Ibiza: The Silent Movie

This audio­vi­su­al odyssey from direc­tor Julien Tem­ple offers a pot­ted his­to­ry of the tit­u­lar Span­ish island via the medi­um of EDM. Com­pris­ing an assort­ment of clips from old Hol­ly­wood epics, cut-price his­tor­i­cal reen­act­ment and buck­et-hat­fuls of emo­jis, Ibiza: The Silent Movie is a sort of Wiki-gleaned psy­cho­geog­ra­phy that attempts to get to the puls­ing heart of this idyl­lic Mediter­ranean locale.

Chart­ing the island’s trans­for­ma­tion from ancient port to club­bing mec­ca, the film con­dens­es rough­ly two-and-a-half thou­sand years of his­to­ry into a 90-minute mov­ing slideshow. Struc­tured chrono­log­i­cal­ly, it tells of the orig­i­nal Phoeni­cian set­tlers who named the island after their god of dance, and goes on to explain how it came to be occu­pied at var­i­ous times by the Romans, Dadaists, Nazis, Hip­pies and Fat Boy Slim. It’s all very edu­ca­tion­al, and not very exciting.

Tem­ple serves up a few inter­est­ing tid­bits, such as the fact that Ibiza’s nick­name, ​‘The White Isle’, stems from its nat­ur­al abun­dance of salt and not anoth­er sub­stance. He also namechecks sev­er­al of the island’s famous inhab­i­tants, from anti-Flat Earth­er Christo­pher Colum­bus to Marx­ist intel­lec­tu­al Wal­ter Ben­jamin to Sex Pis­tol Sid Vicious to Elmyr de Hory, the art forg­er extra­or­di­naire immor­talised in Orson Welles’ 1976 docu­d­ra­ma F for Fake.

At one point, pro­fes­sion­al par­ty­go­er and mara­cas mer­chant Bez per­forms a mock shaman­ic rit­u­al in a cave, eyes glar­ing and man­boobs sway­ing hyp­not­i­cal­ly as mis­cel­la­neous images of intox­i­cat­ed rev­el­ry are pro­ject­ed onto the walls around him. Oth­er than that, there’s very lit­tle in the way of sen­so­ry stim­u­la­tion here – hard to imag­ine this being anyone’s def­i­n­i­tion of a good time.