A second viewing of a great movie is never quite like the first. You know the twists. You’re braced for the climax. The surprise factor is diminished.

Christopher Nolan’s Memento has long danced with that certainty. Built around a man incapable of forming new memories, the film forces audiences to reconstruct events from fragments, piecing together its backwards narrative one scene at a time.

Now, 25 years after its release, Melbourne collective Hear My Eyes is offering audiences another chance to experience Memento as though for the first time by erasing one of the film’s distinctive elements. David Julyan’s haunting original score has been stripped away and will be replaced with an entirely new live soundtrack by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard drummer Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh, performed beneath the film in real time.

Michael “CAVS” Cavanagh. Photo © Sarah Findlay

For more than a decade, Melbourne-based Hear My Eyes has carved out a unique niche in Australian performance. Rather than recreating beloved film scores with orchestral precision, it treats cinema as something mutable and open to reinterpretation. Each project removes the original music entirely, commissioning contemporary musicians to build a new...