Uncle Howard
54th New York Film Festival
September 30 - 11, 2016
In a work of love and scholarship, Aaron Brookner breathes new life into the recently discovered archival film and video images in which his adored uncle, Howard Brookner, captured the downtown New York, post-Beat mosaic of writers, filmmakers, performers, and artists during the 1970s and 1980s.
While Aaron Brookner was working on the restoration of Burroughs: The Movie, his uncle Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs, he discovered an archive that Howard left uncatalogued. It encompassed unused footage, and much more: film and video diaries capturing the downtown New York, post-Beat mosaic of writers, filmmakers, performers, and artists in the 1970s and 1980s and the devastation of that community by AIDS, which took Howard’s life in 1989. A work of love and scholarship, Uncle Howard weaves contemporary interviews with this rediscovered footage: of the legendary “Nova Convention”; Robert Wilson rehearsing the aborted L.A. production of The Civil Wars; a twentysomething Jim Jarmusch, Howard’s NYU classmate, recording sound on Burroughs; and Howard’s lyrical video self-portrait, made near the end of his life.
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