As found-footage enthusiasts go, Radu Jude is perhaps among the most omnivorous. Throughout his career, he has reappropriated 19th century lithographs, early 20th century photographs and Communist-era propaganda newsreels for his films. With Eight Postcards from Utopia, it’s the turn of modern-day TV commercials to go under the knife, as he and co-director/philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz offer a delirious critique of Romanian social mores with the help of the most blatantly manipulative form in modern mass media.
Well, Jude has got experience in this, as he cut his directorial teeth making TV commercials – a harrowing experience he has already adapted into film with his first feature, The Happiest Girl in the World, and his most recent, last year’s Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Eight Postcards from Utopia (Opt illustrate din lumea ideala) could be considered a reference film for the latter. Divided into eight chapters (and a brief epilogue) and running to just over 70 minutes, Jude and Ferencz-Flatz cut and splice their way through more than 370 TV commercials as they reveal the way distorted ideas about money, modernity, and masculinity were (and still are) communicated and reproduced in a society embracing both the virtues and vices of “freedom”.
Bowing out of competition in Locarno alongside Sleep #2, an hour-long piece comprising online live-cam footage of Andy Warhol’s grave through the seasons, Eight Postcards from Utopia is a mammoth technical undertaking, and a brilliant showcase for how montage works. While the documentary certainly merits its own berth on the festival circuit, it’s perhaps best served on a double-bill so as to provide viewers with the social context from which it (or the accompanying Jude feature) emerged.
The first and longest chapter of Eight Postcards is perhaps its strongest. Titled “History of the Romanians”, it offers a chronological account of Romanian history – Dacian-Roman gladiators, socialist-era orators, stock-market manipulators – as seen through the prism of TV commercials. But more fascinating is how Jude shows advertising copywriters play with even the most tragic chapters of their own history with impunity and wild abandon. Nothing seems to be off-limits: the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu makes an appearance in a cellphone ad; a newspaper beseeches readers for support by saying “Read before [we] go bankrupt”; parodies are made using stereotypical imagery of poor, the peasantry and the Roma.
Things get even more ludicrous as Jude zeroes into the public deification of the so-called free market with “Money Talks”. In the first segment of this chapter, in what looks like outtakes from a studio shoot of an advert, a preposterous, heavily-moustached man in a suit is seated in front of the camera, trying (and failing) to getting one simple line right: “We all strive to multiply your money”. This short and sweet visual anecdote is something that could have come straight out of Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World.
The third chapter, “The Technological Revolution”, brings forth the outlandish inventions and gadgetry being peddled to the masses. The title itself refers to an actor’s hyperbole about a hair-washing machine shaped like a helmet. “Magique mirage”, meanwhile, highlights the gaudy computer-generated visual effects used to dazzle Romanian viewers of the day. These are mere interludes leading up to “The Ages of Man”. Having already tackled something similar with the use of toys in the 2021 short film Plastic Semiotic, Jude chronicles the journey of man from birth to old age as shaped by the rules, demands and needs of TV advertising.
Well aware of how advertising plays on subliminal human desires, Jude goes from the political to the personal in the film’s final two chapters. Stripping his material of sounds and context, “The Anatomy of Consumption” is a collection of close-ups of the human body. Taken on their own and in slow-motion, even the most innocuous image of someone enjoying a steamy cup of coffee or trashing an apartment could be seen as overloaded with sensory stimulation. All those disembodied faces and fingers might as well be Jude’s nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman.
Godard’s spectre certainly hovers over the documentary’s final chapter. With “Masculin Feminin” – à la the late French cineaste’s 1966 film – Jude reveals the chauvinism which remains very much in place and in vogue in Romanian society (or society in general). Women are shown merely as objectified bodies in these commercials, and described as “delicate, seductive and easy to get”. It’s here that Jude pulls off a masterstroke by putting ads selling erotic services and shampoo side by side: give and take the level of bared flesh, the titillation on display is hardly that different. Plus ça change, then – until the animals could really take over the Earth, as shown by the images included in the epilogue titled “The Green Apocalypse”.
Directors, screenwriters: Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz
Producer: Alexandru Teodorescu
Executive director: Ana Maria Gheorghe
Editor: Catalin Cristutiu
Sound: Stefan Ruxandra
Production company: Saga Film
World sales: Heretic
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Fuori Concorso)
In Romanian
71 minutes
