'Eno' Documentary: Different at Every Screening, to Explore Randomness and 'Generative' Film-making

From The New York Times:
The key to 'Eno' comes near the beginning of the film — at least, the beginning of the first version I saw. The musician Brian Eno, the documentary's subject, notes that the fun of the kind of art he makes is that it's a two-way street. 'The audience's brain does the cooking and keeps seeing relationships,' he says.

Most movies are made up of juxtapositions of scenes, carefully selected and designed by the editor. But 'Eno,' directed by Gary Hustwit, turns that convention on its head. Writ large, it's a meditation on creativity. But every version of the movie you see is different, generated by a set of rules that dictate some things about the film, while leaving others to chance. (I've seen it twice, and maybe half the same material appeared across both films.)

Eno, one of the most innovative and celebrated musicians and producers of his generation, has fiddled with randomness in his musical practice for decades, often propelled along by new technologies. He agreed to participate in 'Eno' only if it, too, could be an example of what he and others have long called generative art... 'Brain One', programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run. Dawes's system selects from a database of 30 hours of new interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive and, following a system of rules set down by the filmmakers with code, creating a new film. According to the filmmakers, there are 52 quintillion (that is, 52 billion billion) possible combinations, which means the chances of Brain One generating two exact copies of 'Eno' are so small as to be functionally zero.

'But the ambitions of Eno are greater than the film itself,' writes the Verge, with director Hustwit hoping for a cinematic future exploring generative filmmaking with their software and hardware package. 'We have a patent pending on the system, and we just launched a startup called Anamorph that is basically exploring this idea further with other filmmakers and studios and streamers.'

In an interview with the Verge, Hustwit points out that Brian Eno did the soundtrack for his previous film. 'I was having these thoughts about, well, why can't showing a film be more performative? Why does it have to be this static thing every time?'

The film just began a two-week run at Greenwich Village's nonprofit theatre Film Forum, and in the U.K. is appearing this week at 17 Picturehouse Cinemas across England and Scotland. Check this online schedule for upcoming dates this week in Nashville (Thursday), Austin (Friday), Dallas (Saturday) — with later dates this month including Toronto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and more cities in August.

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