidetic visual stimuli.
Dead City Radio is a musical album by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, released by Island Records in 1990. The CD is a collection of readings by Burroughs set to a broad range of musical compositions. It was produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, with musical accompaniment from John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, among others. It was dedicated to "Keith Haring, at the Apocalypse."
Sinclair Beiles was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.
This is a bibliography of the works of William S. Burroughs.
Naked Lens: Beat Cinema is a book by Jack Sargeant about the relationship between Beat culture and underground film. First published by Creation Books in 1997, the book has been subsequently republished in two different English language editions, by Creation Books in 2001 and Soft Skull in 2008. The book also features contributions from Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Stephanie Watson, and Arthur and Corrine Cantrill.
Howard Brookner was an American film director. He produced and directed the documentary Burroughs about William S. Burroughs (1983), Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars on theatre director Robert Wilson (1986), and directed, co-produced and co-wrote Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989).
Uncle Howard is a 2016 documentary film about filmmaker Howard Brookner directed by Aaron Brookner.
Aaron Brookner is an American film director and scriptwriter. His debut feature film was The Silver Goat (2011), the first feature film made for iPad exhibition. He produced the restoration of cult classic Burroughs, directed by Howard Brookner, which was re-released by The Criterion Collection. His film Uncle Howard was selected as part of the US Documentary Competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
