The fourteen minute promo for a Nottingham supermarket is a masterpiece of disturbing trance-like minimalism.
Back when I lived in Nottingham, the Murat Food Centre was somewhere that I would pass pretty much every day on my way into town. It was – and presumably still is – a good place for substantial Polish bread, cheap chillies and shockingly strong lager, should any of those things take your fancy, and generally handy for stocking up on essentials that you’d forgotten to pick up at other supermarkets. It also became something of a local legend, thanks to an extraordinary promotional video.
I can’t claim to have been the person who first found this online, though I might have been – it’s all so long ago, who knows? But what is in no doubt is just how amazing this fourteen minute epic is. Opening with deceptive zooming in and out as the essential Murat information is relayed by the curiously sullen and lisping narrator, it then slips into a strange sonambulistic style where the camera pans silently across various aisles at leisure, creating a somewhat hypnotic atmosphere that you are then occasionally jerked out of by jarring jump cuts and the random insertion of more moments of voice over. It’s quite an experience. I heartily recommend watching this with headphones on while you are feeling tired for the full disorienting effect of being shocked awake from your trance at random intervals.
Presumably, this was shot with the intention of being cut down to a shorter version, but oddly, only the long rough cut seems to be online. There is, however, an unofficial dance remix by Si Bennett that fans will want to check out.
