Brian Eno has long resisted being the subject of a documentary. Filmmaker Rob Nilsson recently told the New York Times that the shooting of 1993’s Words for the Dying was a “great cat and mouse game” due to the experimental musician’s antipathy toward being captured. It was only because director Gary Hustwit’s pitch appealed to Eno’s longstanding interest in generative art that he acquiesced to Eno (2024). The resulting film relies on an algorithmic program that remixes hundreds of hours of interview and archival footage, ensuring that no two showings are ever the same. (The Times estimates that there are 52 quintillion possible versions.)
Much of the conversation around generative art currently revolves around artificial intelligence, but all the underlying intelligence here is firmly human. Hustwit and editors Maya Tippett and Marley McDonald put together individual scenes. The film’s director of technology, Brendan Dawes, led the team that wrote the software, called “Brain One” (get it?). The opening and closing are always the same, but before each screening, Brain One chooses which shots will be appearing and when. For the sake of narrative flow, some are programmed to appear only at select timestamps, or to not be shown if specific other scenes are run, or to exclusively follow certain other ones, along with numerous other logistical concerns. The thoughtfulness the crew put into the process results in an impressive level of polish.
Eno recoils at the idea of a traditional biographical film because “lives don’t run in straight lines,” as he says in the film. Its generative structure instead mimics memory, which is messy and nonlinear. But the element of randomness makes reviewing the documentary somewhat tricky. I cannot simply write about what screened for me, because that experience is unique to the particular audience I was part of at Film Forum. One can’t criticize the movie for not touching much on Eno’s time with Roxy Music or Devo, because that’s a vagary of the algorithm at that time rather than a deliberate choice by the filmmakers.
My screening had everything from Eno recounting a memorable Oblique Strategies session with David Bowie in which they drew cards with opposing instructions, to an anecdote about Eno devising an elaborate scheme to urinate in Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), to Eno waxing rhapsodic about his home’s lovely garden, particularly a beetle cluster under a leaf. It’s not unlike a hangout, with Eno alternately recounting his creatively busy life and simply living in the now, whether he’s commenting on the weather or noodling with music on his computer. Beyond how frequently funny Eno is — in one instance, he lays out his philosophy of not eating before noon so that he can focus on creative expression, only to then ask about the time and candidly admit how hungry he is — there’s an absorbing friction in his reluctance to open up. When the camera watches him go through decades’ worth of old journals and notebooks, he is flustered and abashed to see things like notes on albums written side-by-side with grocery lists.
It is refreshing to see a documentary about an artist that does not attempt to condense its subject’s entire life into its limited running time. But Eno still feels like a surface-level interaction with the musician. Part of this is due to the structure of the project; it deliberately does not try to make any single showing of the film a definitive statement, but rather encourages people to revisit it and see what else they might encounter. The issue here is that, while hanging out with Eno is enjoyable enough, the lack of any decisive hand in the construction of the film meant that I didn’t feel all that compelled to return to it. These intricate feats of programming have resulted in a finished work that feels aggressively anonymous. Brain One might be a competent artificial editor, but it’s not a very good one.
Eno (2024), directed by Gary Hustwit, continues at Film Forum, New York, until July 25, before touring elsewhere.
