RETROSPECTIVE: Radu Jude

Could we put the selections of shorts directed or written by Radu Jude onto a common denominator? Is the director's style–at least certain parts of it–recognisable enough? Could we select one element as the most representative, one that makes us say “Hey, that's Jude!?” Daring to push this further, could we narrow down the whole selection to a single image?

Cameraderie of perspectives

Not to flap about with high-flown references, but in this instance, that would unquestionably be the “time-image” of Romania. A quote from The Memoirs of Colonel Lăcusteanu. We only see a page with director’s notes from which the actor Serban Pavlu is reading about colonel’s arrests during the 1848 revolution in Wallachia and Moldova. Our eyes dart between letters and sentences on yellowed paper, while our ears catch the sounds of Armenians being beaten up with blunt sides of the swords. It is said Armenians would warn their children, “You better behave or Lăcusteanu is going to get you.” Reminiscing about the award that had been promised to him for swift arrests, the colonel thinks, “God knows I had no ill intentions.” Merely this in a film that shares a slightly changed title with Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In actuality, the above is only its first part. In the second, there is utter silence and personal photographs of a policeman’s life between 1950 and 1980: a uniform on the doorstep, among friends, accompanied by accordion and other instruments, walking a dog, even holding a baby. “Power on the level of microphysics and actual physical praxis.”

Radu Jude as a punch right into our third eye. All roads lead to Romania–not Rome–(Raw)Mania! Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf: gulping from teat to teat… from a dangerous neighbourhood to… A (film) cut in between. A cut into zoophilia, even bestiality, both of which we have in sight as unavoidable parts of humanity.

In the Morning from 2007: a taxi is waiting for a customer, while we basically “suck on the exhaust pipe”. The left and right scope of the passenger seat’s static camera reaches only to the back seats and through the windshield. A rabid she-wolf? “Can I help you,” asks the taxi driver repeatedly of his customer, whose cleavage disturbs his “gearstick”. Is he bothered by the accident written all over her body or really just her curves? She can’t come out with what is wrong… “Do you know this? An artificial lake… Ceausescu had it made in the shape of Romania.” The film drives on. A stop (ordered by the driver’s mother) at a kiosk that sells everything–from a needle to the Lumiere brothers’ locomotive–where Jude again (vulgarly) serves up sexuality… A kiosk owner runs to the car, gawks at the back seats, and thoroughly ogles the girl/woman/cleavage–explaining to the taxi driver that he might jerk off later. The end of In the Morning is marked by the following quote: “Cancer is a body angry at itself.” The question arises as to what is a camera in relation to this cancerous quote. Perhaps an embodied “cameraderie” of perspectives?

Cut to Alexandra (2006), a film that opens with the golden arches of McDonald’s, Vodafone, Glamour, and other names and logos of famous brands, as well as sucking on an exhaust pipe, which also stars as one of the leads in Jude’s full-featured road movie Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023).

“How did the first people know that water is called water,” Alexandra asks. Dad turns to Romans for help. Romania becomes Rome, and it’s all a child’s play. We are talking about Papa Smurf, Micky Mouse, and all the plushies of the world gathered inside Alexandra’s room. Her dad is angry because she called him by his name when they last saw each other and is worried that her stepdad might soon lose the “step”. He blames Alexandra’s mother for that and takes it out on her dress–with a screwdriver!

Alexandra’s room offers a great cue for thoughts on Jude’s aesthetics. On the one hand, we are faced with living rooms, fully crammed with kitsch that overflows, along with all the bodily fluids, onto the trashy Romanian streets, and on the other hand, with poetic landscapes with no end… This endless duration might have something to do with the long years of dictatorship… If only people could escape to… Cut!
In The Potemkinists (2022) Jude “samples” the black and white Eisenstein and dips it in colour. He proclaims the end of the Potemkin as a lie and propaganda bullshit–Russian sailors were rescued by Romania–and with the famous sequence of the Odessa stairs, he just about installs the greatest martyr among them, Vakulenchuk, onto one of the monumental Ceausescu statues.

For the grand finale, Plastic Semiotic (2021), the Romanian Robot Chicken… The science of signs filmed with toys, which have never before been so cinematic. Jude saves these images from being cliché with cuts and constant shifts. From dinosaurs to Gregor Samsa. Barbie and Oppenheimer two years ahead of their time. Bucharest instead of Rossellini’s Open City, squashed into the surface of humour. Apocalypse Now, yes, but what about tomorrow? Seeing a close-up of a Lego soldier with a bazooka, we wonder when the Simpsons’ yellow smiley faces were replaced by war scowls. Fuckk, yuckk, FeKK!

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Anže Okorn

programme curator: Peter Cerovšek