Radiohead's Motion Picture House opens in Brooklyn

Radiohead's Motion Picture House, the touring home of the KID A MNESIA film, opened its Brooklyn run on the evening of Wednesday 6 May in the Agger Fish Building, a 35,000-square-foot warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It came on 12 trucks from its debut in April, in a bunker Goldenvoice built for it beneath the Coachella grounds, and stays until 28 June before moving on to the other cities announced in April.

Nigel Godrich has rebuilt the soundtrack from the original Kid A and Amnesiac multitracks for six-point surround, with the speakers recalibrated in every venue. Some songs now run longer and some shorter, and instruments come and go. “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” is stretched into a 12-minute sequence. SPIN says it draws on an early version of what became “True Love Waits”, and understands the new mix is not due for release.

The 75-minute film, directed by Sean Evans from the art Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, first came out in 2021 as a download for PS5, PC and Mac. Its minotaur wanders a maze of dreamlike rooms across four big screens, one on each wall of a theatre that rises 25 feet, each tilted slightly down at the audience. The floor is padded, and the padding runs a few feet up the walls, so people sit, lie or lean where they like. In “The National Anthem” the drums hold off until an animal figure leaps into a glowing orange cube, and “Hunting Bears” arrives at the climax, after about an hour of mostly electronic music. Min Chen, writing for Artnet News, rates the new “Idioteque” the best of it.

A visit is a two-hour slot, and the first half-hour is spent in galleries. Stacked old televisions play studio footage and animation loops, one of them showing Jonny Greenwood at a wire-strewn electronic box. On the walls are mix notes for “Optimistic”, the words of “Like Spinning Plates” and faxes between Donwood and Yorke, among sculptures of the crying minotaur and the grinning bear, while a low hum carries scraps of “Motion Picture Soundtrack”. Yorke calls it a derelict museum of the lost and forgotten⁵.

Tickets cost $72.43 with fees, before tax, and phones get a sticker over the camera at the door. Walter Wuthmann, reviewing for Gothamist, set the price beside the $1 he paid for In Rainbows in 2007, but he found a crowd that mostly kept its phones away, and applauded when the film ended.

Motion Picture House, the dates as the Brooklyn run opened