14/08/2024 - The director and the philosopher discuss their approaches to cinema, exploring the use of archival material, and the interplay between advertising and ideology

Radu Jude (left, © Locarno Film Festival) and Christian Ferencz-Flatz

Award-winning Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is at the Locarno Film Festival to unveil his two latest works, Eight Postcards from Utopia [+see also:
film review
interview: Radu Jude, Christian Ferenc…
film profile], which he co-directed with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, and Sleep #2 [+see also:
film review
interview: Radu Jude, Christian Ferenc…
film profile] (both screening out of competition). Cineuropa met up with both directors to talk about the experimental works.

Cineuropa: Eight Postcards from Utopia homes in on the intersection of history, advertising and ideology in post-socialist Romania. Why did you choose adverts?
Christian Ferencz-Flatz: Advertisements are very important for Romania's transition period, which stretches from the fall of the Ceausescu regime to the country’s accession to the European Union. On one hand, you can see a lot of what was happening during this period in the commercials, so it is documentary material of the finest quality. Ads are very keen readers of the zeitgeist. In order to work, they must know what buttons to push. They were very sensitive to what was happening in people’s minds. On the other hand, commercials were really historic perpetrators of what was going on in this period. They really transformed Romanian society in various ways. And using these materials regains access to some of the emotional energies.

Radu Jude: For me, it was about André Bazin’s question: “What is cinema?” We just had a talk with some young filmmakers and critics, and one of them asked me, "Why do you make films with images that weren’t originally made for cinema?" I think it is very important to enrich cinema and expand it. Cinema can incorporate all kinds of things and still remain cinema. That was the idea here: to reframe these images through montage and through [a particular] gaze. The titles of the chapters are also very important because they are a frame through which you can see the material in a new light.

When so many clips are juxtaposed, it often appears as a hyperbole of capitalism. Was that intentional?
CF-F: I’d say that’s more of a side effect, but it does make the film harder to read in all its layers. The best way to watch Eight Postcards from Utopia is perhaps to see it on a laptop. Seeing the film in the cinema does things, for sure – you see the footage on a larger scale and you notice the differences in image granularity, which speaks about the state of the archive and so on. But in order to access the deeper layers of the film, it is better to be able to slow down, pause and rewatch certain parts of the film.

Some commercials don’t have an ending, as you cut them off before the punchline.
RJ: Yes, in many cases, because the idea was to recontextualise them and to extract, if you like, the documentary elements or the elements that confirm the hypotheses of the titles. The materials are so heterogeneous in advertising that you have to make these choices. Otherwise, it would be chaos.

CF-F: There’s actually a sort of progression in how we intervened from the first to the last chapter. It wasn’t entirely intentional at first, but we began with a kind of respect for the material, assembling whole bits of advertisements in the earlier sections. The first chapter is focused on history, so it treats the ads more like documents, with a more traditional documentary approach. But as the film progresses, it becomes more playful and more fictitious. The interventions are more profound and more obvious.

Sleep #2 feels like a completely different experience. Did you work on these projects simultaneously?
RJ: All of my projects tend to overlap at some stage, but the most important phase for both – the editing – was done separately. They are being shown together here, and any time you see two things together, the brain finds connections. But there are festivals that will screen only one of them. The main connection between them is that both movies are montage films made from material not originally intended to be seen as cinema or as a work of art. Sleep #2 is a dialogue-homage with Andy Warhol and his cinema. But beyond that, the two films offer entirely different viewing experiences. Some people have found Sleep #2 boring, especially if they try to watch it with the same mindset as Eight Postcards from Utopia.

How did you find out about the Andy Warhol grave webcam?
RJ: I came across it in an article about Warhol and became fascinated. I started recording the webcam footage without any specific purpose, maybe just to make a short video joke. But over time, the idea grew and developed into a full film.

There’s something interesting about the fact that Eight Postcards from Utopia feels like a film, while Sleep #2 could easily be a gallery installation.
RJ: It’s difficult to answer that because what we used to call cinema and video art are overlapping much more nowadays. Both films have a beginning and an end, and I believe they need to be watched in their entirety to be fully understood. A loop in a museum would mean you could watch only one or two minutes.

CF-F: Actually, I think Eight Postcards from Utopia would also work on eight or nine separate screens in an exhibition space.