Film First and Tigerlily Productions are delighted to bring Eno, filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica/RAMS)’s groundbreaking, generative documentary film about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno - a film that is different every time it’s shown - to the UK this summer. Launching on Friday 12 July, the film will play in Picturehouse Cinemas across the country, with a different version of the film emerging on screen each day.
For the past 50 years, Brian Eno has been at the forefront of musical creativity, technology, and artistic innovation. The hugely influential British musician, producer, activist, visual artist and self-described “sonic landscaper” began his career as an original member of the legendary Roxy Music in the early 1970s. Eno has since released over 40 solo and collaboration records, and pioneered the genre of ambient music with his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. As a producer, he’s helped define and reinvent the sound of some of the most important artists in music, including David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Coldplay, and dozens of others. He also composed what may be the most heard piece of music in the world: the startup sound for Microsoft Windows. Undeniably, Eno has changed the way modern music is made.
Rich with access to hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, Gary Hustwit’s documentary employs groundbreaking technology to accomplish something that’s never been done before: a feature film that’s different each time it’s shown. Hustwit and UK-based creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music. Each screening of Eno is unique, presenting different scenes, order, music, and meant to be experienced live. The generative and infinitely iterative quality of Eno poetically resonates with the artist's own creative practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.
A UK/US co-production, Hustwit’s collaboration with Eno began in 2017, when Eno created an original score for Hustwit’s film Rams, about the German designer Dieter Rams. Says Hustwit, “Much of Brian’s career has been about enabling creativity in himself and others, through his role as a producer but also through his collaborations on projects like the Oblique Strategies cards or the music app Bloom. I think of Eno as an art film about creativity, with the output of Brian’s 50-year career as its raw material. What I’m trying to do is to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”
