WILLIAM S BURROUGHS RECONSIDERED

AUTHOR JACK SARGEANT IN PERSON: The Australian-based, British-born author of numerous books on underground cinema including Flesh & Excess, Deathtripping and Naked Lens presents a special screening of NOVA EXPRESS (dir: Andre Perkowski, 2009 - 2014, 70mins), the feature length adaptation of William S Burroughs’ legendary cut-up novel. Like the novel the film cuts-up, remixes, incorporates and detours through the image hoard of the twentieth century, with a soundtrack featuring the voices of William S Burroughs and others, the film offers a truely cinematic version of Burroughs most radical textual experiments. Introduced by Jack Sargeant, who will also be selling copies of his Burroughs inspired “Against Control.”

ABOUT THE FILM, “NOVA EXPRESS,” - For his 1964 novel “Nova Express,” William Burroughs (who died in 1997) employed the “cut-up” method devised by himself and writer-artist Brion Gysin, an anti-narrative method that involved randomly splicing together phrases from various sources and inserting them into his own text. For the film adaptation Andre Perkowski attempts something similar. In this five-year (and counting) project, he synchronizes bits of found footage with recordings of Burroughs and others (including fellow Beat writer Alan Ginsberg) reading from the novel. Repeated, retro images eventually coalesce into a tawdry, otherworldly miasma, suitable for Burroughs’s gravelly monologue — a cross between Raymond Chandler, Rimbaud and underground filmmaker Craig Baldwin. The author relates the escapades of his persona, Inspector Lee, an agent of the Nova police, whose mission is to save the planet from the virus of words and images by which malignant entities control and parasitically consume the human race. He and his colleagues hunt down the viral humanoids who infest and enslave unwitting hosts.