by ana laura caruso
Herald staff

Twelve years after his death in 1997, William S. Burroughs is talked of solely as a writer. Yet he was much more than that. Burroughs was a US novelist, essayist, painter, filmmaker and spoken word performer. His work influenced many generations of artists of all kinds. A primary member of the Beat Generation, he was an avant-garde author who affected the whole of popular culture.
While some regard him as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, others consider him overrated. Prominent admirers of Burroughs’s work have included rock critic Lester Bangs and authors J.G. Ballard, Charles Bukowski and Alan Moore. Both the New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him.
Whatever else he was, William Burroughs was surely an intriguing figure. He used his first gun at the age of 8, cut off his little finger at 25, started experimenting with drugs at 30, and shot his wife dead at 37 while playing a drunken game of “William Tell” at a party. He later said, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.”
Caja Negra has recently translated and published The Electronic Revolution, a collection of essays by Burroughs (see box). The publishing house called experts of different disciplines to talk about Burroughs’ influence on music, visual art, films, and literature. The seminar opens today and will last through Saturday 31. This is a unique opportunity to look at all sides of Burroughs’s work simultaneously.
Guest artists feature Enrique Symns, Oliverio Coelho, Rafael Cippolini, Pablo Marín, Pablo Schanton, Alan Courtis, and others. Regarding music, critic Pablo Schanton said that he would talk about the manipulation of sound by some bands of the post-punk scene during the 70s and 80s. “The act of cutting up tapes and creating loops has a strong reference to Burroughs,” says Schanton. This was the case of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. “Cabaret Voltaire took the book The Electronic Revolution as a bible,” he says. “During the 90s, DJ Spooky –best known as The Subliminal Kid– was also influenced by Burroughs.” As a matter of fact, he borrowed his stage name from the character The Subliminal Kid in the novel Nova Express. In addition, Schanton says that he will refer to the history of bands such as The Soft Machine or Steely Dan as well as the reason why Burrough’s picture is on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.
As for written words, writer Oliverio Coelho will talk about the influence of William Burroughs in Argentine literature. “I will talk about the merging point between some local writers and Burroughs,” Coelho says. According to him, Marcelo Cohen, Néstor Sánchez, Ricardo Zelarayán, Carlos Gamerro, and Osvaldo Lamborghini are in tune with Burroughs. “Lamborghini deals with written language in a very anarchic way; Marcelo Cohen has created a whole new language,” Coelho explains. “These writers break with tradition in literature just like Burroghs did.”
Language, says Burroughs, is a virus and certain speech acts have contagious effects. “You cannot remain unchanged after reading any of these writers,” Coelho says. “The impact of their books doesn’t have to do with the plot but with experimenting with a whole new language. And it’s not just a provocation; it has a political and aesthetics significance,” he says. “These writers are strongly committed to a cause, it’s not just playful or pop,” he concludes.
Nevertheless, Coelho thinks that it’s almost impossible to find such a groundbreaking writer as Burroughs because “everything is aimed at selling in the marketplace nowadays.” He takes The Naked Book as an example and says, “I cannot think of any other writer who has experimented in such a way with language.”
Film critic Pablo Marín talked further on the influence of Burroughs cut-up technique in films. Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in September 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences. During their friendship, the technique was combined with images, Gysin’s paintings, and sound. Burroughs also appeared in a number of short films in the 1960s directed by Anthony Balch. “These films are like appendices to Burrough’s books,” Marín says.

What’s the difference between cut-up and fold-in in filming?
In literature, the cut-up technique is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text (printed on paper) and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. The rearranging of work often results in surprisingly innovative new phrases. In films, we can think of Jean-Luc Godard’s films. He used to cut out in the middle of a scene and thus broke with the tradition of a linear way of telling a story. Godard —and also Michelangelo Antonioni— tried to highlight the editing cuts between shots.
Fold-in is the technique of taking two different sheets of linear text, cutting each sheet in half and combining them, then reading across the resulting page. So fold-in is basically making use of other writers’ texts. Burroughs, for instance, combined one of his texts with a text by Genet and created a whole new text. This procedure has to do with home footage —making a film out of other people’s films and get rid of any previous ideas on what a film should be like.

