Brian Eno has taken many musical forms: producer, technologist, glam-rock star. , the new documentary about the musician, also takes many forms, though more literally. Each showing of the movie, which opens today in New York at Film Forum, will be a different version.
It is, according to its makers, “the first generative feature film,” meaning pieces of it will change shape and structure per viewing, thanks to some clever software ingenuity designed by director Gary Hustwit and his partner Brendan Dawes. While Eno may be more famous as a band member of Roxy Music or producing David Bowie’s Berlin trio, the form of this documentary fits its subject: Eno himself has been making generative art for decades now, since avant-grade minimalism of 1975’s to . This is different from generative AI, though, which uses massive training models to infer what it should spit out.
is crafted through 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of film — a curated and ethically sourced data set — with certain pieces weighted to be more likely to appear. Basically, it follows a set of rules and logic written by Hustwit and Dawes. , there are 52 quintillion possible versions of .
The two that I saw were immensely satisfying, with lots of overlap between each. is an unexpected documentary in other ways, too. You might expect a movie with so many possibilities to be broad, yet the scope remains narrow.
Rather than taking a sweeping look at the musician’s long career, it expounds on his philos.