Uncle Howard

3/13/18. Lucky for Howard Brookner (who died of AIDS at the age of 34) that he had a nephew who happens to be a film maker to salvage his memory and his work. A somewhat decent documentary for those interested in William Burroughs, whose life was the subject of Howard Brookner's film that was never completed because of his death. Those interested in the Beat Generation, of which Burroughs was one of the better known writers of that time, may be interested in watching this.

Howard Brookner isn't a name that many people know. He was a young film-maker in the 1980's who died of AIDS, aged 34. He made a highly acclaimed documentary about the writer William Burroughs and a mainstream movie, "Bloodhounds of Broadway" with Matt Dillon and Madonna but little else is known. Now his nephew Aaron Brookner has made a portrait of his uncle, "Uncle Howard", that reclaims him for posterity. Luckily for Aaron, Howard left a lot of film behind, of his work and of his life and moved in circles that included, not just Burroughs, Zappa and Warhol but film-makers like Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo who were more than happy to talk about Howard. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a talented and beautiful man whose life ended much too soon. It's also a wonderful picture of a society, many of whose inhabitants are no longer with us. It's honest, enlightening and very moving and Aaron Brookner is to be commended for giving it to us.

Going into this documentary, I don't think I had researched it as much as the other films I've picked to screen at SIFF 2016. I must've just seen "William Burroughs" & "Jim Jarmusch", threw my hands up & exclaimed, "That does it! I must see this!". Needless to say, the subject matter went above & beyond my simplistic expectations. While this is a movie about a nephew (Aaron Brookner) trying to piece together the life & works of his uncle, filmmaker Howard Brookner, it is also a movie about something much deeper & broader. While it was a delight to watch clips & outtakes from Howard Brookner's film Burroughs: The Movie, moments from home movies of Brookner's family, and follow the present-day storyline of Aaron Brookner delving into storage lockers, picking the brains of his uncle's friends, and trying to pry reels of film from the caretaker of Burrough's Bowery apartment "The Bunker", the real meat of the film was a much more poignant tale. In the smaller scope, it is a tale about what one man could accomplish in such a truncated life--about living to the fullest & doing what makes you happy, regardless what those around you may think. It is about a life cut short by AIDS. In the broader sense, it is an open-ended question with no possible answer--what did we, as a society, lose because of the AIDS crisis? While I cried tears of sorrow for a talent like Howard's taken too soon, for the palpable lasting sadness of his family & friends, for the anguish of those around me who lived through this and lost their loved ones & partners, I also cried tears of anger. What if those in power had taken this epidemic more seriously & much sooner? Would we be watching a retrospective of Howard Brookner's work made up of 15-20+ movies & not just 3? Could our culture have been guided towards acceptance of all our beautiful variations & colors more gracefully if a generation of thinkers, artists & unique souls had not been ravaged by this outbreak? It is impossible to inventory the scope of such a loss, unlike the boxes of celluloid rotting in a Bowery basement--but indeed, it is a profound loss that can never be recovered.