William S. Burroughs

Overview

Known for
Acting
Gender
Other
Birthday
Feb 05, 1914 (111 years old)
Death date
Aug 02, 1997

William S. Burroughs

Known For

Robert Wilson: The Beauty of the Mysterious
0h 52m
Movie 2022

Robert Wilson: The Beauty of the Mysterious

We look back at more than half a century of mysterious artistic creation while trying to crack a unique artistic code. Why are people moved to tears when Robert “Bob” Wilson puts minimalistic petrol pumps into a production of Shakespeare’s sonnets? Why does merciless repetition change our understanding of something? Together with Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe or Marina Abramović we trace back our own experience of Bob’s art. Is it true what Philipp Glass the collaborator of the milestone piece “Einstein on the Beach” laughingly and with apparent pleasure exclaims “what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything!”?

Take Your Pills
1h 27m
Movie 2018

Take Your Pills

In a hypercompetitive world, drugs like Adderall offer students, athletes, coders and others a way to do more -- faster and better. But at what cost?

Uncle Howard
1h 36m
Movie 2017

Uncle Howard

When Howard Brookner lost his life to AIDS in 1989, the 35-year-old director had completed two feature documentaries and was in post-production on his narrative debut, Bloodhounds of Broadway. Twenty-five years later, his nephew, Aaron, sets out on a quest to find the lost negative of Burroughs: The Movie, his uncle's critically-acclaimed portrait of legendary author William S. Burroughs. When Aaron uncovers Howard's extensive archive in Burroughs’ bunker, it not only revives the film for a new generation, but also opens a vibrant window on New York City’s creative culture from the 1970s and ‘80s, and inspires a wide-ranging exploration of his beloved uncle's legacy.

Robert E. Fulton III Edit of Burroughs: The Movie
0h 23m
Movie 2015

Robert E. Fulton III Edit of Burroughs: The Movie

After two years of filming, director Howard Brookner brought inventor and photographer Robert E. Fulton III a trunkful of William S. Burroughs footage to see if Fulton could edit his film. The result was a decidedly experimental 23-minute cut. The director was looking for a more narrative approach, so Fulton’s edit was never used.

Don't Blink - Robert Frank
1h 22m
Movie 2015

Don't Blink - Robert Frank

The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they're one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he's covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to the present, is intimately registered in his now-formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early '90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don't Blink is Israel's like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90.

William S. Burroughs in the Dreamachine
1h 5m
Movie 2015

William S. Burroughs in the Dreamachine

Jon Aes-Nihil's experimental documentary about iconic Beat author William S. Burroughs' experiences using a stroboscopic device, known as the dream machine, which simulates the electric pulses of the human brain to elicit hallucinations and dream-like imagery while the user's eyes are closed.

William S. Burroughs: The Possessed
Movie 2015

William S. Burroughs: The Possessed

Thelema Now! host Frater Puck discusses William S. Burroughs, possession, synchronicities and chaos magick

Coda I + Coda II
0h 4m
Movie 2013

Coda I + Coda II

Peter Gidal’s starting point for his 16mm film was a soundtrack that consists of three lines from a 1,000 word story written by Gidal in 1971, read by William Burroughs. Gidal describes the film’s ‘so-called imagery’ as ‘a complex of barely visible cuts in space and time, the opposite of erasure, but nothing so much as visible’.

Coda I
0h 2m
Movie 2013

Coda I

Peter Gidal’s starting point for his 16mm film was a soundtrack that consists of three lines from a 1,000 word story written by Gidal in 1971, read by William Burroughs.

Coda II
0h 2m
Movie 2013

Coda II

Gidal describes the film’s ‘so-called imagery’ as ‘a complex of barely visible cuts in space and time, the opposite of erasure, but nothing so much as visible’

Biography

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art". Description above from the Wikipedia article William S. Burroughs, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

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