Nashville’s premiere performances of Gary Hustwit’s new generative documentary will be created live in real time by the filmmaker. These versions will never be seen again.
Visionary musician and artist Brian Eno — known for producing David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, among many others; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing more than 40 solo and collaboration albums — reveals his creative processes in the groundbreaking generative documentary ENO, a film that’s different every time it’s shown. Acclaimed filmmaker Gary Hustwit (HELVETICA, RAMS) set out to decode Eno’s creative strategies and examine his lifelong search for the meaning of music in the first career-spanning documentary of the legendary and prolific artist. Instead of a by-the-numbers bio-doc, Hustwit and his collaborators invented an approach befitting the iconoclast’s use of new technologies.
ENO is the world’s first generative cinematic documentary and, like a musical performance that’s different every night, ENO creates a unique viewing experience for each audience. Utilizing a proprietary software system developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, the film has millions of possible variations of scenes and footage drawn from Hustwit’s original interviews and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music. The result is a film that resonates with Eno’s own artistic practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.
“A singular experience… If you’re lucky, [a] Bowie bit will be in the version you eventually see. You may also get to bask in Eno introducing the joys of Afro-Pop to the Talking Heads, resulting in the brass section-like arrangements of backup singers on “Remain in Light”; the early Roxy days, with Eno sporting the second greatest spaceman-mullet in glam rock history; a priceless anecdote about Eno pissing in DuChamp’s “Fountain” urinal when it was on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art; and the now-75-year-old Eno grandpa-boogieing to the Silhouettes’ “Get a Job.” —David Fear, Rolling Stone
“Sure, it is intriguing to think that the documentary being reviewed here will not be exactly the same documentary that another person sees down the line. But the one constant — and what makes the movie worth seeing — is the man himself. Charming, smart, sensitive, genial, and exuding an almost childlike passion for and profound (though never pretentious) questioning of the musical art-form, Eno makes for great company, regardless of the film’s innovative making.” —Anthony Kaufman, Screen Daily