Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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San Francisco Chronicle JULY 23, 2024 - by Pam Grady

'ENO' IS A MUSIC DOCUMENTARY DESIGNED TO SCREEN DIFFERENTLY EACH TIME

The amorphous, atmospheric and sometimes trancelike sounds by Brian Eno enveloped listeners who visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Devon Turnbull's HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2, part of the current Art Of Noise exhibition, earlier this spring. The music varies daily in the space, and on this particular day, it offered a glimpse into how filmmaker Gary Hustwit celebrates the English musician at the center of his new documentary, which returns to the Bay Area for a limited run this week.

Indeed, for Hustwit's Eno" which is opening at the Roxie Theater on Friday, July 26, it is a film that is never the same twice. Made in conjunction with British artist Brendan Dawes, the documentary's director of programming, even the running time varies between eighty-two and ninety-five minutes long. Dawes' software and its algorithms pull from Hustwit's interviews with his subject as well as around five hundred hours of archival material to generate a new film each time the program runs.

The Roxie plans to project seven versions of Eno through August 1.

Based on his singular career and own relationship to technology, Eno is the perfect subject for this innovative documentary. After his start in the early 1970s, when his synthesizer made a vital contribution to the Space Age sound of the pioneering glam rock band Roxy Music, he went on to forge an identity as a solo artist and a collaborator and/or producer to artists like David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, U2, John Cale, Coldplay and Laurie Anderson, just to name a few. In the 2000s, he went on to develop Bloom, a generative music iPhone app, and 77 Million Paintings, software that produces an ever-changing, never-repeating series of paintings that he employs in audio-video installations.

The idea for Eno began not with Hustwit's contemplation of his subject but his own questions about the nature of film. The veteran documentarian notes that musicians might play the same songs every night on tour, but they don't necessarily play them the same way every time. They are free to experiment, and some like Bob Dylan will employ radical rearrangements to keep even old songs fresh. Hustwit, who made his debut in 2007 with the graphic design documentary Helvetica, grew frustrated over the years with the unvarying nature of a finished film.

"I go on screening tours and I press play and I can't watch the film anymore because I've seen it too many times," he said. "I was trying to think of a way that exhibiting a film could be a little bit more like music."

The filmmaker approached Dawes, a friend of nearly twenty years, whose work revolves around using automation and generative systems to create computer-based art. The duo took footage from Hustwit's last documentary, Rams (2018), to begin their experiments. Eno composed the music for Rams, and as Hustwit and Dawes made their tests, Hustwit settled on the musician as his new documentary's subject.

The only problem was "Brian wasn't interested in making a documentary at all," Dawes said.

"Brian is like, 'I hate, hate, hate bio documentaries and I hate music documentaries,'" Hustwit recalled. "They're always one person's very subjective version of this other person's story, and he didn't want to be that."

What ultimately sold Eno on the film was that reimagined Rams footage. Eno loved what he saw, observing that the proposed project was the type of experiment that he had contemplated doing himself for decades.

Eno is not without its challenges. Dawes had to figure out how to design software that would build a narrative arc out of randomly generated scenes. Editors Marley Mcdonald and Maya Tippett had to work out how to cut discrete scenes that would meld seamlessly in any order. Audiences will have to get used to the idea that the career highlights they expect to see may not appear in the iteration they are watching. There is also the issue of the film's home viewing afterlife. The streamers, Hustwit says, would love a "director's cut," an idea he resists.

"I want everyone to have their own version," he said. "I don't want to be the one dictating the version people will see. What we're concentrating on now is innovating the technology to make it possible to release the film in the way we think it should be released."

Joseph Becker, SFMOMA's associate curator of architecture and design who helped bring Eno's music to Turnbull's "Listening Room" experience, watched Eno at its May 10 premiere at the Palace of Fine Arts before interviewing Hustwit onstage immediately after the screening. He observed the parallels between the work and its subject.

"I didn't feel like I needed a linear story," Becker said. "In fact, the idea of chronology was pretty antithetical to my understanding of Eno's music. When you listen to his music, you don't get a sense that he started here and went there. His music is always moving and pulling and coming back. The music and the apparatus of the film are so in concert with each other."