A Sense of Doubt blog post #3448 - Eno Documentary
Today's share is about a movie I would like to see -- the documentary Eno -- and I had quite forgotten about it until a friend in Michigan, fellow Eno fan, hello Jedi Master, and reminded me that it existed.
There's no streaming option for the new documentary simply called Eno, yet, and I missed my chance to see it in Portland in May.
The soundtrack is out, though - https://www.brian-eno.net/
Here's the press release from the screening schedules earlier this year:
This Documentary About Brian Eno Is Never the Same Twice
Thanks to a software program, the length, structure and contents of the movie are reconfigured each time it’s shown. It’s the only way the musician would agree to the project.
By Rob Tannenbaum
July 12, 2024
Gary Hustwit had a
simple wish: to make a documentary about the visionary musician Brian Eno. When
that wasn’t possible, he devised a far less simple approach. He made 52
quintillion documentaries about Eno.
At a time when it
seems like there’s a movie about every band that’s recorded even a 45,
Hustwit’s “Eno,” opening
Friday, is unlike any other portrait of a musician. It’s not even a portrait,
because it isn’t fixed or static. Instead, Hustwit used a proprietary software
program that reconfigures the length, structure and contents of the movie.
“Every time it
plays, it’s a different movie,” Hustwit told an audience in May at the film’s
New York premiere. “I’m surprised every time I see it.”
His collaborator,
the digital artist and programmer Brendan Dawes, explained that because of the
variables, including 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from
his personal archive, there are 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie.
(A quintillion is a billion billion.) “That’s going to be a really big box
set,” Dawes quipped at the premiere.
Movie theaters are
still guided by “a 130-year-old technical constraint,” Hustwit said over lunch
the next day at a Chelsea restaurant. “We can use technology as a structural
tool to do interesting things with the narrative. This idea that a film has to
be set in stone and always linear is obsolete, I think. There’s another
possible path here for filmmaking going forward.”
At some showings of “Eno,” Hustwit brings the machine with the Brain One software for the film.Brandon Schulman for The New York Times
A generative approach to documentary is especially suitable for Eno, who has made generative music for years. (Despite the use of the word “generative,” A.I. isn’t involved in either the film or the music.)
In 1972, as an
original member of the unsurpassed British art-rock band Roxy Music, Eno was an
immediate media phenomenon. He was a dolled-up, androgynous dandy in rouge and
eyeliner, with a wardrobe of kimonos, butt-hugging cigarette pants and padded
jackets adorned with animal feathers.
He left Roxy after
two albums and started a solo career that anticipated punk and new wave. And he
has produced or collaborated with Talking Heads, Devo, U2 and David Bowie,
bringing experimental élan to pop music.
His interest in
generative music was inspired by Steve Reich’s opus “It’s Gonna Rain.”
Reich recorded a Pentecostal preacher on a San Francisco street corner, then
duplicated a short passage and played it simultaneously on two tape recorders.
Thanks to variations in motor speed, the twin loops gradually fall out of sync,
building to a wild cacophony. The music “blew my socks off,” Eno said in a 1996
lecture.
Generative music,
he explained then, is based on “a system or a set of rules which, once set in
motion, will create music for you.” For his 1978 album “Music for Airports,” a
founding document of ambient music, he recorded three simple melodies, each of
a slightly different length, then allowed them to play in what mathematicians
call incommensurable cycles, which never repeat.
“If you work in
electronic music, Eno’s relevance is unavoidable,” said Carsten Nicolai, a
German musician who records under the pseudonym Alva Noto. “He was very much
ahead of his time. His first records are more than a half-century old, but they
don’t feel old.”
Eno had contributed
the soundtrack for Hustwit’s previous documentary, “Rams” (2018), a profile of the
German industrial designer Dieter Rams. But when the director proposed a movie
about Eno, the idea was immediately shot down. It wasn’t a surprise, given
Eno’s longstanding antipathy to documentaries.