How do you manage to do so and keep a dramatic structure?
The films we are going to show in the seminar are very experimental —you may say that all of them have open meanings. Take Nova Express, for instance —it’s absolutely experimental. In the case of home footage it’s about turning language against itself. These experimental filmmakers study the way in which certain issues are dealt with in Hollywood films and they try to show how it becomes natural for audiences. They show the procedure without any background voice —just images. They show fifteen films with identical scenes, and the audience can’t help but ponder on this. 

Can you think of other examples of cut-up?
Irreversible, by Gaspar Noé, is a pretty clear example. Then, some filmmakers from the Nouvelle Vague did the opposite from Godard and tried to make shots last as long as possible. Or else Andy Warhol, who filmed the Empire State building during eight hours. It’s difficult to apply a concept from literature to films.

What about Argentine films?
There’s a filmmaker from Rosario city, Gustavo Galuppo, who could have been part of the seminar. He works with images from classic and home films, and then he edits them to create a whole new meaning.

What are the two trends in experimental filmmaking?
There are a lot of filmmakers from the US who started experimenting in the 1920s with ready-made and continues throughout the 50s. Most US filmmakers, like Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner and Wallace Berman, are visual artists who knew Burroughs and worked with him. Berman was the editor of a magazine and Burroughs was one of the contributors. We might talk about an artistic movement, because the work of visual artists of that decade was in tune with that of writers.  In the case of Austrian filmmakers, they made use of certain techniques but their work was not as groundbreaking as that of US artists. Most of the films that are done nowadays are like this, many of them don’t produce such a strong impact. They just work with the legacy of their predecessors. There are films like Zelig, by Woody Allen, that make use of footage from other films and documentaries. Jürgen Reble’s Rumpelstilzchen opens with found footage from a 1955 film version of the Brothers Grimm story. What Reble did was hanging the film from a tree branch so it is marked by layers of residue, chemical traces, scratches and blotches. What you finally see are a lot of colours. Anyway, as I said before, it’s almost impossible to create an avant-garde piece of art nowadays because art enters a cycle in which everything is the same and innovation is difficult.

where &
when

CCMOCA (Montes de Oca 169). Thursday 22 to Saturday 31. Tickets: $5.
Today: William Burroughs: Films, music and visual arts by Pablo Schaton, Rafael Cippolini and Pablo Marín. At 8pm.
Saturday 24: Will Hollywood ever learn? Seven short films in tune with Burroughs' work: A movie (Brunce Conner), Aleph (Wallace Berman), Manufraktur (Peter Tscherkassky), Valse Triste (Bruce Conner), Rumpelstilzchen (Jürgen Reble), By Night with Torch and Spear (Joseph Cornell), and To the Happy Few  (Thomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs). At 8pm.
Thursday 29: The influence of William Burroughs on Argentine literature by Marcelo Cohen, Enrique Symns and Oliverio Coelho. At 8pm.
Saturday 31: Live music by Alan Courtis, Las cosas, Estados sonidos . At 8pm.

The Electronic Revolution
Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2009

The Electronic Revolution is an essay collection by William Burroughs. The book is divided into two parts. Part one, entitled The Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden deals with the significance of written words. Burroughs see language as a distinguishing feature of human beings which enables them to transform and convey information to future generations. He proposes the theory of “the unrecognized virus” present in the language, suggesting that “the word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.” The second part, Electronic Revolution, concerns the power of alphabetic non-pictorial languages to control people. It draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on human beings and the dangerous possibilities of using human voice as a weapon. Recording words on tape recorders and employing the cut-up technique can easily lead to the false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches, causing confusion and psychic control over individuals.