Eno Is Not Your Standard Biopic
A brief dispatch from the lauded documentary’s Berlin premiere
I loved Rams, filmmaker Gary Hustwit’s portrait of visionary German designer Dieter Rams, for which Brian Eno composed the original music.
Hustwit’s follow-up project, the now Oscar-shortlisted documentary Eno, was six years in the making. Last night I got to see the premiere of the film at Berlin’s historic Babylon cinema.
The scoop is that no crowd gets to see the same version. 70% will be different at each screening.
A generative code – not an AI, as Hustwit insisted in the Q&A afterwards – chooses the elements anew for every 90-minute version, drawing from a pool of hundreds of hours of archival material and filmed interviews.
This approach mirrors Eno’s own work in generative music. Which has not much to do with AI either, by the way.
My initial skepticism about the concept shows just how culturally attached we are to the ‘classic’ format of a static 90-minute film.
As a writer and critic, I remember feeling similar resentments towards Kanye West when he started fiddling with his Life of Pablo album after its release in 2016, adding new mixes and swapping entire feature parts, permanently updating the streaming version. It implied that “finished products”, to use an industry term, weren’t that important in our day and age.
While that practice hasn’t stuck and I don’t care too much about Kanye West anymore, I have since made peace with the idea that a work of art can be constantly changing, updating itself in real time, and never – or always – be “finished”.
It’s an interesting way of toying with the film format – and it can definitely work, as Eno actually proved. The version that I saw last night was highly entertaining.
Eno comes across as an extremely likeable human here – he’s funny and witty, with a child-like sense of curiosity, intellectual but not pretentious. He often refers to nature and its processes as an inspiration, and he manages to talk about the ecological responsibility of an artist without coming across as either a moralist or a hypocrite.
The pieces that I saw were bits about his childhood in the British countryside, his time at art school and in Roxy Music, his concept of ambient music (which was originally dismissed by critics), the Oblique Strategies, his work on the famous Apollo soundtrack, his production sessions with David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2, and more.
There were also many sequences of him working in his home studio at a standing desk, giddily pulling up YouTube videos of Little Richard and Fela Kuti, dancing and singing along.
Of course, there were dozens of other topics I’d wanted this movie to go deeper into, like his visual art and his installations, his formative work with Cluster/Harmonia in the 1970s and his time in Forst, or even his genre-defining work with people like Laaraji and Harold Budd in the early 1980s.
It’s the very nature of this piece that it only shows you a small glimpse into the expanding universe which is Brian Eno’s life and work. Due to its experimental format, Eno is not a biopic that tells you the artist’s life story in a linear way. You should at least have a rough sense of who Brian Eno is when you go see it.
As I write this, I actually think it might even work if you have no idea at all. His philosophical ideas and outlooks are very general and therefore can be applied to many areas of life.
Hustwit told the audience afterwards that Eno had originally turned down his idea of making a documentary about his life.
He said, and I’m paraphrasing here from my memory, that such a documentary could always just recount one person’s story about someone – in this case Hustwit’s own view of Brian Eno – and that he wasn’t interested in being the subject of someone else’s story.
By adapting the generative approach and selling it to Eno, Hustwit kind of outsmarted the smart guy and finally got him to agree to making the film.
What the audience can now experience is not so much one definitive story – a “finished product”, if you will –, but an indefinite mosaic of possibilities. Which might be more representative as a true reflection of a human’s life, even if it feels slightly unsatisfying at first.
I really want to watch it!
such a great doco. I'd pay good $$ to have full access to the whole 800 hours or whatever of raw footage. I'd have it playing all the time. Now that's a streaming subscription...