In the 1993 film
“Words for the Dying,” which chronicled an album he made with John Cale of the
Velvet Underground, Eno growled, “Keep that bloody camera off me,” and flipped
off the cameraman.
Eventually, Eno
agreed to allow the director, Rob Nilsson, to film only his hands and feet.
“Great cat and mouse game,” Nilsson said in an email. “I think Brian made the
film more interesting.”
Hustwit, a
self-taught filmmaker who worked in music and publishing before turning to
documentaries (“Helvetica,” 2007), isn’t the sort
to surrender. He’d met Dawes in 2009, when they were on a South by Southwest
panel, and over email, they discussed the possibility of making an Eno movie
that was never the same twice. “I always want to do things I don’t know how to
do,” Dawes said during a video interview from his home in Southport, England.
Hollywood has dallied
with nonlinear stories before. When “Clue” played theaters in 1985, viewers
randomly saw one of three different endings. Steven Soderbergh’s HBO
mini-series “Mosaic” (2017) was accompanied by a mobile app that allowed users
to view the drama from the perspectives of different characters, and more
recently, Netflix’s “Choose Love” (2023) offered a choose-your-own-adventure
component that branched into six possible endings. But Hustwit knew he couldn’t
hook Eno with half-measures.
Hustwit said he had been asked to make a director’s cut, “but that would be sort of antithetical to the whole exercise.”Credit...Brandon Schulman for The New York Times
Dawes, who taught
himself computer programming in high school, said it took “two years of really
intense work” to write the software, Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno), for
the film, he said. Hustwit first used it to create a generative remix of “Rams”
and showed it to Eno.
When Eno saw it, he
was excited, he said in an email interview. (He even used an exclamation mark!)
“I didn’t fancy the linearity of conventional biographies,” he said. “Lives
don’t run in straight lines, and every time we think about them in retrospect (i.e.,
every time we start remembering) we actually rethink them. Our lives are
stories we write and rewrite. There is no single reliable narrative of a life.”
On the festival
circuit, Hustwit and Dawes occasionally brought the Brain One machine onstage
and tweaked “Eno” in real time, adjusting the audio for each theater’s
acoustics. When the movie plays Film Forum in New York, they’ll create
individual Digital Cinema Packages, which modern projection systems use in lieu
of film reels, for each screening.
For Eno, the approach to the film is apt: “Our lives are stories we write and rewrite.”Credit...Brandon Schulman for The New York Times
Ever since Bach
wrote “The Art of Fugue” in the 1740s and didn’t specify any tempo or
instrumentation, composers have experimented with indeterminacy. In 1958, the
composer Christian Wolff said that he, Morton Feldman and John Cage, as well as
Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, used chance procedures to
achieve “a kind of objectivity, almost anonymity,” resulting in music that was
“free of artistry and taste.”
Artist-free art
remains a niche, though. Siddhant Adlakha reviewed the Sundance premiere of
“Eno” for
IndieWire and denounced the random elements as “tomfoolery,” while criticizing
its “haphazard placement of emotional denouements.”
Nicolai, the German
composer, hadn’t seen “Eno,” but shared Adlakha’s aversion to randomness. “I
like it when people make clear artistic decisions,” he said. “In a time of
so-called A.I., personality becomes even more important.” Using technology to
randomize content and narrative, he added with a laugh, “becomes a little bit
garbage.”
In his email, Eno
pointed out that all music was generative before the invention of notation,
around the year 1000. And a generative tradition endured until the middle of
the 19th century, when the invention of recording allowed people to hear a
piece of music over and over in the same static form. “Generative music is
actually a return to an earlier way of listening, in which each experience was
unique and transient,” he wrote. “I prefer to think that nongenerative music is
the niche.”
Maybe the emotional
payoff of a fixed narrative is too ingrained in audiences to be eliminated. It
certainly hasn’t been easy for Hustwit to adapt “Eno” to the commercial
conventions of streaming and DVDs.
