Home viewing has taken over, but cinema still lives, and I do like seeing epics on a commercial big screen with a room full of people, though sometimes these days it turns out to be almost a private showing in a near-empty auditorium. For best results I choose particular cinemas and even specific screens: and at Sydney’s Cremorne Orpheum Cinema 4 were particularly powerful experiences (they run that room loud!), and you get a bonus Wurlitzer coming through the floor on Saturday afternoons, something you rarely get at home. During Sydney’s 2024 Vivid Festival, when the city illuminates itself dramatically to celebrate all the energy it saved during Earth Hour, I went to an unusual film screening at the Opera House.
It was unusual because the film would be shown only once, and would never be shown anywhere ever again in that form, and you had to be there to watch it – and so did the director, Gary Hustwit. This film is a documentary about Brian Eno. It’s hard to say that I fully love Brian Eno, because there are many Brian Enos, and I’m not sure I like all of them, but some of them I do, very much indeed.
I am particularly indebted to , a whole side of vinyl where Eno makes soft ‘bong’ sounds on generative loops that go round and round and fade up and down; nothing much happens for 20 minutes and it eventually fades away. (I like to think it actually went on for days at the time of conception, but such extended Max-Richterian flights of fancy were sadly limited by.