Soap opera: Michael Nyman composes score for washing machine film - The Guardian

It is either taking slow cinema to the next level or is a PR spin too far: a London cinema will next week screen a 66-minute film of a 40-degree wash cycle, complete with score by Michael Nyman.

Washing Machine – The Movie is a single shot of the full wash, rinse and spin cycle of a Samsung QuickDrive.

It will be accompanied by music by Nyman, best known for his scores of Peter Greenaway films including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and The Draughtsman’s Contract; and the Jane Campion film The Piano.

Nyman has taken the commission seriously, although he admitted it was the “the most unusual, bonkers and challenging request I have had in many years”.

He added: “The idea of this intrigued me … putting a score to something so visually repetitive and prosaic. As a film composer you are frequently taking a cue from the drama on screen or interpreting it sonically, but here the challenge was to offset the mundanity and also enhance the hypnotic appeal.

“I have written a lot of music to manufacturing processes, but this is the most elaborate mechanical, mechanistic film I’ve been involved with. I’m interested in the mechanical process, the way that I create musical cycles which are based on repetition and variation and the correlation between that music and what happens in a washing machine process.

“I really want the music to be heard and I want the music to be loud, so I think with this project it’s man over machine.”

He said it was significant that the work came 300 years after the 1717 premiere of Handel’s Water Music, “so in some ways we have come full circle”.

The film will premiere at the Cineworld cinema in Leicester Square, central London, on 5 December. After that it will be available – to washing fans and anyone having a quiet week – on YouTube.

The movie concept comes after a three-minute and 20-second advert of the Samsung machine wash cycle filled the complete ad break of Channel 4’s Gogglebox on 24 November.

It is clearly a publicity stunt for Samsung but, it can be argued, a good one. And it does tap in to a desire for slower, more mundane thrills with slow television – whether a train journey through Norway or birds singing in Devon – having many fans.

The film is not the the first artistic response to the wonders of the washing machine. Kate Bush, of course, perfectly summed up the sensuality of laundry on her album Aerial (as opposed to Ariel) in the song Miss Bartolozzi.

“And all your shirts and jeans and things,” Bush sings plaintively. “And put them in the new … washing machine. Washing machine. Wash Ing Ma Chine!”

Nyman also pointed out that Ed Sheeran had this year sung about his bedsheets and two One Direction members – Liam Payne and Niall Horan – had referenced the topic. “Laundry may well be the ‘new rock and roll!’”

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