“The reaction from
the film industry has been curiosity and excitement, but also confusion,” he
said. “Everyone wants me to make a director’s cut. I could make a really good
one, but that would be sort of antithetical to the whole exercise, for me to
exert that level of control.”
Streaming platforms
don’t have the ability to generate unique versions of a movie for every viewer,
but neither Hustwit nor Dawes has ever been deterred by tradition. Their
company, Anamorph, is developing new software that would allow streamers to
create versions of “Eno” that change with each viewing. It’s not possible to watch all
52 quintillion versions of the film, but some Eno fans will try.
A version of this
article appears in print on July 15, 2024, Section C,
Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: One
Story, Told in Endless Ways. Order Reprints | Today’s
Paper | Subscribe
https://www.openculture.com/2024/07/eno-the-new-generative-documentary-on-brian-eno-thats-never-the-same-movie-twice.html
Brian Eno once wrote that “it’s possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say, ‘You mean you used to listen to to exactly the same thing over and over again?’ ” That speculation comes from an essay on what he calls “generative music,” which is automatically produced by digital systems in accordance with human-set rules and preferences: “like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations.” These words were first published nearly 30 years ago, in his book A Year with Swollen Appendices. Today, he has at least one grandchild, whose handwriting figures in one of the music videos from his latest solo album. That particular work may be non-generative, but his interest in the concept of the generative in art endures.
This year, Eno even stars in a generative documentary about his life as an artist, music producer, and “sonic landscaper” directed by Gary Hustwit, best known for Helvetica and other non-fiction films on design. The New York Times’ Rob Tannenbaum writes that Eno “is unlike any other portrait of a musician. It’s not even a portrait, because it isn’t fixed or static. Instead, Hustwit used a proprietary software program that reconfigures the length, structure and contents of the movie.” This suited both Eno’s professional philosophy and his antipathy to the conventional documentary form. “Our lives are stories we write and rewrite,” Tannenbaum quotes him as writing in an e‑mail. ‘There is no single reliable narrative of a life.”
In fact, there are about 52 quintillion different narratives, to go by the estimate of possible permutations of Eno Hustwit has given in interviews. “We could make a 10-hour series about Brian, and we still wouldn’t be scratching the surface of everything he’s done,” he told The Verge. “I just added a bunch of footage this past week that’s going into the Film Forum week two runs, which has never been in the system before.” Not only do “we get to keep digging into the footage and bringing new things into it, but we also get to keep changing the software. And I don’t know, in a year from now, what the film will look like or what the streaming versions of it will be.”
What Eno didn’t have to clarify in 1996, but Hustwit has to clarify in 2024, is that this kind of generative film isn’t generated by artificial intelligence. Emphasizing that “the data set is all our material,” including 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of conventionally shot film, Hustwit frames his enterprise’s custom software, acronymically called Brain One, “as more like gardening.” That metaphor could have come straight from Eno himself, who’s spoken about “changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds.” Eventually, “you stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together.”
Related content:
Eno: A 1973 Mini-Doc Shows Brian Eno at the Beginning of His Solo Career
Watch Brian Eno’s “Video Paintings,” Where 1980s TV Technology Meets Visual Art
Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989)
How David Byrne and Brian Eno Make Music Together: A Short Documentary
Watch Another Green World, a Hypnotic Portrait of Brian Eno (2010)
Watch Brian Eno’s Experimental Film “The Ship,” Made with Artificial Intelligence
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
hy do films have to be the same every time?” asks Gary Hustwit, as we sit in a dressing room backstage in a Copenhagen theatre at the documentary festival CPH:DOX. “The idea of film as this linear, static, fixed piece of media needs to be evolved. It’s based on a technical constraint that we don’t have any more since everything is digital.”
In front of him on a laptop contains a piece of custom-built software that looks to fundamentally change the very nature of what film is and what it can do. Brain One was created in collaboration with the digital artist Brendan Dawes, and is the engine behind the new generative documentary Eno. Brain One is, of course, an anagram of Brian Eno, as well as being the proprietary software capable of producing a new film every time it is screened in real time. “This film that you will watch tonight doesn’t exist outside that moment,” explains Dawes. “You have to be there to experience it and once it’s over, it’s gone forever.”
