SEWARD: Eno: Reclamation of individualism
The documentary "Eno" begins with an interview conducted with the musical icon about the thought process behind his music. A very failure-based thought process, contradictory to perceptions about creatives such as himself.
The stereotypical image of musicians creating great music follows a standard formula. A musician picks up an instrument, plays an intriguing melody, writes down lyrics and continues this process until "Bohemian Rhapsody" is born. Tried and true, the formula works.
But this "formula" is not accurate. Barring a few exceptions — such as Paul McCartney writing "Get Back" in two minutes — no iconic song just comes to a musician. Later on in the documentary, sessions for the recording of U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" show Bono scatting and singing nonsense, waiting for some coherence to rise above the babble. Eno argues that this is true musicianship. Try until you succeed, and keep an open mind to explore failures.
Eno is a fitting musician for a revolutionary documentary.
The standard music documentary or biopic displays the message of musicians being geniuses not of this planet. They normally begin with the musicians at a young age, learning the guitar, covering a few failed attempts at making music before meeting up with someone or a group of people who can unleash this talent and create otherworldly beauty in a matter of minutes.
The Queen biopic, "Bohemian Rhapsody," was an ardent follower of this formula, receiving mixed reviews for its unwillingness to push beyond this stereotypical pattern and be nothing more than "a medley of a true greatest hits collection."
While Queen's greatest hits album is incredible, it does not come close to capturing the enigma of Freddie Mercury, with a particularly scathing review by RogerEbert.com writer Sheila O'Malley calling it "superficial" and saying that it "avoids complexity."
Eno's documentary does not commit this cardinal sin, mainly because of how it was created. Instead of assembling a recognizable cast of actors and having them do a "greatest hits" version of the artist's life, the director Gary Hustwit compiled more than 500 hours of archival footage, along with 30 hours of fresh interview footage with Eno, to form the first "generative feature film."
Hustwit, alongside programmer Brendan Dawes, created a computer program that takes this footage and organizes it into a documentary whose contents change upon every screening. The New York Times reported that there were fifty-two quintillion ways in which "Eno" could play out.
When I sat down at the Princeton Garden Theater on Tuesday night, in between my father, who has a nasty habit of falling asleep during movies, and a woman who was a diehard fan of Roxy Music, Eno's first foray into music, I knew that there was a one in fifty-two quintillion chance I would see the movie that I viewed that Tuesday night. Not even the most addicted gambler would take those odds.
A randomly generated documentary sounds nightmarish to fans of coherent narratives. Especially for someone as prolific as Eno, it would be a disorganized mess, spending way too much time on Coldplay before smash-cutting to glam-rock Eno playing "Needles in the Camel's Eye."
These fears were dissuaded almost instantly. The film, despite its randomly generated nature, still derived a coherent narrative capable of exploring the mind behind Eno's genius while also discussing his lengthy musical pedigree. The film covered all of the beats you would expect from an Eno documentary, like his beginnings with Roxy Music, forays into ambient, and production work with Bowie, Talking Heads and U2.
Despite the threat of a play-by-the-rules documentary lurking behind the interesting process, numerous reminders of the film's engaging and unique nature interrupted my negative reveries. Whenever the documentary wished to discuss a different part of Eno's career, brief displays of computer programming would pop on screen, the machine's gears turning as it combed through the hours of footage compiled by Hustwit and Dawes.
These brief intermissions served as a theatrical comparison to Eno's Oblique Strategies, a method designed to overcome creative blocks. The program is working out the kinks, almost as if Eno told them to "work at a different speed" or "distort time."
Yet "Eno" is not revolutionary because of the format. It is revolutionary because it captures the man's unique spirit, reclaiming an artist's individualism through randomization. Musicians and creatives are not people who play by the numbers. That is why we adore their work, for their willingness to explore randomness and failures just to see what happens.
"Eno" doesn't portray Brian Eno as a god but as an individual capable of failure and brilliance. Learning to defy expectations or conformities is a useful skill that Eno has mastered. My father defied expectations, learning from the man he idolized as a teenager. He stayed awake.
Samuel Seward is a senior at the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in political science and minoring in English. Seward’s column, “Dead Air,” runs on alternate Mondays.
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