Eno matches its subject's inventiveness with a dazzling, generative mosaic

Brian Eno, the once would-be glam rock star turned record producer and ambient music composer, doesn’t think like most of us. Or, as Gary Hustwit’s dazzling new documentary Eno makes clear, the world-renowned musician works hard on any given day to wrestle himself out of well-worn ways of thinking, being, and, above all, creating. It’s fitting then that, not merely content with offering a portrait of Eno’s life and career, Hustwit has produced a film that borrows the artist’s ethos: Eno is a generative documentary. No two screenings are alike. Parameters have been set, but whatever version of it you will see won’t be the same as the one I caught on July 26th at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

It’s an ambitious gamble, one that risks feeling like a gimmick had Eno not spent much of his career striving to perfect such an approach to his own artistic creation. As he puts it in the doc—which shuttles between candid discussions with the artist, thrilling recording sessions with the likes of U2 and Talking Heads, and many an archival interview with Eno dating back to the ‘70s—to want music to be generative is a way to mimic and pay homage to the world around us. Eno has long been fascinated with the very systems nature builds, simple and intricate in equal measure, at times built from similar building blocks yet always entrancing for how different their assemblage appears. 

What would it mean, he posits, if we created the way that nature creates? What if instead of laying out the piece of art as it is, we planted seeds and let them grow? These are questions that feel abstract, yet for Eno they’re remarkably simple and concrete. Having grown up alongside recording technology that allowed him to manipulate sounds and notes at whim, he has been able to constantly dabble with ways of making generative music. Music, that is, that grows out of parameters and recordings he creates (how often should notes be repeated, how calibrated should their cadence be, etc.) but that he doesn’t, in the end, wholly control. He just admires it.

Such is the case in Hustwit’s documentary. Driven by Eno’s sensibility, the film is constantly scrambling itself, assembling and reassembling before your eyes: shots of Eno in a bright pink jacket and a white tee are refracted, creating a kaleidoscope image; sequences are clearly pulled out in arbitrary order, computer code and file names made visible in the bottom left hand corner letting us know how each is being retrieved at any given moment. 

Order is not really what’s important here. ENO doesn’t obey nor conform to any kind of linear narrative. Audiences end up learning about the artist’s childhood love for rural landscapes, his youthful years in a glam rock band, his turn toward producing music for the likes of David Bowie and DEVO, and his extensive work creating ambient music—not to mention his later flair for art lectures.

Eno breaks itself up instead into playful vignettes that create a mosaic-like portrait of Eno the artist and Eno the man with little concern for chronology. We jump from seeing a long-haired Eno talking about how he found refuge in an androgynous look back in the 1970s, to shots of him regaling Hustwit with YouTube clips of songs he loved as a kid; from eye-opening behind the scenes looks at how U2’s “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” came to be in the studio to clips of of a young Eno explaining how he’d decided to create ambient music for airports. It’s a hodgepodge of images and scenes, of lectures and interviews that only accrue power and understanding through their very accretion, like watching a jigsaw puzzle being both created and assembled at the same time.

Play is the most important driver of Hustwit and Eno’s collaboration. After all, much of Eno’s career has been premised on the value of play. Of the joy in dabbling. Of the wide-eyed desire to upend known strictures and blindly adhered-to ideas. It’s what initially pushed him to create (with multimedia artist Peter Schmidt back in the 1970s) his card game Oblique Strategies, where each card in a deck contained a necessarily elliptical proposition (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities;” “Only a part, not the whole”) meant to short-circuit the creative process in the recording studio. 

Eno follows suit, letting its aleatory structure guide our way and, in the process, spark insights and connections with welcome vibrancy. Play is what allows Eno (and us, in turn, he insists) to think askew, to rewire how it is we understand the world around us. Art is meant to jolt us awake. To help us connect with how we feel. To carve out a space for those feelings to feel welcome and find a home.

More than a biographical documentary, Eno emerges as a brilliant and endlessly inspiring creative manifesto. Eno is an enthralling subject, whose way of talking about art and artmaking is as lucid as it is stimulating. And with its inventive generative gambit formally echoing the very tenets Eno has nurtured in his art for decades, Hustwit’s film boldly paves the way for a decidedly new kind of cinema—one that proves as soothing and as stirring as Eno’s own work.

Director: Gary Hustwit 
Release Date: July 26, 2024