By Neil Giordano

The new bio-doc about producer-musician Brian Eno looks at the artist’s life and his creative process in a deliberately provocative new format.

Eno, directed by Gary Hustwit. The documentary screens at the ICA Boston, January 17 through 19. On January 24, Hustwit will host a 24-hour streaming event at www.ohyouprettythings.com in which the film will screen several versions as well as giving viewers access to a variety of the archival video and interviews.

Eno: A look at the many pieces of Brian Eno.

I was skeptical of Eno at first, for two reasons. For one, on its face, it’s just another celebrity profile, a growing subset of the documentary form that tends to gobble up attention from other worthy films for the wrong reasons: the subject is already well known, and we often don’t get anything new along with the customary hagiographic or sentimental airbrushing. Eno brushes this suspicion aside because it is not a PR project. Rather, it features an addictively engaging subject. Even more suspect is that critics have hailed Eno as a new frontier in filmmaking because it draws on “generative” algorithms with each screening. In other words, every showing of Eno is different: it remixes its elements — adding some pieces, subtracting others, rearranging archival footage and interviews — to create a new version for each of its respective audiences. This sounds like a gimmick and, perhaps in some ways, it is just that. More troublingly, have we reached the point in which our worst fears have materialized: a world where software and AI have dethroned human professionals? At the moment at least, those fears may be overblown. In this case, the possibility of an infinite variety of “versions” of Eno turns out to be a delightfully novel way to get people to see it, maybe even more than once. I have now seen the doc  twice, first at an early screening last spring at the Full Frame documentary festival, and again at the ICA last fall. Is it different each time? Yes. Was it worth seeing more than once? Again, yes.

What makes it worth the price of more than one admission is not so much the film’s generative aspect, but Eno himself, who comes across as a fascinating subject. Still, the film’s inventive use of technology is delightfully compelling. And that was the clincher for Eno, who reportedly didn’t want to be the subject of a documentary because he didn’t want to spend time in the anticreative exercise of “looking back.” Director Gary Hustwit concocted an innovative strategy for persuading him: inducing him to take part via this software-based approach. In that way, the film itself takes a meta approach, being a creative way to probe creativity. We get multiple Enos with each screening, and each manifestation of the artist has something different to say.

Hustwit has dedicated many of his past films to exploring ideas of design and creation. If you’ve seen Helvetica, you probably won’t think about fonts again in the same way or the people who design them. Objectified examines the design of consumer products and, once again, focuses on the artists who dedicate their lives to crafting the widgets that populate our everyday lives.

As for Eno himself, he makes for a fecund subject; the movie positively overflows with his approaches to creating music. We see a glammed-up Eno in early incarnations of Roxy Music, while the present-day Eno remembers how he turned to synthesizers because he didn’t know how to play any musical instruments. That led him on toward a career of combining technology, computers, and music. (In fact, he eventually grew tired of touring with Roxy Music, preferring the studio experience, where he could do something new every day). Another section of the doc touches on his pioneering ambient compositions, while others take up his prolific career as a producer to various iconic musicians and groups over the past 40 years, including U2, Talking Heads, and Laurie Anderson.

Most fascinating are interspersed long meditations by Eno, spoken in the present and accompanied by archival clips of past interviews. He offers koan-like proclamations on the creative process. Yes, that might make him sound like a pretentious “artist,” but he comes across as a self-effacing thinker, someone who delights in both creating and in thinking about creating.

The generative aspects of the film — as far as I can tell after two screenings — come in various forms. Some pieces show up in different parts of the film in each screening — for instance, a foray in the present in which Eno is out in his garden, trying to understand beetles. This segment came late in the film during my first screening; early in the second. Does it matter? Maybe? Juxtaposition is an integral part of the editing process, so when something is shown to us will undoubtedly affect its meaning. Can I say that learning about garden beetles was made more or less important given what came before and after? I cannot. Various screenings contain some episodes and not others. The Boston showing last fall included a section in which a young Eno at university created an orchestra of individuals playing instruments that they didn’t actually know how to play. It was an experiment in sonic absurdity (maybe) but some fruitful points may have been made about creativity. That episode didn’t appear in the Full Frame screening. That suggests each version will offer new perspectives.

In addition to these generative aspects, the software excels at providing interstitial montages scattered throughout the movie. Unfortunately, they come with irritating R2D2-like beep-beep- boop-boop sound effects that semaphore to viewers that they’re entering the “AI zone.” Still, these scraps of audio and video are a valuable addendum. In the Boston screening, I caught glimpses of a young David Bowie, a bank of keyboards with a tangle of wires, a snippet of a young Eno walking in London, and a costumed Devo performing in synchronous motion. Hustwit was lucky enough to have been given permission to delve into Eno’s vast personal archives. It might take a few thousand screenings to catch a glimpse of all the hidden treasures. (There are apparently 52 quintillion possible versions of the film.)

The Boston screening last fall added yet another new element. Hustwit stood at the front of the theater with Brain One (an anagram of Brian Eno), a console on which he purportedly could track how the film was unfolding. He was purportedly able to note what the generative software would produce in advance, heading off any problems. To me, the sight of the director — turning a dial or adjusting some setting — seemed a meta bridge too far. Like the oft-told joke about DJs, I wondered if this was just window dressing, showmanship to spice up the presentation. The truth is, Hustwit doesn’t need any of these in-person histrionics. He’s created an entertaining and provocative film that has been shortlisted for the coming Academy Awards. Eno itself is a performance, each screening giving viewers something fresh to consider about its subject, about art, and about the nature (and future) of documentary film.

Neil Giordano teaches film and creative writing in Newton. His work as an editor, writer, and photographer has appeared in Harper’s, Newsday, Literal Mind, and other publications. Giordano previously was on the original editorial staff of DoubleTake magazine and taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.