Blu-ray, DVD Release: Burroughs: The Movie

By
Laurence
– September 21, 2015Find Others: Blu-ray, DVD, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: ,

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Dec. 15, 2015
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion

Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Burroughs: The Movie, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), was for decades mainly the stuff of legend.

Burroughs1_optThe legend became a reality when Aaron Brookner, the late director’s nephew, discovered a print of it in 2011 and spearheaded a restoration.

Now viewers can enjoy the invigorating candidness of Burroughs: The Movie, a one-of-a-kind nonfiction portrait that was brought to life with the help of a remarkable crew of friends, including Jim Jarmusch (Down By Law) and Tom DiCillo (When You’re Strange), and that features on-screen appearances by  fellow artists of Burroughs’s including Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Patti Smith, and Terry Southern.

Criterion’s Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film contain the following:

  • New, high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
    • New interviews with filmmakers Jim Jarmusch, Aaron Brookner, and Tom DiCillo, as well as William S. Burroughs’s friends and fellow writers James Grauerholz and Stew Meyer
    • Rare outtakes
    • Footage from the 2014 New York Film Festival premiere of the film’s restoration
    • Thirty-minute experimental edit of the film from 1981 by inventor and photographer Robert E. Fulton Jr.
    • More!
    • An essay by critic Luc Sante and a collage poster
Buy or Rent Burroughs: The Movie
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.