By Bernard Zuel
A film about musician/artist/thinker/provocateur Brian Eno that remakes itself every time it is screened so no two versions will ever be the same and not even the filmmaker, especially not the filmmaker, can predict what he will see?
You know that Eno, who shook up the methods and thinking and careers of artists like U2, Talking Heads and David Bowie, would approve.
The innovative documentary has Brian Eno’s blessing.Credit: Cecily Eno
And he does.
“That was a big reason for why Brian agreed to do it,” says Gary Hustwit, director of Eno. “He hates bio documentaries and music documentaries because they are always one person’s version of the subject’s story and he didn’t want to be anyone’s story.
“I think that idea of every time you see that you are making different connections works a lot like how memory works: you don’t remember things in perfect chronological order, sometimes you remember them differently, some things are more important or less important depending on the time you are alive.”
When Eno is shown at the Opera House as part of the Vivid Festival, each of the four screenings will be “mixed live”, like a musical performance.
Gary Hustwit: ‘You don’t remember things in perfect chronological order.’Credit: Ebru Yildiz
The opening and closing scenes will be the same, but a program devised by Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes will mix visual, musical and interview elements from more than 100 hours of material, showing yet another side of the Eno story.
“My background before film was in music and that’s really part of why I wanted to do this: I wanted film to be more performative,” says Hustwit, whose previous films as producer or director include examinations of design and typography as well as synthesisers, skateboarding and bands like Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie and Animal Collective.
“And it’s usually not that. [Usually] it’s impossible to watch something for the first time, or experience it through the eyes of people who have never seen it before, but this time, every night the system … makes connections between different scenes that I’ve never seen in that sequence before. I’m still making new connections about Brian via that juxtaposition of scenes. The audience is also making those connections: you’re kind of telling your own story.”
Hustwit stresses two things about the computer program he calls Brain One (an anagram of Brian Eno). Firstly, it isn’t powered by artificial intelligence built on feeding in thousands of hours of other work and asked to reproduce something in that ilk, but generative technology that is “a combination of our intelligences as filmmakers and the programming”.
And secondly, he has not abandoned control of the film. All the available material, some of it newly shot, some of it from Eno’s private library, is material he has chosen.
“And that I think is the director role,” he says. “It isn’t crafting every second of the 90-minute film but it is curating what that the mix of things is and trying to arrange it so, or make the algorithms arrange it so, there is an arc to it, so that there is progression of Brian’s thinking, and as you are watching it you are seeing something that is engaging and feels like a conventional documentary in some ways.”
Eno screens as part of Vivid at the Sydney Opera House May 31-June 2.