FEATURE:
Oblique Strategies
Eno: Reinventing and Reframing the Possibilities of the Music Documentary
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AS someone not fully aware of…
Brian Eno’s brilliance and incredible career, I have done a lot of looking back and catching up. There is a lot of new focus about his work and brilliance through the documentary, Eno. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for it in a minute. I think that music documentaries are a hard thing to get right. One of the big issues is keeping the length down. Able to make something both concise and authoritative. Having it be balanced and engaging to new fans and long-serving alike. It is almost an impossible task for any filmmaker to make a music documentary that pleases everyone and can fit everything else in. That is why Eno interests me. Perhaps it is the other end of the spectrum. In the sense that its innovation means no two viewings of the documentary are the same. It means that so many hours of audio and footage can be included so that you do not have to restrict yourself to one single narrative and piece. Here are some more details about Eno:
“Brian Eno is the subject of a new career spanning documentary that is uniquely generative: a film that’s different every time it’s screened. Compiled from hundreds of hours of video footage, music and interviews, the film explores Eno’s music, art and ideas, giving the viewer personal insights into his creative processes.
Accompanying this groundbreaking new film is a soundtrack that serves as a companion audio journey touching on Eno’s output throughout his rich career. The 17 tracks included on the album feature work from early solo outings such as 1974’s ‘Taking Tiger Mountain’ and 75’s ‘Another Green World’, acclaimed collaborations with the likes of David Byrne, John Cale, Cluster and more recently, Fred again… all the way through to music from his latest album, ‘FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’, and his 2021 appearance at the Acropolis in Athens with brother, Roger”.
IN THIS PHOTO: On 11th July, Brian Eno spoke to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music about Eno/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC
I will get to a couple of reviews for Eno before moving on. In their five-star write-up, The Guardian stated how it is quite hard to review the documentary. With every viewing being different, you can only really give your account of events. It won’t apply wholly to anyone else who watches Eno. It is a fascinating project none the less. Something that has not really been done before:
“How do you capture the mercurial character, the elastic creativity and the prolific and endlessly inventive output of an artist such as Brian Eno – member of Roxy Music, producer of David Bowie and others, musician, activist, artist – in a conventional documentary? The answer, as director Gary Hustwit realised, is that you can’t. The traditional approach of the average music documentary – a dutiful plod through talking-head interviews and archive footage – might pin down a few of the biographical facts of Eno’s life and work, but it could hardly be further removed from its spirit.
And so Hustwit, who first worked with Eno in 2017 when the musician created a score for the film Rams (about the German designer Dieter Rams), decided to think outside the box. The result is an extraordinary work that takes its cue from Eno’s auto-generated musical projects. Using specially developed software (dreamed up in collaboration with creative technologist Brendan Dawes), Hustwit has created an exhilarating and innovative cinematic experience: a generative film that is different every time it screens.
It proves to be a uniquely challenging project to review – the version of the film that I viewed will never be seen again. My iteration, in which David Byrne and Talking Heads featured prominently, was thoughtful and philosophical; I imagine there are far more angular and abrasive possible versions (I would be fascinated to see an incarnation that touched on Eno’s tricky collaboration with Devo, for example). What is particularly striking, however, uniting most critics so far, is how elegantly the film flows; there is a curious, intuitive logic weaving together these randomly chosen scenes and clips. It’s an outstanding achievement”.
There are always restrictions with music documentaries. Truly great ones can fit everything in and give a complete portrait of an artist or music event. I don’t know whether there will be attempts by anyone else to follow from Brian Eno and do something similar. I am interested whether Eno will have an impact on how music documentaries are made and perceived. This is what the BFI said about Eno:
“To tackle a tireless explorer of music as a system of rules and patterns, the American documentarian Gary Hustwit has found an appropriately complex strategy. Not for Brian Eno a by-the-book compilation of archive footage and talking heads (Eno got one of those in 2011, with the epic but conventional Brian Eno: The Man Who Fell to Earth 1971-1977). Instead, Eno is a fascinating honeycomb of interlocking sequences, each tackling a different facet of his artistic methods and philosophy or a moment from his career, and playing in a jumbled order, which can change from day to day or from screening to screening.
Common to many of these particles are warm, unguarded interviews with Eno at his home and studio in Norfolk, where he’s seen layering sounds at his computer and out admiring shrubs in his garden. Indeed, it seems that for him sound-making is a quasi-horticultural pursuit. His interest in generative music derives from his thrill in planting something and watching it grow; in seeing complexity arising out of simplicity. “I like things that don’t look like they’re changing,” he says.
Hustwit’s jigsaw-puzzle pieces include invigorating sequences about Eno’s notebooks, his breakfast habits (or denial of them) and his invention of the ‘oblique strategies’ cards with which he throws haphazard instructions into his artistic projects. Roxy Music, David Bowie and a mixing-desk session with U2 are in the blend too. It doesn’t really matter what order these come in: each of these collaborations are the molecular elements that form a larger pattern of creative endeavour.
From helvetica font (Helvetica, 2007) to the industrial designer Dieter Rams (Rams, 2018), Hustwit has shown a preoccupation with creative systems and processes. His fragmented scheme here brings to mind François Girard’s prismatic look at another mathematically minded artist, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) – though the short films are now randomised, like a playlist set to shuffle.
The attempt to create an aleatoric, generative cinema to match Eno’s methods – via bespoke software which Hustwit developed with creative technologist Brendan Dawes – is inspired. If there is a flaw in the conception, it’s in the stubborn limitations of the medium. Watching the sequences in different orders may get the neurons firing off in new directions and making serendipitous connections but the film itself doesn’t grow, can’t grow, in any organic way.
More controllably, the transitions between sequences are accompanied by rows of jumbled letters on screen and a digital scrambling sound: corny and very un-Eno signposts that the thing we’re watching is changing”.
I do like music documentaries, though there always seem to be flaws or drawbacks. What you find is that the filmmaker either does not dive deep enough or things are quite sanitised. You have a picture of that subject that is missing details and truth. The restrictive length of documentaries means it is naturally difficult to create true balance and richness without things being too long. Then you risk it being bloated and people’s attentions wandering. Eno, as I said, is an extreme example of how you can have a documentary that omits nothing and everyone has their own unique experience. This regenerative visual experience is intriguing. In any respect, I do wonder whether we are now in a position where music documentaries can have these limitless possibilities. Or at the very least there are few restrictions. You could make a documentary about, say music of a particular decade or band, and ensure that everyone goes away happy. I like the idea of having different viewing experiences. Maybe not infinite or endless. You could have something slightly different over five or six different versions. I don’t know. Regardless, we have technology that allows us to take documentaries to new places. Eno is proof of that. Whilst some note that this regenerative and new approach to documentaries means we can never get to the core of a subject or feel this sense of completion, it does mean that everyone who sees Eno has their own perspective. That is a wonderful innovation that is so…
EXCITING to see.