It’s not surprising that an artist with a career as shape-shifting and genre-defying as Brian Eno would balk at receiving the conventional documentary treatment. After all, once footage hits the editing room floor, there’s no going back; the final product is just that — final. Not so with Eno, in which director Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) utilizes a “generative” approach to filmmaking that shuffles the content — 30 hours of interview footage and 500 hours of film culled from Eno’s personal archive — like a deck of cards. Using proprietary software called Brain One (spot the anagram!), each screening is a brand-new and standalone viewing experience, with up to 52 quintillion possible combinations (that’s 52 followed by 18 zeros). Brief on-screen glitches mark the moment when Brain One triggers a transition, cutting off scenes abruptly and rearranging motifs in ways that can seem significant in light of their randomness, or perhaps frustrating for the same reason.
Like Eno’s famously oblique music, which is most commonly described (or perhaps derided, depending on your tastes) as “ambient,” Eno the film rewards close attention but doesn’t demand it. Because of its nonlinear structure, it doesn’t follow the familiar documentary beats — childhood, early career, scandal, redemption, etc. — in an immediately recognizable way. Stripped of the visual and audio cues that moviegoers are conditioned to anticipate — like, say, orchestral strings to signal a big emotional denouement — the result is less a narrative film than a pleasantly meandering conversation. This writer’s particular screening’s 85-minute runtime was dotted with Eno’s riffs on creativity and the purpose of music, musings about the natural world, reminisces about favorite records and collaborators, and self-deprecating comments about the role of a “sniveling” music producer. With his trim white beard and matter-of-fact demeanor, the overall effect was not unlike going on a long walk with your favorite professor.
These days, the word “generative” is near-synonymous with artificial intelligence, but for Eno it denotes something closer to creation, reproduction, and evolution — a process as much rooted in ecology as technology. While ambient music is often relegated to the background, in Eno’s hands it takes on a strikingly physical, tangible presence, as if hewn from the natural world. He speaks of “sculpting” three-dimensional sound, as though chiseling a melody from a mess of synthesizers or shaping a lump of unyielding noise into music. This tactile approach also helped producers and musicians across genres associate sound with texture (Eno even has an album of the same name, released in 1989). One of his most famous and accessible records, 1978’s Music for Airports, was designed to “resign [listeners] to the possibility of death”, and its use of spliced tape loops, arrhythmic piano, and angelic vocals does in fact sound like something that would usher listeners though the big airport in the sky. The album manages to repurpose and even dignify the universally unloved airport terminal, replacing its chaos with a purgatorial serenity. Composer William Basinki, whose seminal The Disintegration Loops features the gentle crackle of tape loop recordings breaking down in real time, is another Eno acolyte whose work feels archeological, equally convincing as relics from the past or signs from the future.
There’s a reason the word “soundscape” is such a useful and evocative shorthand when describing electronic music — lacking lyrics, a song must rely on sound and texture to guide listeners across emotional or spiritual terrain. For Eno, this journey is often tied to a sense of belonging, which is ultimately what he seeks to create and what he believes listeners are hoping to find. When that sense of belonging is lost, it can be devastating: in one segment, he discusses the process of recording 1975’s Another Green World as highly emotional, feeling so out of his depth in the studio that he was often in tears. However, this may be tied to the particular constraints of his own recording process, which he has described as “in-studio composition.” Rather than tinker on a preexisting piece, he preferred to work around the parameters of the studio’s capabilities (for more on this, see his 1979 lecture “The Studio as Compositional Tool”). What resulted was as much a conceptual conversation between man and machine as producer and musician, with the final piece coming together like a painting, layer by layer — an additive process that would be familiar to Eno, a former fine arts student. Archival interviews with David Bowie, Eno’s longtime friend and collaborator until his death in 2016, confirm that his talent as a producer lay primarily in creating the conditions under which this painting — this manipulation of material — can optimally occur.
In a way, Eno’s sense of control in the studio is the inverse of what Dustwit and collaborator Brendan Dawes achieve with their documentary. Instead of painstakingly creating new layers, Brain One seamlessly remixes what it’s already been fed. Maybe this is the logical progression of similar technology that’s already infiltrated other mediums: New York City’s Museum of Modern Art recently exhibited Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised,” a digital installation that distilled 138,151 pieces of metadata spanning 200 years of art history into fluid “hallucinations” spawned by an AI model. But instead of a human creating art from machines, now a machine is creating art from its human subject. What’s more, the universal experience of watching a film with a shared audience is irrelevant; each screening is the first and last, final yet unfinished. The result is as ingenious as the person Eno celebrates, and as beautifully ephemeral as the music for which he’s known.
DIRECTOR: Gary Hustwit; CAST: Brian Eno; DISTRIBUTOR: Film First Co; IN THEATERS: July 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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