You’ll have to let me know what’s in your Eno. The deck of cards behind David Bowie’s Heroes? The logistics behind taking a leak in Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain? Both? Neither?
The new documentary about glam rocker, pop producer and non-musician Brian Eno has been dubbed the “first generative feature film.” No two viewings are ever one and the same. When Eno screens at FilmScene on Tuesday, all but the first and final scenes could differ from the screening at the Varsity Cinema on Thursday.
I’m a little jumpy about these things. The bummer of seeing Ian Holm, who died in 2020, re-animated for far more than a cameo in Alien: Romulus remains rock bottom for moviegoing this year. The decision to use AI and CGI to bring Holm back from the dead was gross at best — and the effect looked unforgivably hokey regardless. But despite some Google search results assuming otherwise, Eno’s generative format isn’t AI.
Director Gary Hustwit, whose Helvetica still comes up in small talk, worked with digital artist and programmer Brendan Dawes to develop a software platform that shuffles scenes in, out and around the documentary. Between 500 hours of archival material and 30 hours of newly shot footage, the software can generate 52 quintillion (or 52 billion billions) versions of Eno. This makes it more of a reflection, able to change, than a portrait. And the fact that its format is a gimmick doesn’t matter much. In mirroring Eno’s own work, it’s got good enough reason to be.
Whenever one scene ends, the screen cuts to black and bursts with lines of code to generate the next. My Eno viewing generated a scene about his biblical recording sessions with Bowie in Berlin, 1977. The two of them make the pop canon their plaything, drawing cards from a deck of Oblique Strategies — you can play around with a web version — to determine the destiny of a song.
“A couple of guys in our band found what Brian and I wanted to do kind of stupid and childish,” Bowie said in an old interview from bed. “And I guess they’re probably right, but it produces great results.”
These four or five minutes are worth the price of admission, but so are the too-human moments captured within the newly shot footage.
“Let’s visit the wonders of YouTube,” Eno says to himself as much as the camera. “Where we will hear songs that could change anyone’s life.” He clicks through seven decades of influences, singing and dancing along like no one’s watching. “Oh, shut up, you …” he groans when the inevitable happens and a VRBO ad gets in the way of his Talking Heads rabbit hole.
The sunny and naked look of the newly shot footage suits its subject and subject matter, flattering both bald head and Digital Audio Workstation. Here, little more than the lens separates Eno from the audience. Each interview is so easygoing, so genuine — unlike the manufactured candor you’ll find in one of Netflix’s self-produced slop docs — it starts to feel like Eno’s not producing his own documentary but rather producing you.
“The audience’s brain does the cooking and sees the relationship,” Eno explains of generative art, in a scene that may or may not appear in your Eno. I don’t buy the generative format as the future of storytelling, on screen or otherwise — but I do buy it as one of many ways to tell this story. And I do want to see the documentary all over again.
Where to watch:
Iowa City | FilmScene | Tuesday, Oct. 8, 7 p.m.
Des Moines | Varsity Cinema | Thursday, Oct. 10, 7 p.m.
