“Why do films have to be the same?” asks Eno director Gary Hustwit. “Can we make it more performative, more like music?”
The director, speaking with POV via telephone, shares the line of questioning that inspired him to make the most audaciously original documentary on the Oscar shortlist this year. (Read Marc Glassman’s review here.) Eno boasts a genuine surprise among the slate of contenders whittled down to 15 by the Academy’s documentary branch. The surprise has nothing to do with the quality of the film, but rather the nature of Eno’s design. It literally plays as a different film every time it screens.
Eno offers a portrait of producer, musician, and sound artist Brian Eno in a form that reflects his iconoclastic style. It’s a generative documentary, which means it draws upon a vast archive of scenes that are pre-coded, pre-tagged, and pre-programmed, and then an algorithm selects which bits of the artist’s life tell his story. It’s a welcome antidote to the world of music docs at a time when celebrity bios ironically feel pre-made by an algorithm. Reviewing music docs often feels like playing Mad Libs, but that’s not the case with Eno.
Hustwit (Helvetica, Rams) says that the generative technology for Eno was developed with digital artist and coder Brendan Dawes, who gets a credit as “Director of Programming.” Hustwit says they saw Eno’s life and work as the ideal fit for a film that reflected his interest in making a documentary that evoked the spontaneity of live performance, i.e.: how songs evoke consistent feelings or emotions by artists on tour even though they inevitably play them differently at each concert. “Brian would be the perfect subject for this because he does use generative software in his music. He’s been a pioneer of that. He’s been doing it for over 30 years now,” says Hustwit.
The director says he’d previously approached Eno about making a conventional music doc about his life and Eno declined. “His reasoning was that bio docs are always one person’s version of another person’s story. He didn’t want to be anyone else’s story,” says Hustwit. Once Eno saw in 2019what the generative software could do, he (begrudgingly) agreed to go along for the ride.
Eno still tells the artist’s story with a high degree of structure even though it’s different every time. Seeing it with a blank slate, one could easily assume it’s a classically edited doc put together 100% by a human in the editing suite. Or, for a viewer like myself who saw it first at Hot Docs and then again in preparation for this interview eight months later, it plays more or less as I remembered it, kind of like revisiting a classic film 20 years after first seeing it. Eno holds up and the story and message are the same, but some beats feel familiar while others seem entirely new. (And, hilariously, when pulling press images for this article, I came across stills for an interview with Laurie Anderson that I have no recollection of seeing either time!)
Hustwit says that some scenes are consistent throughout the screenings to give Eno a skeleton, like the opening scene with Eno in his studio or his interviews at the Rose Garden, while interludes with pixels and images of code evoke the generative selection. “Probably 70% of the film is different every time, or can be different every time,” explains Hustwit. “I didn’t want to make just an experimental mashup of clips. I wanted it to feel like a cinematic documentary, like any other film that I would make, and have a narrative arc and have a progression and have a story. And I just wanted it to be different every time.”
The generative direction also holds some logic thanks to the code with which Dawes and Hustwit designed the project. “When the system selects a certain piece of footage, it then has an idea of what could thematically connect with that piece and build the arc based on that,” explains Hustwit. “There’s years of programming in that aspect alone in terms of how it will connect certain story elements.”
Scenes, for example, illustrate Eno’s magic as a music producer. One might get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of his work recording a track with Bono as the Irish singer belts out “Pride (In the Name of Love)” in the recording booth and Eno provides feedback to finesse the track. Different elements evoke Eno’s philosophy and creative approach.
Although the scene selections vary screening by screening, or perhaps because they vary by screening, Hustwit adds that the production is pretty extensive compared to conventional features. Licensing music, for example, is its own beast for a generative documentary about a music producer who worked with the likes of U2, the Talking Heads, Grace Jones, and David Bowie, all of whom have archival musical performances or tracks in versions of Eno that I saw. (As did Laurie Anderson, but not the contemporary interview.)
However, Hustwit says he still has to license everything in full even if it’s only playing every other time. “Luckily, most of the music is Brian’s or something he is related to,” says Hustwit. “But for this project, we had to license exponentially more music than you would ever see in one version. It’s just part of the approach for this film. I tried to do the argument, ‘Well, it’s only going to be in 5% of the versions of the film, so could I pay 5% of the normal license fee?’ That didn’t fly with the music publishers,” he laughs.
That element of chance makes Eno a fascinating must-see to understand the evolving—and increasingly complicated—conversation about the relationship between technology and artistry. When asked about where Eno sits within the larger conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) in documentary, Hustwit observes that the technologies are markedly different. “Eno is a generative video platform, but it’s a human-coded algorithm,” he explains. The documentary therefore doesn’t follow AI’s process of feeding excessive examples into a machine, i.e. uploading thousands of documentaries to tell a machine how to make a movie. Eno’s creative decisions are informed by human hands.
“We brought our intelligence as filmmakers and storytellers into the algorithms,” adds Hustwit. “You can make your own generative software that uses all of your own material—that is 100% ethical. It’s just a tool that we’re using to remix the story in interesting ways, so there’s a big distinction there.”
Hustwit admits that it’s been fascinating to see the conversation about AI evolve during his five years producing Eno, but the hands-on approach with generative technology may simply be the “tip of the iceberg” for innovations that level-up filmmakers’ creative potential without inviting the same technical and ethical issues.
“With any film, we’re making connections from scene to scene and piecing stories elements together and coming up with this picture of what this person’s about. In this film, you get to do that as you’re watching it,” observes Hustwit. “You’re putting the threads together and making those connections. And then if you watch it again, now you’ve got a whole new set of connections that you get to make. Our brains are designed to solve puzzles and make connections and find patterns. You get to do that in all these different ways if you watch multiple versions. It’s a different kind of watching. I think it’s a more engaged viewing experience.”
The Oscar shortlist, moreover, clearly means that Eno has the industry’s attention. The film, as seemingly niche sounding as it is, also happens to be the highest grossing documentary on the Oscar shortlist. The numbers, moreover, don’t account for the film’s healthy festival run. Stops at Sundance, Hot Docs, CPH: DOX, and Sheffield have made it a consistent talking point among doc fans.
In fact, Hustwit says that self-distributing Eno with producer Jessica Edwards and distribution consultant Emily Rothschild, he’s seen people take in repeat screenings of Eno precisely because of this engaged viewing experience. It’s proof that audiences want smart movies, particularly at independent and art-house cinemas, and not the formulaic works pushed by streamers.
That seems to be the case with doc makers too. Hustwit notes that campaigning a generative doc like Eno means that some doc voters see it in a unique version on the Academy’s online portal. Others take it in at festivals and screenings. But either way, it’s inspiring people to expand their ideas about the art form’s creative potential.
“It’s really about the idea around the film,” says Hustwit. “And, I think, about Brian and his ideas and his career and his creativity. What the film is about resonates with filmmakers because it is about the creative process and methodology.”
