Eno

Director: Gary Hustwit

2 June 2024

See

A documentary about musician Brian Eno as a generative film where no two screenings are the same. It’s structure is dynamic around core components, interviews with Eno, but which parts are used varies as do the elements of his creativity and process.

Think

And it’s Eno’s process that inspires so many as to how he things about his minimalist music. Mainly contemporary society is so fast faced and frenetic that playing slow melodious music makes people think more fully to fill the space. Eno uses ‘oblique strategy’ cards in producing music (and so does David Byrne and Laurie Anderson in the doco for core structural beats). Whether his own, or David Bowie or U2, the point is to do things differently. Trying to read aloud things he wrote before, particularly his diaries was compelling. But for quotes he found cringeworthy he came up with a game on the spot for crew to shout emotions out to him before each one he’d read and act then out the dialogue. 

Feel

Brian Eno’s quote about control vs current was included. It saved me once. Now it does again:

“Since we come from a technology culture, and we’re very good at technology. We tend to think that control is the solution to every problem. And sure if you can do it, it is a good solution. If you can control when crops come up and how they grow and how to get rid of weeds and what have you. Why not?

But there are lots of situations we can’t control, because we don’t know the rules for them. We don’t have the technologies to deal with them. So if you can’t control, what is the best thing to do? Surrender. Gracefully.

Somehow allow that situation to carry you along, and not be damaged by it. 

So surrendering I think of as an active verb, not a passive verb. I think of it as a way of dealing with things. In our repertoire of responses to things, we have at one extreme end control, and at the other surrender. We can very rarely, except in scientific experiments, be at the control end. There are always random factors and unpredictable things. And equally it’s quite difficult to be at the surrender end. We’re gradually generally in our lives moving along the axis to find the right blend.

But what we find ecstatic, is nearly always an experience of surrender. If you think of the things we achieve transcendence if you like, or ecstasy. It’s sex, drugs, art and religion. Those are all the places where we say ‘I’m gonna let go and just let this thing happen to me. I’m not gonna control it, I’m going to be taken somewhere.’ 

It’s interesting to me that although we’re constantly trying to control, our biggest thrills come from letting go of control.’ So what becomes obvious is the combination of those two that we should really be specialising in. And we should not forget the surrender part. We should not think that surrender is passivity, or cowardice, or incompetence. We should say, it’s one of the ways we deal with the world. And it’s one of the things I think we learn from the experience of art. And the experience of love, and sex and religion and drugs (laughs)

They’re all the ways we pitch ourselves into a situation that we know we will be out of control in. That’s one of the other reason we are so attracted by art, because we know that’s one of the ways that can happen. And of course, art is harmless essentially. So we can have the experience of being out of control, and not be flattened by it (laughs) not be killed by it. We can switch the film off or we can leave the gallery or whatever. So I think art is the place we go to have this feeling again. Of going with the flow, of letting something happen to us. So that in real life, in the rest of life, I should say, we can still remember that feeling. And we can know when to use it.”