The literary heritage of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) defies any artistic or philosophical category in which we try to place him. Eloquent proof could be the fabulous Queer (2024), by Luca Guadagnino, based on the work of the same name by Burroughs, certainly the most radical film – in other words: radically beautiful – to hit Portuguese theaters this year. Now, we meet Burroughs again in a beautiful documentary, Nova ‘78co-signed by the Portuguese Rodrigo Areias and the American Aaron Brookner – already presented at Doclisboa, airs today at Porto/Post/Doc (Batalha Centro de Cinema, 9:30 pm).
In the most basic, and also most cinematic, sense, Nova ‘78 documents an event. Namely: the so-called Nova Convention, a series of meetings/shows – concerts, performances, conversations, etc. – which took place in New York over three days in 1978 (Nov. 30, Dec. 1 and 2). Imagined by Sylvère Lotringer, a French literary critic, based in New York at the time, the event was conceived as a tribute to Burroughs, who returned to the USA in 1974.
From that date on, largely thanks to the support of his friend Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs overcame drug addiction, which was largely reflected in his writing, particularly in Queer (written in 1951-53, but only published in 1985). With echoes of the call Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded e Nova Express), launched between 1961 and 1967, the events of Nova Convention remind us of a Burroughs admired as a true guru of the so-called counterculture of the 1970s (the term “counterculture” had been coined in 1969 by the writer and philosopher Theodore Roszak). For his peers, through his critique of post-industrial society and the legal system for monitoring individual differences, Burroughs even justified the aura of “philosopher of the future”.