“The Nova Convention… a Free Artistic Experiment”: Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias on Nova ‘78

Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 centers around the Nova Convention, a late ’70s avant-garde extravaganza that took place at NYC’s now defunct Entermedia Theater (Second Avenue and 12th Street) in honor of William S. Burroughs’s return to the U.S. after living more than 20 years abroad. It was also a great excuse to gather a who’s who roster of counterculture icons to perform in the presence of the postmodern wordsmith who’d profoundly impacted them all. That would include Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, John Cage, Jackie Curtis, Robert Anton Wilson, Terry Southern, Frank Zappa and the list goes on. Quite the happening indeed! (Even without Keith Richards, who had to cancel at the last minute and was replaced with Zappa. Needless to say, no ticket-holders in the jam-packed audience took Smith up on her offer of a refund.) And just as remarkable is the fact that footage of the three-day event — shot on 16mm by Howard Brookner, Tom DiCillo and Jim Lebovitz with Brookner and Jim Jarmusch on sound — was only recently discovered in 2022 by an archivist at the John Giorno Foundation. Who then naturally placed a call to Aaron Brookner (Uncle Howard), who’s long been on a restoration endeavor, from 1983’s Burroughs: The Movie to 1986’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars (screening at the upcoming NYFF), to keep his late uncle’s all-too-brief body of work forever in the public eye. Soon after the film’s Locarno debut Filmmaker reached out to the Europe-based co-directors to learn all about Nova ’78 and the challenges of bringing a lost film to the big screen.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.