Eno, the career-spanning documentary Brian Eno, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, is an invigorating look into the brain of one of the most transformative musicians, producers and sound pioneers of the last half-century. But it’s a challenge to revisit.
That’s because director Gary Hustwit, in collaboration with Brendan Dawes, generative art specialist, has created tools to generate endless unique versions of the documentary built around hundreds of hours of footage. What you see is not necessarily what someone else will get next time. Simply put, your mileage may vary.
But it represents an almost inevitable choice of subject matter for this kind of project, illuminating the man who has not only worked with some of the most popular and influential musical artists and their albums of the last 50 years, from Roxy Music to U2, David Bowie to Talking Heads, but also contributed to the birth of the ambient music genre. Eno has been experimenting for decades with using generative AI to create music based on rules and processes rather than extracting specific notes on an instrument.
More recently, Eno has created sound installations, sculptures and other works of art of all kinds and genres. Indeed, he talks (in my version of the doc) about trying to make music more like painting (his first love) and making painting more like music.
The film features repeated conversations around Oblique strategies, the box of cards featuring epigrammatic commands used to stimulate creative thinking, which he created with Peter Schmidt in the 1970s. The documentary ends with performance artist Laurie Anderson, yet another Eno collaborator, reading out loud one of the strategies.
Oblique strategies This is yet another way for Eno to happily blur the boundaries of expression, creation and authorship for a very long time. His conversations on these topics, culled from dozens of hours of interviews with Hustwit’s team, are among the film’s most captivating and inspiring segments, as we see in his airy country home and studio in England, having fun in front of two giant screens of music software. and YouTube videos where he discusses song numbers, longtime influences, science, art, and more.
The custom AI technology used to create the film’s many variations has a fun, informal name, Brain One, appropriate for the tool’s tasks and, fortunately, an anagram of Eno’s own name.
Brain One gained access to hundreds of hours of archival Eno music, projects, interviews, performance videos and more, as well as more recently filmed material from Hustwit’s team. This material has been divided into sets and types of information, built around far more metadata and carefully edited footage than a typical documentary would ever need. Armed with all of this, Brain One begins to construct another personalized version of the film, within certain limits.
“It’s a movie about one person,” Hustwit said. “It starts the same and it ends the same.”
Some other crucial scenes were “pinned” to specific locations in the 85-minute documentary. However, everything else may be different, depending on what hardware 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 this person at different points in the film. Ultimately, it’s you who makes the connections as the viewer.
The version I screened in Beverly Hills, California, is marked as the one showing a distant time zone and 10 hours later on the first night of Sundance in Park City, Utah. But this is by far not the only version. Preparing for Sundance on Monday, Hustwit was still scrambling to make six different digital cinema prints, one for each festival screening.
More versions are coming, depending on the platform it runs on, Hustwit said. He’s also mulling live remixes of the documentary at special events later this spring, just like director Mike Figgis did with his own technological experience Timecode in 2000. The loaded Apple Mac Studio computer that runs the generative AI program isn’t quite capable of doing this kind of live mixing and matching yet, despite its power. But live remixes are a goal.
My version of the film included scenes from Eno’s early days as a member of the glam-rock band Roxy Music, and his mid-1970s production work with David Bowie on his iconic “Berlin Trilogy” of albums, and its culmination undoubtedly, the song Hero, from the album of the same name. A decade later, you (well, me) 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 less heroically”.
There’s Eno with Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, working on their technologically influential and culturally polarizing project. My life in the bush of ghosts, which led to the Heads’ most notable and enduring album, Stay in the Light. Together, these works contributed to a wider adoption of electronic music techniques, found sounds, and extraordinary influences from 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 direction. and his collaboration with producer/musician Daniel Lanois and EnoIt is brother Roger on Apollo: Atmospheres and soundtracks, apparently the soundtrack to a documentary consisting of approximately 6 million feet of footage filmed by NASA about the American space program.
Beyond and between the high-profile and rather traditional musical collaborations, we see Eno thinking about climate change and the future of the planet, his creative approaches to music, light, video and sound, connection between cybernetics, the way frogs see movement and ambient music, among other things.
Missing from my version of the documentary: discussion of Eno’s later experiments with generative music and sound design, such as the delightful (and expensive) 2017 Reflection, a constantly evolving “album” of ambient music on an iOS mobile application. There was also little about the influential series of solo albums of the 1970s (notably Here are the Warm Jets, taking Tiger Mountain by strategy, and particularly, Ambient 1: Music for airports) of which Eno is the author. Maybe next time.
Hustwit has been a director and producer of documentaries focused on music and design for over two decades and, like Eno, he became involved in art early on. In 2002, Hustwit was a producer on Sam Jones’ I’m trying to break your heart, about the band Wilco creating their breakthrough album Yankee Hotel in Foxtrot. His music projects also include documentaries on Mavis Staples, the Saddle Creek label and Animal Collective, among others.
Hustwit first worked with Eno in 2017, when he was directing rams, a documentary about influential designer Dieter Rams. Eno, who was familiar with Rams’ work, agreed to create the soundtrack.
However, when it came to turning the camera on Eno himself, the musician was less interested.
“He said to me, ‘I really don’t like talking about the past. People always want to talk about Bowie and what I did 50 years ago,” Hustwit said. “Making a movie about his life wasn’t something he wasn’t interested in. I left thinking about ways to make filmmaking and exhibition a little more performative.”
Eno This is the rather remarkable result. Although Hustwit hopes for even more robust computers to enable live remixing, he and Dawes have already experimented with this form in a variety of ways, including “an almost dreamed prequel” at the Venice Biennale last year. There, the software created a film that lasted for 168 hours straight, throughout the Italian art fair.
“You could make a film that is always ongoing, always evolving, always changing,” Hustwit said. “I feel like Eno, it’s really kind of an opening conversation. And after? What can we do with this? Which could (Area of interest director) Jonathan Glazer to do something like that? We’re trying to get people to think about a project for this medium.
It’s not hard to see what other musical artists, such as Taylor Swift, might think of all this. She just completed her first concert tour that grossed $1 billion, and a concert film about that tour grossed $261.9 million, another record. Given the legions of Swift fans on Easter egg hunts, the possibilities for creating a generative, ever-evolving documentary about Swift’s career are mind-boggling.
A streaming service such as Netflix
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Currently, new media artists such as Turkish-American Rafik Anodol are already using generative video tools in fascinating ways, as with her Unsupervised – Mechanical Hallucinations – MoMA, hypnotically displayed in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in recent months.
And stimulating more of that thinking is sort of Hustwit’s goal, and perhaps Eno’s life’s work.
“For 30 years he has used generative software to create his music,” Hustwit said. “He mentioned that something like this project was something he had always wanted to do. It turned out we had these ideas about making a film that came together for this. Brian is the perfect subject for this. I can’t think of anyone better.