A thought crept into my mind as I watched Eno at the Irish Film Institute last Saturday 7 September, and the thought can be summarised thus: ‘Oh no, how do I review this?’ The documentary about the eponymous musician and producer, by Gary Hustwit (best known for 2007’s Helvetica), was screened three times at the IFI last week. It’s built on a filmic adaptation of Eno’s generative music techniques: Hustwit and the visual artist Brendan Dawes developed a programme to select and compile the film from hundreds of hours of interviews and archival footage, meaning that each screening of the film is unique. But how unique? Theoretically, the differences could be anything from a slight colour grade change to a wholly different film structure.

So I broke my reviewing rule: I read other opinions before I began. And, unsurprisingly, the differences between versions of the film seem to be quite substantial. The overall narrative seems predetermined, a somewhat chronological journey through Eno’s career, as does the format, mostly narrated by Eno himself, with little to no input from other talking heads. The Guardian’s Wendy Ide saw a version that focused on Eno’s work with the band Talking Heads, but ‘would be fascinated to see an incarnation that touched on Eno’s tricky collaboration with [American new wave band] Devo.’ The version I saw did touch on Devo (he acknowledged the difficulty – and sometimes the absurdity – of working with them, but held clear respect for their talent), but Talking Heads were given just a couple of minutes. No review I read mentioned Eno’s ambient music, where the version I saw spent quite a bit of time.

There’s some algorithmic compilation of material going on, that much is clear. At the beginning, the date and location of the screening are displayed, followed by a quickly-glimpsed list of filenames (a similar list appears at the beginning of each segment of the film) – presumably the specific video segments to be shown in this screening. It seems as though Hustwit and Dawes’ programme builds the film from its existing material on-site at the time of its screening, in the same way that some Eno works – such as his 2017 application Reflections – build themselves according to predetermined musical parameters. 

Puzzles
About halfway through the film, there was a discussion of Oblique Strategies, the cards developed by Eno and the visual artist Peter Schmidt containing short sentences that can be used to spur creativity. Then, a single card is drawn and read aloud: ‘Repetition is a form of change.’ The film jumps back fifteen minutes to the beginning of the discussion of Oblique Strategies, and rolls the same footage again. This is the sort of puzzle the film presents: is a card always drawn? Is it always that card? Does the card immediately affect the structure of the film? It’s a fascinating moment, because it’s a clear artistic choice but also (probably) an inconsistent part of the experience.

A memorable moment comes courtesy of an interview with David Bowie, from around the time of the recording of Heroes. Asked what Eno brings to the process, Bowie answers with a pensive ‘I don’t know’ – eventually settling on the idea that his presence ‘broadens the parameters’ of what they’re doing. Eno describes the game he and Bowie used to play with the Oblique Strategies cards, where each would use one in recording sessions, without telling the other what they were. When they reached the end of a long and surreal back-and-forth on the composition of ‘Moss Garden’, they revealed their cards. Eno’s read, ‘Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency’, Bowie’s, ‘Destroy the most important thing.’

This film is rare among documentaries in making explicit – indeed central – the fact that we see only part of the subject. The portrait that emerged from this version of the film is of a musician who spends a lot of his time thinking about the concepts of music; a thoughtful optimist and an opinionated listener; a passionate believer in art as a collaborative and shared process who works alone in an empty studio; a shrewd artistic philosopher with a self-deprecating wit.

Collaboration seems particularly key to Eno’s way of thinking about art. Perhaps it was a fortuitous through-line of this screening, but he argues the case for humanity as social collaborators first and foremost, whether that’s in the process of creating pop songs, or singing in a group (Eno leads an a cappella group in his home town), or even technology. Eno argues that although few of us understand how the majority of things around us work or where they come from, by using them we’re participating in uniquely human behaviour because we are collaborating with the brains that created them.

This film’s coherence speaks to the fact of its human construction, despite the algorithmic procedures that assembled it in the moment; they were guided by a living hand. In watching it, I found myself more intrigued by what was included than regretful to be missing out. It’s a fascinating way to look at a fascinating subject, using transience as a form of honesty. But for all its variations, Eno is a singular experience.

Visit www.brian-eno.net.