The Erotic Grammar of Silence: Music, Language, and Orgasm

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It Is Only Sound That Remains

Farid Ghadami

Ali Farahmand’s latest cinematic work, It Is Only Sound That Remains, has recently been selected for the Beijing Film Festival, marking its international debut. But the occasion of the festival is only a pretext for a deeper conversation. This remarkable film deserves attention not because it made it into a festival lineup, but because it signals a shift in the grammar of modern Iranian cinema; perhaps even world cinema. I was fortunate to see this hauntingly beautiful film last summer, and the experience has stayed with me ever since.

The film begins not with a traditional scene, but with a solemn epigraph:

“For years those who play and those who hear all have been burned in the fire. Music has left the world and people have had nothing to say. Language has been forgotten and people have turned to silence. The bodies have become emaciated and no longer accept food. Instinct has died. Everyone follows a musical note to survive. People live only by imagining music and closing their eyes. Close your eyes.”

This poetic preamble immediately sets the tone for a cinematic meditation that is as much philosophical as it is visual. We’re not told who is speaking. Is it the director? The film itself? A godlike narrator? A tyrannical force responsible for this apocalyptic condition? The ambiguity is deliberate. The final sentence (“Close your eyes”) is particularly striking. If the viewer obeys, they can no longer watch the film. So who is really being addressed? The answer reveals the film’s philosophical core. Perhaps it is a dark, omnipresent power within the film’s universe telling its inhabitants to turn away, to reject perception, imagination, and ultimately, resistance.

What follows is a series of carefully composed, dialogue-free scenes that defy conventional cinematic storytelling. The first image is of a young woman, eyes closed, immersed in a sound we, as the audience, can hear. This woman appears to be imagining music, or more accurately, living within it. She is not just listening: she is embodying music in a world where music has been officially extinguished. Soon we see her caring for her elderly parents, who are fed through IV tubes, suspended in a state of vegetative silence. The visual metaphor is powerful: with the disappearance of music, not only has language died, but the very instinct to live has withered.

This is where Farahmand delivers his most radical idea: that language is fundamentally musical. In this film, the absence of music leads directly to the collapse of language, not because music is simply a cultural product, but because music is what makes human connection possible in the first place. Language is not, as we often assume, a system for transmitting information. Rather, it is a space for relational presence, for resonance between bodies. In It Is Only Sound That Remains, the disappearance of music is the disappearance of humanity’s ability to exist together. Without this musical dimension, words become inert, bodies become fragile, and the world becomes uninhabitable.

Farahmand’s boldest formal decision is to make a silent film, not silent in the sense of early cinema, but entirely without dialogue. This is not a nostalgic gimmick or an aesthetic flourish. It is a deliberate refusal of representational language. Cinema and ideology share a deep-rooted desire to represent, to simulate, to recreate a "real" that can be controlled or understood. By eliminating even the smallest bit of dialogue, Farahmand makes a powerful political statement: he rejects the idea of cinema as a mirror to reality. Instead, he seeks to create an entirely new world, one that cannot be represented because it has never existed before. And what is this new world?

It is a world where sound is not just auditory, but existential. The film’s title, It Is Only Sound That Remains, is not metaphorical. It is ontological. In this world, sound is not simply organized music, not a composed melody, not an artistic object. It is what remains when everything else has been stripped away. Those familiar with the work of Edgard Varèse will immediately recognize the philosophical underpinning here. Varèse famously defined music as "organized sound." Farahmand seems to go further: if music is the last trace of life, then sound is the raw material of being itself.

This line of thinking culminates in a brief but unforgettable scene: the protagonist softly places her hand on the piano keys in a gesture that subtly evokes masturbation. In that intimate moment, the film reveals its hidden key: the enigmatic link between music and orgasm. The sensuality of sound, its bodily resonance, reveals itself. And here, Farahmand’s film can be read as an eerie reply to J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash, which explored the dark fusion of technology, speed, and eroticism. Where Ballard portrayed orgasm as a byproduct of mechanical collisions, Farahmand reclaims it as an act of creation through musical resonance. In a world of silence and decay, the erotic power of sound becomes a revolutionary force.

What makes It Is Only Sound That Remains so compelling is that it is not merely a dystopian allegory or philosophical experiment. It is also a deeply emotional film. The care between the daughter and her parents, the fragile beauty of imagined music, the sheer weight of silence: it all creates a haunting emotional texture that words cannot convey. That, too, is part of the film’s genius. It embodies what it argues. It does not tell us that music is life. It shows us what life becomes when music is gone. In a time when so much of global cinema is obsessed with plot twists, high-stakes drama, or political signaling, Farahmand has offered something far more radical: a cinematic experience that asks us to feel the absence of sound, to see the silence, and to recognize in that void the essential role that music (and by extension, connection) plays in our humanity. So yes, It Is Only Sound That Remains may have premiered at the Beijing Film Festival, but its true significance lies far beyond the red carpet. This is not just a film. It is a quiet rebellion against the spectacle of representation.