(Image courtesy of Film First and Brain One)
Eno, the career-spanning documentary about Brian Eno that premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, is a bracing dive into the brain of one of the most transformative musicians, producers and sound pioneers of the past half century. But it’s a challenge to review.
That’s because director Gary Hustwit, collaborating with generative art specialist Brendan Dawes, has created tools to generate endless one-of-a-kind versions of the documentary built around hundreds of hours of footage. What you see is not necessarily what someone else will get the next time around. Simply put, your mileage may vary.
But it represents a near-inevitable choice of subjects for this kind of project, illuminating the man who not only has worked with some of the most popular and influential musical artists and their albums of the past 50 years, from Roxy Music to U2, David Bowie to Talking Heads, but also helped birth the ambient musical genre. Eno has been experimenting for decades in using generative AI to create music from rules and processes rather than plucking out specific notes on an instrument.
More recently, Eno has made sound installations, sculptures and other art of many kinds and genres. Indeed, he talks (in my version of the doc) about trying to make music more like painting (his first love) and painting more like music.
The film features repeated conversation around Oblique Strategies, the box of cards featuring epigrammatic commands used to stimulate creative thought, that he created with Peter Schmidt in the 1970s. The documentary closes with performance artist Laurie Anderson, yet another Eno collaborator, reading one of the strategies out loud.
Oblique Strategies is yet another way Eno has been merrily smearing the boundaries of expression, creation and authorship for a very long time. His conversations about those subjects, pulled from dozens of hours of interviews with Hustwit’s team, are some of the film’s most absorbing and inspiring segments, as we see him in his airy, England country home and studio, capering about two huge screens of music software and YouTube videos as he discusses bits of song, long-time influences, science, art and much else.
The customized AI technology used to build the film’s many variants is amusingly named, informally, Brain One, appropriate for the tool’s tasks and happily, an anagram of Eno’s own name.
Brain One has been given access to hundreds of hours of archival Eno music, projects, interviews, performance videos and more, along with the material Hustwit’s team filmed more recently. That material has been broken into sets and types of information, built around far more metadata and carefully edited footage than a typical documentary might ever need. Armed with all that, Brain One starts building yet another custom version of the film, within certain limits.
“It’s a film about one person,” Hustwit said. “It starts the same and ends the same.”
Some other crucial scenes have been “pinned” to specific spots in the 85-minute documentary. Everything else, however, can be different, depending on the material the generative AI program decides to insert into a given print.
“It’s kind of a modular approach,” Hustwit said. “You can learn different facts about that person at different times in the film. In the end, you make the connections as a viewer.”
The version I screened in Beverly Hills, Calif., is marked as the one to show a time zone away and 10 hours later on the first night of Sundance in Park City, Utah. But it’s not the only version by far. In preparing for Sundance, as late as Monday, Hustwit was still wrestling into reality six different digital cinema prints, one for each festival screening.
More versions are to come, depending on the platform where it runs, Hustwit said. He’s also pondering live remixes of the documentary at special events later this spring, much as director Mike Figgis did with his own technological experiment Time Code back in 2000. The loaded-up Apple Mac Studio computer that runs the generative AI program isn’t quite able, yet, to do that sort of mix-and-match live output, despite its power. But live remixes are a goal.
My version of the film included scenes of Eno’s early stint as a member of glam-rock band Roxy Music, and his mid-1970s production work with David Bowie on his iconic “Berlin trilogy” of albums, and its arguable high point, the song Heroes, from the album of the same name. A decade later, you (well, I) see Eno working with the then-babyfaced members of U2 on Pride (In the Name of Love), advising Bono to perhaps sing the first chorus a “little bit less heroically.”
There’s Eno with Talking Heads’ leader David Byrne working on their technologically influential and culturally polarizing My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which led to the Heads’ most remarkable and enduring album, Remain in Light. Together, those works helped usher in broader adoption of electronic music techniques, found sounds, and the extraordinary influences of world music greats such as Fela Kuti and Lee “Scratch” Perry.
Later we see John Cale with Eno, working on their wonderful 1990 album, Wrong Way Up. and his collaboration with producer/musician Daniel Lanois and Eno’s brother Roger on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, ostensibly the soundtrack for a documentary built around 6 million feet of footage that NASA filmed about the U.S. space program.
Beyond and between the high-profile, rather traditional music collaborations, we see Eno musing about climate change and the future of the planet, his creative approaches to music, light, video and sound, the connection between cybernetics, how frogs see movement, and ambient music, among much else.
Missing from my version of the documentary: discussion of Eno’s later-stage experiments in generative music and sound design, like the delightful (and pricey) 2017 Reflection, an ever-changing “album” of ambient music on an iOS mobile app. There also was little about the influential string of 1970s solo albums (most notably Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and especially, Ambient 1: Music for Airports) that Eno authored. Maybe next time.
Hustwit has been a documentary director and producer focused on music and design subjects for more than two decades, and like Eno, had an early involvement in art. Back in 2002, Hustwit was producer on Sam Jones’ I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, about the band Wilco creating its breakthrough album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. His music projects also include documentaries about Mavis Staples, the Saddle Creek record label, and Animal Collective, among others.
Hustwit first worked with Eno in 2017, while directing Rams, a documentary about influential designer Dieter Rams. Eno, who knew Rams’ work, agreed to create the soundtrack.
When it came to turning the camera on Eno himself, however, the musician was less interested.
“He was like, ‘I really don’t like talking about the past. People always want to talk about Bowie and things I did 50 years ago,’” Hustwit said. “Doing a film about his life was something he was not interested in. I went away thinking about ways to make filmmaking and film exhibiting a little more performative.”
Eno is the rather remarkable result. Even as Hustwit hopes for even more robust computers to enable a live remix, he and Dawes have already experimented with the form in various ways, including “an almost dream prequel” at last year’s Venice Biennale. There, the software created a film that lasted 168 hours straight, throughout the run of the Italian art fair.
“You could make a movie that’s always on, always evolving, always changing,” Hustwit said. “I feel like Eno, it’s really kind of an opening conversation. What’s next? What can we do with this? What could (Zone of Interest director) Jonathan Glazer do with something like this? We’re trying to get people thinking about a project for that medium.”
It’s not hard to see what other musical artists, like say, Taylor Swift might make of all this. She’s coming off the first concert tour to gross $1 billion, and a concert film about that tour that has grossed $261.9 million, another record. Given Swift’s legions of Easter-egg-hunting fans, the possibilities for creating a generatively made, ever-shifting documentary about Swift’s career are mind-boggling.
A streaming service such as NetflixNFLX – which has played with interactive forms of video such as its Bandersnatch episode of sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror – could easily generate a different version of the documentary every day, Hustwit said.
As it is, new media artists such as the Turkish-American Rafik Anodol are already using generative video tools in fascinating ways, as with his Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA, on hypnotic display in the lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in recent months.
And stimulating more of that thinking is kind of the point for Hustwit, and perhaps for Eno’s entire life’s work.
“For the past 30 years, he’s been using generative software for his music-making,” Hustwit said. “He mentioned that something like this project was something he always wanted to do. It just kind of worked out that we had these ideas about making a film that came together for this. Brian’s the perfect subject for it. I can’t think of someone who’s better.”
