Radu Jude Returns with Provocative, Amusing Eight Postcards from Utopia and Sleep #2

A yr since Do Not Count on Too A lot from the Finish of the World amused us so, Radu Jude has now unveiled two new experimental found-footage movies in Locarno. And true to his present media and mass–tradition pursuits, they respectively concern junky Romanian broadcast tv, and a splotchy, low-resolution livestream of a cemetery website. Entitled Eight Postcards from Utopia and Sleep #2, you can say one is his nostalgic YouTube supercut film, the opposite his The Shrouds. 

They’re each fairly sturdy: satisfying additions to his corpus, not redundant facet initiatives. They’re separate and self-contained works that complement one another: definable as compilations of discovered materials, sure, however which keep on with rigorous formal guardrails earlier than deconstructing these very boundaries. Locarno’s premiere screening exhibited Postcard adopted by Sleep; future shows may nicely mimic that, but it might even be incorrect to understand them as one full movie sundered in two. 

If Eight Postcards from Utopia is undoubtedly a compilation-essay, it’s an unusually crowd-pleasing one. Co-directed with thinker Christian Ferencz-Flatz, it surveys Romanian-produced TV commercials from the nation’s post-Ceaușescu period as much as the current day, the discovered materials first introduced unadorned and unabridged earlier than Jude begins to hauntologically alter and manipulate them à la passages of Do Not Count on. Shilling telecom offers, confectionary, and grooming merchandise, they’re full of life and usually artistic in and of themselves––Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim would love the bombastic, lo-fi graphics––however Jude and Ferencz-Flatz are extra involved with their latent references and directions in direction of ideological change, referencing the nation’s onerous ’90s flip from a deliberate economic system in favor of free-market and Western-consumer values. 

No query: the takeaways can’t keep away from a sure obviousness, and the prescriptions of John Berger and semiotic concept concerning our visible tradition have turn out to be acquired knowledge; we all know we’re being bought to, conscious that an commercial for a product is definitely one for a lifestyle. Having labored for a artistic company answerable for producing spots like these, with some a part of his personal portfolio, Jude is aware of he’s complicit in wreaking this unsatisfactory various to the nation’s also-troubled previous. Divided into brief, thematically related chapters (“History of the Romanians,” “The Ages of Man”), these Postcards are dreamy dispatches from someplace solely present in our covetous creativeness––a utopia.  

Sleep #2

The 2 movies additionally map a tough divide between artwork and commerce, Sleep #2 within the former case. A faraway transmission from a a memorial website convincingly rethought as an artwork set up, right here Jude (working and enhancing it by himself) cuts “highlights” from what’s described as a “live cam” [sic] of Andy Warhol’s Pittsburgh gravesite, and exhibiting his working, he even offers the URL in onscreen textual content previous to the primary shot (https://www.warhol.org/andy-warhols-life/figment/). While Postcards’ mode is acquainted from many latest docs and the likes of Adam Curtis, issues of loss of life tourism, and even atrocity tourism, really feel extra pertinent. We do behave self-consciously (and some are willingly disrespectful) in these environments, and spanning a whole yr, proven by the US East Coast climate situations, we glimpse a bizarre stock of human conduct. 

Simply over an hour lengthy, Sleep #2 is likely one of the most demanding and static options I’ve seen shortly, with darkened, theatrical viewing situations an crucial. And the previous crucial noticed that it’s “more rewarding to think about than watch” additionally wandered into my thoughts, however typically you have to play by the ache, to let the influence and outcomes the movie seeks bloom in your head. It’s directly an apt homage to Warhol’s personal conceptually pure, lovely, and minimal options––particularly Empire and the unique Sleep, single and fantastically nonetheless compositions difficult by gradual alterations––while additionally creating an unique, self-reflexive art work, reborn on his stays like newly grown flora. 

Eight Postcards from Utopia and Sleep #2 debuted on the 2024 Locarno Movie Pageant.