Brian Eno’s Legend To Be Told at Texas Theatre With Help From AI Software

If you’re a fan of rock and pop music, you’ve almost certainly been affected by the work of Brian Eno.

As an artist, he helped make Roxy Music’s first two records incomparable, invented ambient music and combined the razzle-dazzle of glam rock with the high-brow urbanity of avant-garde. As a producer, he partnered with Tony Visconti on David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and has attached his name to musical benchmarks such as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, DEVO’s Q: Are We Not Men?, U2’s The Joshua Tree and his own compilation album No New York, which is credited with launching New York’s no wave movement.

It's nearly impossible to fully state, never mind overstate, Eno’s achievements and how much our musical landscape is indebted to him, but filmmaker Gary Hustwit makes a valiant attempt with the documentary film ENO, which will be screened at the Texas Theatre on Saturday afternoon. The July 20 screening will be followed by a Q&A with Hustwit, whose previous films include Helvetica and Rams, the latter for which Eno did the musical score.

Naturally, a documentary about one of the most groundbreaking artists and producers alive has to be groundbreaking in its own right, so Hustwit went as far as to make this the first “generative feature film.”

Here’s what that means for Dallas: there are over 30 hours worth of interviews and 500 hours worth of footage for this entire film, and an algorithm is curating which footage will appear in which order for each individual screening. This will quite literally be its own unique film, as (if The New York Times is to be believed) there is a 1-in-52 quintillion chance of this exact screening being replicated elsewhere. This curation will be done with the help of Hustwit’s own generative filmmaking software, Brain One, which he created with artist Brendan Dawes.

“I wanted the film to be about creativity and about his creative process and learning from that,” Hustwit said in an interview with The Verge. “Almost any piece of the film, there is some kind of creative lesson there. The majority of the footage in the scenes, even if he’s talking about Roxy or talking about synthesizers or anything, there is some grain of creative inspiration in it.”

Eno premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and we would comfortably bet that whatever screening the entertainment press saw will be nothing like the one Dallas will see on Saturday. Will we find out about the sessions for David Bowie’s Low? Will we get a closer look into the masterpiece that is Ambient 1: Music for Airports? Will we finally find an answer to the age-old question of what Eno sees in producer Fred Again?

Only time and Brain One will tell. Also, did you notice that “Brain One” is an anagram of “Brian Eno”? How cool is that?!