Jude's latest film premieres in Locarno a year after his triumphant 'Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World'. In this documentary, he collaborates with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz on a unique, revealing documentary.
Ada Solomon, defeated Alexandru Solomon and Radu Jude | Noaptea Albă a Filmului Românesc (@TVR3)
“Mad Men” did much to romanticize the art of the advertising agency, with many of the show’s most memorable scenes devoted to the creative and strategic genius that goes into successful sales. Not all advertising is so elaborate or expensively conceived, though as “Eight Postcards From Utopia” makes clear, even the most utilitarian or workmanlike ads have a cultural value of their own. Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s witty, chaotic documentary, edited entirely from a vast archive of post-revolutionary Romanian TV ads, chronicles the tumultuous 30-plus years of a country’s transition from socialism to capitalism — all via the ways in which everything from beer to detergent to banking is presented to the viewing public.
Ostensibly experimental in form but simple in concept, Eight Postcards From Utopia is presented as a “found-footage” film in the truest sense of the word—with these vintage advertisements, often set to grainy video footage, giving little sense of having been preserved with much care or consideration for future scrutiny. Together with Bucharest-based philosopher Ferencz-Flatz, who is currently working on a research project specifically devoted to post-socialist advertising, the firebrand auteur Jude takes a more rhetorically passive approach here than in his spikier fictional work. There’s no narration or secondary commentary to contextualize the clips, save for the nine chapter headings (the eight postcards of the title, plus an epilogue) that roughly divide this deluge of content into (often overlapping) thematic strands.
Viewers will have to parse for themselves the implications of how the filmmakers and Jude’s longtime editor Cătălin Cristuțiu have sequenced and stitched together these banal flashes from an ambitious past: some connections are obvious, others indirect, though there’s a consistent joy in figuring them out. That curiosity factor, plus a high degree of how-we-lived-then comedy in the selections themselves, should make the short, digestible “Eight Postcards” a favorite of festival programmers outside of Locarno. In terms of distribution, though, it might be better suited to specialized streaming platforms — not entirely out of place for a work that can feel like a very muddled dive down the YouTube rabbit hole. (The film was presented at Locarno as a double bill with Jude's "Sleep #2," a mesmerizing, hour-long observation of the year-round happenings at Andy Warhol's grave in Pittsburgh; the two are not formally related works, though they pair well as a dual reflection on the cycles of popular culture and nostalgia.)