Eno’s vast personal film archive was dug up, dusted off and digitised and – combined with fresh interviews with him – this provided a huge pool of footage for Brain One to pull from to weave together endless edits. However, while this might lead one to imagine a series of abstract images and clips being randomly spewed out with confusing intensity, the result is actually something much more measured, considered and coherent.
Later that evening, I watch modern day Eno dancing to tunes, shouting at YouTube adverts on his computer, talking through the Fela Kuti-inspired vocal arrangements on Talking Heads’ Remain In Light and pottering in his garden on the hunt for beetles. Then you’re thrown into the studio working with U2 in the 1980s, leap forward to the mid 1990s, and then come back to him today reflecting on creating the enduring soundtrack for the Apollo documentary For All Mankind. It’s unpredictable, non-linear and ever-shifting but it also all feels connected, logical and oddly thematic.
This is because the algorithm has been trained to respond to how the film is unfolding and shape its next steps based on tone and subject matter. So, for example, at one point David Byrne pops up on screen to pick an Oblique Strategies card at random and that then triggers where the film will go next based on what he picks. For filming, Byrne picked six different cards that each lead to different narrative pathways, and Laurie Anderson also did the same.
Laurie Anderson (potentially) in Eno
When the film premiered at Sundance it screened six different times, with unique edits for each. These were rendered and exported in advance to play as finished files. However, at CPH:DOX, for the European Premiere, as well as at the Barbican in April, the pair are presenting a live cut of the film.
So, the obvious question of course is: how does all this work? “There are parts of the film that are anchored,” Hustwit tells me. “There’s an opening and closing scene with Brian and they are always there. And then there are several scenes within the film that we’ve pinned to occur in specific regions of the runtime. So there is a skeleton of structure – and that’s probably 25% of the film. The other 75% is pulling from a vast number of edited scenes that could possibly come in, along with raw material. Plus, the system is also making its own scenes, generatively, that are unique to each cut as well as generating its own 5.1 audio mix in real time. These generative scenes are pure art that’s happening in the moment that are never repeated.”
You can literally see Brain One at work on screen too. “It sometimes shows the code,” Hustwit says. “The software itself is part of the visual aesthetic of the film. We were trying to show the process of making the film, and I think you end up appreciating what’s happening more when you’re seeing a little bit of what the system is doing.” The aim of the film is to create a one-off experience that is more akin to seeing a gig than a traditional film screening. “I wanted the film to be more like live music where even if you’re playing the same song every night, you can change it,” Hustwit says. This also results in a fascinating exploration around audience expectation. When you come into a film about Eno, you may have certain expectations around what you will, or should, see. This obliterates assumption or predictability and it also means you may not get the film you want. What has been created here is an experience that can equate to going to see your favourite artist hoping for a greatest hits show and instead they hammer out the B-sides and obscurities.
“We were asking ourselves: can you watch a documentary about Brian Eno that doesn’t mention Roxy Music?” asks Hustwit. “We posed it to Brian and he’s like, ‘Yes! Why does something that I did 50 years ago have to be talked about every time someone talks about me?’ So you might see the Roxy Music or the David Byrne part this time or you might have to watch it a few more times. There’s no way you can encapsulate what he’s done in the last 50 years, even in an entire series about him. This is a way to include a lot of that material but you’re only seeing a piece of it each time you watch.”
It’s a fascinating experience to watch the film. The idea of what constitutes a definitive exploration or telling of an artist’s life and work is completely unmoored here and the very definition of a definitive documentary is also challenged. Eno seems to exist to refute the idea that a single story or retelling is capable of meeting that definition. Instead, it basks in the malleable, conflicting and contrasting nature of a person’s life and art while also connecting themes that run through all of that change and ceaseless evolution. The film asks, more by its very existence than the contents, how can anything that is alive and endlessly moving be documented definitively? The film’s tagline of being the definitive documentary on its subject instead comes more from its endless possibilities and outcomes, rather than existing in a rigid framework.
