How do you capture the mercurial character, the elastic creativity and the prolific and endlessly inventive output of an artist such as Brian Eno – member of Roxy Music, producer of David Bowie and others, musician, activist, artist – in a conventional documentary? The answer, as director Gary Hustwit realised, is that you can’t. The traditional approach of the average music documentary – a dutiful plod through talking-head interviews and archive footage – might pin down a few of the biographical facts of Eno’s life and work, but it could hardly be further removed from its spirit.
And so Hustwit, who first worked with Eno in 2017 when the musician created a score for the film Rams (about the German designer Dieter Rams), decided to think outside the box. The result is an extraordinary work that takes its cue from Eno’s auto-generated musical projects. Using specially developed software (dreamed up in collaboration with creative technologist Brendan Dawes), Hustwit has created an exhilarating and innovative cinematic experience: a generative film that is different every time it screens.
It proves to be a uniquely challenging project to review – the version of the film that I viewed will never be seen again. My iteration, in which David Byrne and Talking Heads featured prominently, was thoughtful and philosophical; I imagine there are far more angular and abrasive possible versions (I would be fascinated to see an incarnation that touched on Eno’s tricky collaboration with Devo, for example). What is particularly striking, however, uniting most critics so far, is how elegantly the film flows; there is a curious, intuitive logic weaving together these randomly chosen scenes and clips. It’s an outstanding achievement.