“Eight Postcards from Utopia,” co-directed by Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz, is a 71-minute long montage of Romanian television commercials. Broken into eight parts with titles like “Money Talks,” “Found Poetry,” and “Masculine/Feminine” (an obvious nod to Jean-Luc Godard) the commercials are situated in the edit with varying intentions. Sometimes it’s simply hilarious to look at the kitschy ads promoting Pepsi, photocopiers, the lottery, hamburgers and more. At one point ABBA’s The Winner Takes it All provides the soundtrack to a toothpaste commercial. Jude even includes clips of sex hotlines, just to give you a full range of everything that could’ve been hitting tv at every hour of the day. These commercials, despite their clunky acting and obvious low budget, however, aren’t too dissimilar in their intent from commercials seen in any other country.
These ads sell by doing one of two things: by telling you you’ll have a crummy life without this product or by showing you how you can become rich. The latter, if one believes what they see on television, can be had by government-backed investments, banks, and loans. Some of these ads, such as one promoting Mass Privatization—a program during the 1990s where vouchers were distributed to citizens to be invested in state-owned assets—demonstrates the financial pain felt by the country following the fall of the Soviet Union and the country’s desire for the populace to look to the state for solutions even while selling a false sense of individuality.
Jude and Ferencz-Flatz are playful with form. At one point, during a part entitled “The Anatomy of Consumption,” the film goes silent and we’re left to watch the pure images of buying, selling, craving and demanding that is ultimately a corrupting force. It’s an example of how Jude is able to swerve when others expect him to repeat, making “Eight Postcards from Utopia” a mischievous piece of cultural criticism.
Speaking of never repeating, “Sleep #2,” which Jude directed solo, is equally as surprising. In every sense it has a simple set-up: Jude has a camera positioned to look at Andy Warhol’s grave, which rests at the artist’s family plot in Bethel Park just outside of Pittsburgh. It’s a static shot (Jude never cuts to a secondary camera) that is purely observational in a way that it almost dares the viewer to create a kind of order or narrative to the disconnected images of visitors to Warhol’s resting place.