Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

The Austin Chronicle JULY 17, 2024 - by Richard Whittaker

INFINITE POSSIBILITIES IN ENO, THE GENERATIVE DOCUMENTARY

Director Gary Hustwit lets his biography of Brian Eno make itself

Peeing on a famous work of art. Killing flies. Passing on working with Joni Mitchell. All core moments in Eno, the new documentary about musical maverick Brian Eno, that you may never see.

To clarify, they are moments that I saw, and they were part of my film. They just may not be part of your film, or the version that will screen July 19 at AFS Cinema. Or they might be. Statistically speaking it's highly unlikely, and even more unlikely they will happen in the same order as when I saw it. That's because Eno rebuilds itself for every screening. Director Gary Hustwit says, "People come up to me and say, 'Wow, I love how you connected that thing with Roxy Music with this other scene that came after that,' and I'm like, 'That's great, thank you, but we actually didn't do that.'"

There is, Hustwit explains, no one definitive version of Eno, not least because it would be a fool's errand to try to cram the entire life, career, and creative philosophy of Brian Eno into ninety minutes. What decisions do you make? To leave out how the British musical pioneer basically invented ambient music? Do you mention that he had a burgeoning career as an avant-garde musician and gave it up to form art glam lounge mavericks Roxy Music? Do you just rattle through the list of bands he produced, from David Bowie to Laurie Anderson to U2 to Sinéad O'Connor, or his collaborations with John Cale, Genesis, Coldplay, and David Byrne? That's why Eno reinvents itself as often as Eno has.

"Director" is an interesting term in this situation. Its use raises similar questions to those raised about the role of the composer in 1975, when Eno released his fourth solo album, Discreet Music. For it, Eno experimented with a synthesizer and a tape-delay system - effectively setting criteria through programming and inputs that would allow the equipment to create compositions. Eno does very much the same, just in documentary format. "How great is that," said Hustwit, "that the first generative feature film is about Brian Eno? It couldn't be a more perfect marriage of form and content."

That process - that makes the director an instigator rather than an ever-present hand - was what inspired Eno. "I wanted to make a documentary that felt like any other of my documentaries," explains Hustwit. "I just wanted it to change every time."

At the core of the project is a huge database of video footage - a mix of archives, material from Eno himself, and extensive interviews with the musical pioneer by Hustwit himself. This was definitely not meant to produce "a random assemblage of clips," Hustwit says, and so he worked with digital artist Brendan Dawes to build a proprietary software system capable of rebuilding the archive into a roughly ninety-minute documentary again and again and again, ad infinitum. Hustwit explains, "I'm giving up control of the minute-by-minute film, but it's like I'm stepping back and overseeing it as a bigger picture, looking at this system in which the film would create itself." Inevitably, the system makes choices that he wouldn't have, or that leave him bemused or stunned, or leaves out scenes that he'd like to see, "but that's part of the exercise - to remove some of that subjectivity."

There are constant elements across all iterations, adding up to about 30% of the material: a scene with Eno discussing generative music, some footage of David Bowie, a look at Eno's famous Oblique Strategies process of creative prompts. Hustwit describes them as "tent poles" that form "a rough skeleton, and then there's all this room for variety," he adds. "Some are more introspective and more about the process. Some are about art in our lives and more about the creativity side. Some are just funny and more music and higher energy."

Building the archive and the software was a process that took years "and a ton of trial and error," says Hustwit, "to figure out what the taxonomy of each scene is or each piece of footage is, and then spend a ton of time programming the software so it feels like a film with a cohesive arc or at least a progression, no matter what individual pieces get pulled in to each iteration." He then brought in award-winning editors Maya Tippett and Marley McDonald to craft some of those elements into more finished components, and that's where the film becomes more than just a jumble of rough footage. "If you have a lot of great ingredients, in some ways it doesn't really matter how you mix them up - it's going to come out good."

The software then takes a subset of that footage and arranges it with bespoke transitions and even some purely generative scenes, like one of the film's fixtures: an opening "pixel dream that we imagined the system would be dreaming." Even then, Hustwit explains, "Those are different music, different graphics, that are unique to each cut of the film."

Hustwit's established filmmaking skill came in building what is basically a chaotic attractor - a seemingly random creation that reveals its ordered nature - with his role becoming "more curatorial than directorial." Of course, Hustwit adds, it helps that there's a singular subject in the witty, charming, insightful Eno himself to keep the film focused, "so even if we don't make connections intentionally in the process of creating the film, the audience creates those connections themselves."

Solving the technological challenges of the film was arguably the easiest hill to climb, especially compared to the biggest impediment to making a film about Brian Eno - that being Brian Eno. Most subjects would be flattered to have Hustwit, the director of critically acclaimed and award-winning documentaries Helvetica and Objectified, interested in them. But Eno has spent the last five decades frustrating the ambitions of filmmakers by refusing to be profiled on film.

Even though they had worked together on Hustwit's 2018 documentary Rams (about designer Dieter Rams), Eno wasn't interested. Nothing personal: He's turned down dozens of pitches. "He hates interviews, and he hates bio-documentaries and music documentaries, just because they're such a fixed story and it's very subjective from one person about this other person." However, it was the idea of using his generative processes to make a documentary that got him interested - or, as Hustwit half-joked, "He wanted to be involved in a generative film experiment. The penalty of that is that it had to be about himself."

But while the format was what got Eno on board, it's the kind of project that gives licensing attorneys dyspepsia. Hustwit laughs. Even with the huge volume of original interviews and access to Eno's own archives, "We're licensing exponentially more music and footage than you would normally put for a conventional film." At the other end of the process, unlike a film generated by AI, Hustwit retains the copyright to each and every version of the film, just as Eno owns the rights to his generative music. Hustwit explains, "It would just be like if I just sat down and kept editing different versions of the film myself and just released one every week. I would still have copyright over all those different versions. It's just bigger numbers, basically."

And he remains committed to the idea that every version of Eno could be new, as new material is regularly added to the archive. "We're constantly evolving the movie and the software, and that's the cool thing. It doesn't have to end. There's no fixed version. I can keep experimenting and finding new things in the archive. Maybe it comes up this time, maybe you have to watch it five or six times before it comes up. But that's the beauty of it."