Brian Eno's biranneo's eonniarb One Brain

The buzz surrounding Gary Hustwit’s new “generative” documentary premiering at Film Forum this July was almost as intolerable as the thick heat strobing off the sidewalk outside. At the Q&A, the director entered and crossed his legs: hipster-grade thick black glasses, matching black baseball cap, trying to use generative technology to redefine cinema for the digital age. The impulse was to beg: Please, Gary, don’t. Still, generations of Brian Eno fans trusted that this documentary would be as rich in content as it was in technical ambition, so they packed into the theater, held their breaths, and listened to the algorithm whir.

Brian Eno is an electronic and ambient musician, a producer, a cultural theorist, a painter, an environmentalist, a Brit with a bad attitude, and a lifelong advocate for interdisciplinary, experimentative art;  a straightforward narrative documentary of his career would’ve been reductive at best and dishonest at worst. So, Hustwit’s task was to be conscious of form in his filmmaking— “to create a cinematic experience as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”  

The idea was to make a “generative” documentary: to write an algorithm which reconceives, rearranges, and reprises 30 hours of cut interviews and 500 hours of video and audio footage from Eno’s personal archive into a different film every time it’s screened. Laws of combinatory math mandate that the number of possible configurations for this many moving pieces is huge: 52 quintillion.  But this statistic should not impress. In a sense, all artists work on constraining infinity when they begin making choices, and isn’t this intentional discrimination and composition what makes art impressive, or daunting, or replete with meaning? Critics might argue that adding quintillions of hours of haphazardly organized footage to an already A.I.-polluted, video-overloaded, and bloating media landscape is a childish thing to do, that it lacks intention, or that it’s an assault on viewers’ time. There’s a stubbornness to this line of reasoning, though; it’s difficult to hold any new idea to a radiant expectation of a virtuous artistic process and expect it not to block the light. 

So perhaps the form of the “generative documentary” is best explained in the context of its artistic lineage. The subreddit “r/generative” portends that generative art is “a work that expresses the moment when [...] because of the development of AI, we don’t know what to focus our attention on.” Contrary to the Reddit dogma, the idea of generativity in music has actually existed for thousands of years. Before the invention of notation in the year 1000, all music was generative insofar as it was reshuffled and recomposed each time it was performed. Even with the advent of notation technology, composers would inscribe music and then build the “reprise,” a cyclical reconsideration of a phrase. In the seventeenth century, a game called Musikalisches Würfelspiel (“musical dice game”) was popular in Germany. It was a playful system of randomly organizing and overlapping pre-composed musical phrases to make a piece of music. When it was spread to France, it was advertised as a way of making music last “à la infinie,” or “to infinity.”  It wasn’t until recording equipment was invented in the mid-1800s that people began to listen to music in the same static form over and over again. 

Flash forward to 1965, when composer Steve Reich set two identical recordings of a preacher next to each other, played them at different times, and let them fall out of sync to create 18 minutes of dissonant polyrhythm, weaving around itself to create his song “It’s Gonna Rain.” But it wasn’t until 1978 that intentionally generative music was named and brought into the mainstream. Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports involves 22 very simple loops, playing at once, making one sound, as in an arrhythmia. One loop might be a single drawn-out piano note, a field recording, or a group of girls singing, but they’d all repeat at separate times. He explains: “One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is, in fact, a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank’s studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable—they are not likely to come back into sync again.” So, while Music for Airports established Eno’s distinctly textural ambient sound almost 50 years ago,  it still feels contemporary because it has created the illusion of continuous change. In this way, the algorithm of the movie is in direct reference to the form of Brian Eno’s most inventive work.

Or maybe it’d be better to justify the form of the movie in Eno’s own terms. He’s said that “art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.” Take two histories of his life, as seen in two different incarnations of the film; see what ideas they bring up for you.

• Brian Eno gets his start in art school and describes learning to make music in the recording studio as an extension of learning to resolve a full visual composition. His paintings are of circular, emanating colors. 
• After school, he becomes the headliner of early glam rock band Roxy Music, and he talks about the infectious androgyny of the era, of occupying an unfamiliar hazy space in the gender spectrum just as he was occupying the uncharted in-betweens of musical rhythms.
• Brian Eno produces major records for John Cale, U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Laraaji, and the German band DEVO. In each of these projects, the movie focuses on his hands-on production style, like the way he brings unconventional loops into the studio to wrestle with or the way he provides an artist with an entirely new lexicon of cultural references and sounds. 
• He collaborates with multimedia artist Peter Schmidt to make a deck of cards he calls the Oblique Strategies, which give unorthodox creative advice. In the film, Laurie Anderson reads one out: “Do nothing for as long as possible,” and stares into the camera until the audience begins to laugh. 

After this “screening,” you might be thinking about the tenets of Brian Eno’s process, or the interdisciplinary quality of his work. Try another: 

• Brian Eno gets his start as a little kid in the English countryside. He can remember a moment of awakening and synthesis, when he was listening to a song sung by a woman with a sexy voice, walking by the river, and painting with a rich purple color. He experiences a strong, retrievable feeling. Later he decrees that artmaking should always be about a feeling.  

• He’s waiting in an airport which is playing loud, abrasive, German music when he has the idea to make Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Instead of trying to “distract” from death, Eno explains with a half-ironic smile that people should be listening to music that prepares them for the experience of flight by making them feel “sort of suspended in the universe and [that] life or death isn’t so important.”
• David Bowie sits in the back of a black limousine, dangerously thin and stripped of any affectation. He is recovering from a cocaine addiction and drinking milk as the black stretch drives through open planes in middle America. He says the only album he can listen to is Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. 
• Eno becomes a university lecturer, and makes arguments about the role of art and play, what he calls “dabbling,” in modern life. In one, he makes reference to a double pendulum, which is a simple machine made up of a pendulum with another oscillating pendulum at its tip. The first pendulum swings back and forth, but the second dances wildly in arrhythmic zigzags and figure eights. He uses the metaphor to represent how, in art, compositions start simple and grow increasingly complex, to the point where the true meaning of a piece of music eludes the creator and resists interpretation. 

Maybe after this one, you are thinking about creative inspiration, or the way ideas grow. After each of these “screenings,” you first come away with different ideas of his life and work. But then in seeing different patterns and by analyzing your own creative experience in the dark spaces between shots, you are also moved differently—even if only slightly—by each watch. 

He says, “Lives don’t run in straight lines, and every time we think about them in retrospect we actually rethink them.”

Culture critics may operate under the illusion that they are distilling the core truth of a movie, song, or piece of art. But consider the idea that every time you go back to a piece of art in your thinking, you regenerate it and reveal new throughlines. Every new review and conversation is informed by a phantom artwork that you hold in your mind’s eye. It’s an idea into which you can interpolate, an idea that coexists with other rhythms, in infinite, sophisticating harmony. Any review of Eno is not an objective interpretation, because this movie demands that the viewer make their own connecting networks. In this, Eno teaches that memory-recall is a creative game of selectivity and pattern recognition. 

When the movie ended, and faded out to the sweeping, melodic “All I Remember,” strangers began to murmur to each other about which sections of the movie they’d seen before and about which parts they would never see. They whispered, sharing interpretations like dreams.