It took two artists with sonic audacity like Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) and Réka Csiszér (Bitter Moon) to dare add a soundtrack to Philippe Garrel’s film Le Révélateur, released in 1968. A black and white film, originally without dialogue and music, in which we follow a four-year-old child and his parents, without any real grounding or anchoring in reality. Situations without true coherence follow one another in dreamlike, intriguing, and even unsettling scenes and atmospheres. Sometimes, the parents run through a nocturnal forest. Then, the child plays with a doll pinned to the wall. Further on, the child moves through a dimly lit tunnel and heads towards his mother, who is naked. Etc. David Lynch before David Lynch, and even a bit more.
Moumneh and Csiszér construct sound nebulae through synthetic and acoustic manipulations. Exotic voices, electronic and ethereal timbral clouds, rebab, buzuk, cello (for the physical instruments), the musical additions of the Montreal duo “fit” perfectly with the completely strange images of the film. Better yet, they bring a kind of welcome holistic coherence to the overall picture, a soul that was waiting to be revealed.
That said, to fully enjoy the proposed symbiosis, one would need the chance to see the film with the music. I only had the opportunity to watch the film in streaming and then listen to the album. I tried to overlay the two, but the precise timing of the sound segments in relation to the visual scenes is not indicated. What is the artists’ intention? Maybe there is no desire for union between the two? Nevertheless, the concept would be very interesting.
In the meantime, let’s celebrate a hyper-niche but authentically exploratory, and deeply creative release for the label Asadun Alay.
