The visceral impact of the soundtrack of the film Sirāt by Spanish director Oliver Laxe is striking. The film begins and the composer's sound texture immediately saturates the visual field. The viewer, first and foremost a listener, is stunned by the deafening volume of the sound system at a rave party. Reverberating off the arid cliffs of the Atlas Mountains, a mountain of loudspeakers convulses the dancers' bodies, the rhythm and bass pulsing through the crowd. It is difficult not to see an obscene superego materialising in the loudspeakers stacked on top of each other, spewing out rumbling bass into the vastness of the desert. This wall of sound sets the tone for the entire film. The dizzy partygoers dance, they pulse, they don't talk. They dance again. They dance in the morning, in the evening, at night, during the day. They tremble to the almost martial sound of the vibrant pulse of David Letellier's (alias Kangding Ray) electronic music, which provides the film's soundtrack.
Here, events do not make headlines, even the most terrible ones. The prosody of the language matters more than the dialogue, as the latter is rare and its content insignificant. The film's story matters less than the dazzling and disturbing resonance of the pulsating and hallucinatory techno soundtrack that accompanies the battered protagonists under the influence of psychedelics. As they speed along in their trucks to the rhythm of the road vibrations, we almost forget (as do they) why they set out in the first place. It is the jolting progress, like a kind of dizzying and heavy polyphony, that can be heard, rather than the plot of the story. This phonic film illustrates brilliantly, but not without horror, how social construction reduced to a community of a pseudo-brotherhood of pleasure-seeking ravers no longer veils the One who enjoys all alone. This life ruled by addiction then takes a truly apocalyptic turn, and the powerful auditory universe as a result becomes the sound of the feeling of emptiness and wandering. These sand travellers are "commanded by a surplus jouissance that presents itself in its most anxiety-provoking form,"1 which the director films in its sound materiality up until the unbearable of the burning dance.2
Here, there is no "there is no sexual relation,"3 only the sound of the abyss, which is neither desafinado nor afinado except in the body of each of these Ones-all-alone.
[1] Miller J.-A., A Fantasy, Conference given at the IV th Congress of the WAP, Comandatuba, Brazil. Available online: congresamp.com.
[2] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. R. Grigg, New York: Norton 2007, p. 72.
[3] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXV, Le Moment de conclure, lesson of 11 April 1978. Unpublished.
