Memoir as Generative Documentary

Or Uncertainty as the Essence of Reality

Software’s Realism

A BBC Reel¹ presents a new genre of generative documentary that uses AI in the editing process. Every viewing of the film Eno is unique, though pulled from the same database of interviews, clips, and raw archival footage. Only a few elements of the film are standard: a beginning and an ending, for example.

Brandon Dawes, the artist/software developer behind the project, says that there are “approximately 52 quintillion versions of the film”. This is a real number: 52 with 19 zeros after it. Chronology is dissolved, and seemingly unrelated scenes are juxtaposed. Different perspectives provide different cues for our mood responses. Dawes explains that every showing was received differently by the audience.

I found this last statement to be particularly interesting because this week I watched four performances of the same theater production, with four different audiences, and the audiences responded differently each time. No AI needed. Tiny variations in human movement, intonation, or breath can make a huge difference in the presentation of the artwork. A theater performance is always new.

And the audience members themselves will process all the information differently—as individuals. And they will also—sometimes simultaneously—influence one another regarding their outward responses, if not their inner thoughts about what they have experienced. “Oh, yeah, that was funny.”

I believe this happens in movie theaters, too: Who are you with? What did you eat for dinner? How’s your bladder holding out?

While the advent of filmmaking at the turn of the previous century was given credit for more accurately portraying reality than the theater could, I think now this couldn’t be more incorrect. It doesn’t even accurately portray memory: our memories are not fixed.

The director of the documentary Gary Hustwit says that film and television have been constrained for 130 years by technology and forced to present a linear story. I see his point, but the linear constraint of film only relates to the presentation of the story as an artefact of its own storytelling. Storytelling itself has never been constrained to a linear form.

Perspectives in Art

I have a good friend whom I love to go to the theater with. We talk afterwards about what we saw, what we liked or didn’t. But more importantly: what we wondered about. We do a kind of postmortem of our own experiences. She will see things I missed that sometimes change my perception of the play in minor, or major, ways. We can’t go back—rewind—the performance to see if what we saw was “really” what happened. Thank god! Because so much of the experience that art gives us is what happens in our minds: how we leap between juxtaposed scenes, how we fill the gaps between our blinking, how we encompass again what words exclude.

It's the leaping that is poetry. She and I enhance the art experience for one another but opening it up to several different “versions”, based on our inherently limited observations and memories. “It could be this, or this, or this,” is preferable (and truer) than “It was”.

The musician Brian Eno, the subject of the documentary, said that he is “pleased if people are more confused.” He thinks the “biggest problem” is what he calls our “appetite for certainty”. I think this appetite is related to our fear of what is just out of our frame of vision.

I’ve never experienced tunnel vision. My friend B., challenged by a glioblastoma, tried to describe it to me. She described her frustration over not being able to see the whole picture at any one time. I think I understood her, because I believe there is a part of everyone’s brain that is already taking account for the little blind point on our retinas: the punctum caecum. Even those of us with perfect sight are vulnerable to missing something.

Juxtapose this fact with a faded polaroid of a man in bell bottom jeans tickling a laughing child whose hair is tangled in the creases of a paisley blanket.

The story is often—maybe always—in the leaping between what is inside and what is outside of the frame. Outside of the frame are more than 52 quintillion other bits of relevant information.

This is the truth that we all seek, the certainty we cannot stop craving. This, I would argue, is the human condition that is the source of our suffering, and of our communion.

Telling the Truth (Sometimes Sideways)

I’m not trying to create a linear story with my story. But that doesn’t release me from the fear. All these mental snapshots that pop randomly, that juxtapose themselves in ways that bring up new—or very old—somatic responses. What’s missing?

Do I dare to look?

When I was very little, so little that I don’t remember, I would scream and refuse to walk on the floor of my bedroom because (my mother said) I saw crocodiles. Later she would say that this was proof that I never could tell fact from fiction. Sometimes I think this is proof that open spaces are dangerous when leaping between one fact and the next: when the software of our brain drops a crocodile in our path, it came from archival footage.

Somewhere along my timeline, much later, I was holding my second child on my hip, standing on a thrust platform in a zoo exhibit, looking down at a pale, still crocodile who, I swore, was staring at my son. I thought my knees would buckle and I’d vomit. My fear, the specifics of my fear, are certainly outside the frame of his memory. As I stood there, I wasn’t aware of the telescoping possibilities of memory—the leaping that is happening now—as I type this—in my mind.

“It’s a true story” is just one story.

And maybe now 130 years later, film is finally actually beginning to show us something closer to a true form of realism. And maybe we will ultimately find out that, We “can’t handle the truth”. ²

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Thank you for taking the time to read/listen to my work. I hope it moves you somehow—and if it does, maybe you’ll consider sharing it with other readers?

I hope you have a great week!

Warmly,

Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.

1. https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0hzhqr1/watch-the-movie-that-rewrites-itself?zephr-modal-register

2. From A Few Good Men.