“A ‘Classic’ of a Film You Never Knew Existed”: Aaron Brookner on His NYFF-Debuting Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars

While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that’s as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting — artistically, managerially, financially — the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, his massive, multinational, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. And far fewer documentarians have a nephew like Aaron Brookner, who’s spent the past dozen years painstakingly restoring his uncle Howard’s long-unseen film. Premiering at this year’s New York Film Festival, the newly restored version (from a surviving 16mm print) is a deft interweaving of clips of Wilson’s outsized stage works with up-close interviews with both collaborators and the surprisingly transparent theater titan himself, sometimes in laidback settings, such as squeezed between former neighbors on a couch in his childhood hometown of Waco, Texas. Indeed, it’s Howard’s truly intimate access -— an overused term when it comes to docs -— to his lead character that humanizes this abstract avant-garde world. You really get the sense that Wilson’s just hanging out unfiltered with a friend who happens to have a camera, which was probably the case. There’s Philip Glass, who in response to Howard’s questions about Einstein on the Beach, says that it’s hard to describe something with words that wasn’t based on language to begin with. And Wilson’s partner on the German script, Heiner Müller (disciple of Brecht and member of The Berliner Ensemble), who aims to create a “theater of experience,” not a “theater of discourse” – one in which “you might only understand what you saw weeks later.” At one point Wilson even confesses that the older he gets the more he realizes that he has to make compromises, an unexpected admission coming from a detail-obsessed man for whom paring down seems an utterly foreign concept. Just prior to the Lincoln Center debut (September 29th) of Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, Filmmaker reached out to Aaron Brookner, who we last caught up with to discuss his Locarno-debuting Nova ’78). In addition to pursuing a home for his uncle’s archives, Brookner is now also busy developing his own films and series as co-director of Pinball London.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.