It also feels like an especially peculiar film to write about with any sense of convention or traditional thought processes because the film also kind of exists to render traditional film reviewing utterly obsolete. What I saw and experienced will be completely different to what everyone else will. There’s no sense of shared experience other than with those who were in the room with you. The notion of reading something about a film as an indicator of quality or in terms of seeking recommendation is completely out of the window here but it also poses the question of if there is actually anything to be gained from engaging with a critical analysis of a film that no longer exists and people can never see. It’s a bit like reading the forecast for yesterday’s weather.
Another key approach is how this shifts storytelling power more into the hands and minds of audiences. In many ways, they become the editors of their own film, rather than a spectator of someone else’s. “The viewer makes the connections between these different scenes and ideas,” Hustwit says. “And over the course of 90 minutes, they tell their own story about the subject. They’re not being told the story, they’re doing their own piecing together.”
I watch version 2.1. The first six screenings of the doc were versions 1.1-1.6 but given the film has been altered since then, it is already into its second generation. “We’ve added 25 new scenes since Sundance,” Hustwit says. “There’ll be a third generation in the spring, and then maybe a fourth or fifth. Each time we’re changing the content and adding things but we’re also refining the software and making changes to that. So the version that people see in November is going to be much different than this. The point is that it doesn’t have to have an end or a fixed iteration.”
Gary Hustwit, portrait by Ebru Yildiz
Ultimately, Eno sets out to challenge fundamental ideas around memory, identity, legacy and finality in documentary making. “Brian said he always feels there’s multiple truths about people,” says Dawes. “And this film, and the way it is made, allows that to happen.” However, while this could easily exist as a smoke screen to avoid getting anything meaningful, reflective or of any real substance out of its central character – to hide behind the process – it appears the opposite may be true. Perhaps the forward-facing and innovative nature of the film has created a more comforting place for Eno to open up, knowing that he’s not going to be appearing amongst a sea of talking heads and tired anecdotes being dug out.
In one scene, of the version I saw, Eno speaks candidly and emotionally about how bruised he was by negative criticism of his ambient music and how he felt he became a synonym for wimpy music. He says it rattled his confidence to such a degree that he turned down making an ambient album with Joni Mitchell. The regret he expresses even today over that decision feels palatable on screen. It’s a rare and beautiful moment to sit with him as he expresses sincere regret, given how much he’s positioned himself as being anti-looking back.
Similarly, his latest song, taken from the film’s soundtrack, ‘All I Remember’ is one of the most straightforwardly sentimental and reflective songs Eno has ever written. “I have noticed that throughout the five-year process of making the film that he’s gotten a little bit more nostalgic,” says Hustwit. Although there is a limit to Eno’s desires to look back it would appear. “He still doesn’t want to watch the film,” laughs Hustwit. “He is his least interesting subject is what he says.”
So, how do you release a film to the world that is supposed to be unique each time? “The last thing I want to do is make a director’s cut,” says Hustwit. “The only thing that the film industry wants is the director’s cut because nobody can deal with the technology that we’ve made. None of the streaming platforms has the technology to be able to give you as a subscriber your own original version. So we’ve launched our own startup company, Anamorph, to explore this idea of how do you stream generative video? Yes, we could generate 10,000 cuts and stream those to individual people but there is a different way to do it.”
It’s really not an exaggeration to state that what has been created here potentially holds revolutionary capabilities. The very existence of Eno is a template for how cinema can be re-defined in the digital age. “No one’s ever done this and it opens up a ton of questions about our assumptions of what a movie or documentary is and what’s possible,” says Hustwit. “If Christopher Nolan said my next film will never be the same twice, the industry would change. Everybody would flip out and it would break all kinds of boundaries. Eno is just an opening statement for what we’re trying to do.”
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- Days ago = 3312 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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