Maverick recording artist Brian Eno co-founded Roxy Music, produced breakthrough albums for David Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, and U2, and pioneered innovative work in ambient music.
A renowned explorer of technology and “oblique strategies,” he is an unlikely subject for a conventional documentary; but in this first-of-its-kind portrait, Gary Hustwit (HELVETICA, RAMS) applies Eno’s own concept of “generative” art: the filmmaker’s proprietary technology, developed with digital artist Brendan Dawes, produces a different movie every time it’s screened, presenting variations in sequence, music, and scenes (including some with such collaborators as Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, David Bowie, U2, and others).
This is a once-in-a-lifetime screening. ENO offers millions of possible variations and ushers in a groundbreaking approach to storytelling. The result is a viewing experience that resonates with Eno’s own artistic practice, his use of technology to compose music, and the mercurial essence of creativity as his endless pursuit. Defying the hagiographic impulses of the music doc genre, ENO draws from original interviews and the artist’s own staggering archive of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music. This showing will include a pre-recorded Q&A with the Director/Producer Gary Hustwit
REVIEWS: “There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is miraculous and we ought to be grateful that we get to participate in it…[Brian] Eno, one of the most innovative and celebrated musicians and producers of his generation, has fiddled with randomness in his musical practice for decades, often propelled along by new technologies…the generative framework makes perfect sense for ENO, a documentary about a man who’s spent his career rewriting the rules of the possible — not just finding a new way to say something, but changing the act of saying itself.” – Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times
“DAZZLING. More than a biographical documentary, ENO emerges as a brilliant and endlessly inspiring creative manifesto. Eno is an enthralling subject, whose way of talking about art and artmaking is as lucid as it is stimulating. And with its inventive generative gambit formally echoing the very tenets Eno has nurtured in his art for decades, Hustwit’s film boldly paves the wayfor a decidedly new kind of cinema—one that proves as soothing and as stirring as Eno’s own work.” – Manuel Betancourt, The A/V Club
“GROUNDBREAKING. Remixes the music doc.” – David Fear, Rolling Stone
“A template for how cinema can be re-defined in the digital age.” – Daniel Dylan Wray, The Quietus
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