English musician Brian Eno is one of the most innovative and influential figures in popular music today. After starting out his career as the synthesizer player for the band Roxy Music in the early 1970s, Eno has since become known for his experimental work as a solo artist that has helped give rise to the genres of electronica and ambient music. He has also produced albums for many of the world's most successful musical artists, including David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Coldplay.
Given Eno's unconventional and heavily tech-based approach to composing, producing, and performing music, it should come as no surprise that a recent documentary about him is itself an experimental work that utilizes groundbreaking technology. Directed by Gary Hustwit, Eno (2024) was made using generative software that randomly selects snippets of Hustwit's interviews with Eno and archival footage every time the film is screened. As a result, no single viewing of the film is the same, creating a new and unique cinematic experience that the filmmakers hope will inspire future filmmakers.
Billions of Movies in One
In an interview with The Verge, Hustwit explained that Eno was born out of his desire to make "a generative film" whose contents could vary with each new screening. Hustwin described this new type of film as a natural step in the evolution of filmmaking as it transitions from physical film to digital:"...it doesn’t ever have to be finished. We can keep adding things to it and increasing the variety and seeing what the juxtapositions are and just keep evolving it." He decided that Brian Eno, who composed the soundtrack for Hustwit's 2018 documentary Rams, would be "the perfect subject for this approach" because of his own history of generative experimentation during his avant-garde musical career. Despite Eno's long-time aversion to being the subject of a documentary, he agreed to Hustwit's project after being shown a demo of the generative software that would be used for the film.
Hustwit and his friend Brendan Dawes, a digital artist and coder, called their generative software system Brain One (an anagram for "Brian Eno"). The software randomly draws from an archive of over 30 hours' worth of interviews and 500 hours of archival film from Eno's personal collection to project onto the screen. According to The New York Times, this mathematically means that there are approximately 52 quintillion (or 52 billion billion) possible permutations of this film, making it virtually impossible for someone to see the exact same cut twice. Furthermore, Hustwit and Dawes worked with Swedish tech company Teenage Engineering to create a hardware system (also called Brain One) to be used for theater screenings using the same random algorithm.
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Sometimes, the variation in content between screenings is so dramatic that some critics felt like they had watched several entirely different films, rather than different versions of the same one. For example, Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times described the radical difference between her two screenings: "In the first version I saw, much of the discussion explored the way that pop musicians such as Eno and many of his collaborators — like David Bowie and Talking Heads — create and project an identity when they perform, making that persona part of their medium. [...] Another version focused more on the role of pushing boundaries and trying arbitrary experiments (like those encoded in Eno's deck of 'Oblique Strategies')..."
The Creative Potential of Generative Art (Not Artifical Intelligence)
The use of the word "generative" to describe Eno might evoke negative ideas of A.I. and the recycling (and theft) of preexisting content. However, the software used for Eno is not the same as generative A.I. As Wilkinson summarizes, "To grossly oversimplify, generative A.I. (think ChatGPT or Midjourney) is trained on existing works, which can then be prompted to produce outputs that are, by definition, derivative of those existing works. [...] Code-based generative art, on the other hand, uses rules written by a human to make something new." Furthermore, Hustwit himself emphasizes that there was no content theft involved in the film's production: "The data set is all our material. We didn’t train the platform on other people’s documentaries."
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In fact, Hustwit and Dawes see great potential in the nascent style of filmmaking that they innovated for Eno. To that point, in conjunction with the production of Eno, they co-founded a filmmaking startup called Anamorph, whose mission is to explore the possibilities of generative technology in all kinds of film mediums and genres, not just documentaries. Hustwit told TechCrunch that he believes generative films could prove beneficial for movie theaters: "Something that the theater industry badly needs right now is a reason to get people to come in, and if there is a uniqueness about the live cinema experience, that's one way it can be achieved."
'Eno' the Film and Eno the Man
While it remains to be seen whether generative filmmaking will become a staple of mainstream filmmaking or not, the fact that it has already won the endorsement of one of the biggest figures in modern music in Brian Eno will certainly help it gain a great deal of attention. If nothing else, the unconventional nature of Eno can at least be appreciated as a fitting tribute to one of the biggest and most influential figures in contemporary music.
Although Eno is currently unavailable on streaming, it is still being screened in select theaters. Interested readers can check out director Gary Hustwit's website for information and updates on screening dates and locations.