The Dawn of the "Generative Documentary"

Friday night at Vidiots in Eagle Rock, CA a sold out crowd of filmgoers got to experience a new genre in non-fiction: a generative documentary.

Having premiered at Sundance and now on a tour of screenings, Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified) now shared with us here in LA, Eno, his collaboration with legendary music producer Bryan Eno covering the musician’s career and immersing in the icon’s fascinating creative process. 

The production involved 2 years of combing through 500+ hours of personal archives, and 50 hours of interviews conducted over 3 years. But these bits were the straightforward parts.

What will put this film in the history books is the radically novel approach to directing, editing and distribution. Hustwit collaborated with artist Brendan Dawes to program software they’ve named “Brain One”, an anagram for Brian Eno. Although the word “generate” these days implies AI, this is instead a code-based decision tree designed to generate a new edit of the film every time it is screened. 

Before the film started Hustwit told the audience, “We are the only people in the world who will ever see this film”. 

He and his team began innovating this technology 5 or so years ago when he had been musing “why do films have to be the same every time we watch them?” He wondered how instead they could be more performative, like how a band performs music differently each time you see them. 

This instinct aligned with the film’s subject, as Eno had turned down many efforts to participate in a biopic before from other filmmakers including Hustwit himself. It was when Hustwit re-pitched the effort as being an expression of this new generative technology that Eno enthusiastically agreed in the name of doing something original and more in the spirit of his own creative music making process. 

In the Q&A after, Hustwit explained you might have to watch the film 4-5 times to really see most of the content he produced. The technology is designed around a series of randomized outlines that divert in different directions at specified forks to differently sorted scenes and sections of content making each viewing experience one of a kind. 

“The whole approach is not about me exerting a directorial vision”. It’s about “surrendering control to the system. When the film can make itself.”

For this particular technology it’s helpful the film is about one subject who does all the talking so the skipping around isn’t really that jarring and in this case the stream of consciousness musings are very in line with the spirit of Bryan Eno’s “oblique strategies” of art creation. The viewer is very much piecing together their own meaning to extract as Eno does when making a song. 

Unlike the crop of Gen AI tools that are populating social feeds this technology isn’t readily available and its utility is different from the more purely creative tools like Midjourney or Runway. We’re in a different category here and to a degree this one of a kind deliverable almost reminds me more of NFTs and their premium placed on scarcity and rarity. 

Besides being a unique cinematic experience, what also excites me is how this new experiment of technology + storytelling allowing us to challenge assumptions of how a film gets made, how a director relates to their Final Cut, how an audience interacts with the experience. I wonder what other things are also ripe for reinvention as these tools get into the hands of other creators.