One could easily imagine a docuseries about Eno, with segments on Roxy Music, Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, the birth of ambient, and the invention of generative music. While these might feel comprehensive (because they generally represent the 50+ years of his creative output), these segments would miss his love of nature (which informs everything he has ever done), his unique approaches (such as his Oblique Strategies), and his philosophies on creativity and art. Because it would be impossible to create a "definitive" docuseries, Eno never agreed to one.
Gary Hustwit approached Eno with a mind-bending idea to make a generative film, curating and editing new interviews and previously unreleased material into hundreds of scenes, but randomly choosing only dozens to form a viewing. The calm and cerebral 1.2 version that I saw (featuring art school and the birth of ambient music) shared only a few scenes with the energetic and emotional 1.1 version that I saw at the premiere (featuring Roxy Music, Bowie, and U2). While both were enlightening and inspiring, the two viewings told different stories.
In the premiere, I loved a particular Eno quote and thought "I need to come back to this scene" only to later realize that I might never see that scene again, even if I watched the film another dozen times. This forced me to approach the second screening more like a live performance, guided into the moment, as if by Eno himself.
We humans are continuously reshuffling our memories, adding new scenes and making new connections. And with each reshuffle, we tell a different story about ourselves. This film works like that. The "definitive" version was not one of the two versions that I saw, but rather the one that I get to assemble.
Very few people have led a life with this much range, length, and recorded content, so I am not sure that the generative film format will work for too many other subjects. But it works - absolutely brilliantly - for Eno. Highly recommended.
