This article appeared in the August 23, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Eight Postcards from Utopia (Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, 2024)
A year ago at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival, I experienced a moment that felt like a scene from a film by Romanian satirist Radu Jude. At the closing ceremony, as Jude (the Special Jury Prize–winner for Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) and I (a festival juror) walked the red carpet with a small contingent of folks holding up a banner with the slogan of the Iranian women’s uprising—Woman, Life, Freedom—we were halted right in front of the enormous, alfresco Piazza Grande screen by photographers. While they snapped pictures of the mini-protest, the screen showed an advertisement for UBS, the Swiss bank that is a major partner of the festival and, as divestment campaigners across the world have recently highlighted, a major investor in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. It was a plea for life—in celebration of the Golden Leopard–winning film Critical Zone, by persecuted Iranian director Ali Ahmadzadeh—made in the face of profiteers of death.
Art and advertising are strange bedfellows, even when the ads are shilling something less repugnant than weapons of war. The former aspires, at least in principle, to expand our imagination; the latter works explicitly to close it off with a simple suggestion: “buy me.” In Jude’s films, advertisements are the mise en scène for dramas of power. Billboards, posters, and TV commercials crowd the visual field of present-day Bucharest in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), vividly capturing the feeling of navigating a neoliberal world that incessantly tempts, begs, and screams at us to consume. How things are produced, by whom, and at what costs—these realities are relegated to the margins of society, drowned out by the din of the ever-proliferating market. Yet Jude does not have a hallowed or moralistic view of art, particularly the cinema, as ontologically distinct from commercial endeavors. In Do Not Expect Too Much, a director of TV commercials notes that some of the very pioneers of cinema, Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers, got their start hawking products.
The movie business has always peddled desire and fantasy, which are also the currency of advertisements. Jude’s pair of new films, both of which premiered out of competition at this year’s Locarno, exhume the infrastructure of desire underlying moving images. The 71-minute-long Eight Postcards from Utopia, co-directed with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, traces themes and resonances—with the frenzy of a conspiracy theorist—across Romanian TV commercials from the 1990s, when the country’s formerly socialist economy underwent liberalization. Sleep #2—a tribute to Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1964), which loops shots of the pop icon’s slumbering lover, John Giorno, for five hours—assembles surveillance footage of Warhol’s grave near Pittsburgh. For 61 minutes, we patiently watch grainy, somewhat seedy video feed of the headstone, surrounded by Campbell’s soup cans and other commemorative paraphernalia, and visited by unwitting tourists, local fauna, and caretakers. Like with Sleep, we are watching the act of watching, and are forced to consider why we’re watching—what desires and curiosities keep us glued to an image that gives us so little by way of meaning or narrative? Sleep #2 inverts the effect of Eight Postcards, whose assaultive montage of endless products—banks, cars, shampoos, bras—pummels us with prefabricated desires, telling us what to want.
Advertisements are the collective unconscious of capitalism, tapping into our base impulses but also shaping them—and implanting new ones. For me, watching Eight Postcards brought on a flood of memories from my own childhood in the 1990s in India, where globalized, free-market capitalism arrived around the same time as it did in Romania, under the gun of International Monetary Fund–imposed liberalization. Until shortly before my birth in 1995, my parents had only one, state-run TV channel, and getting a phone line required a government application and a monthslong wait. But a few years later, I was born into a home where you could flip through satellite channels all day long, and watch Disney Channel shows broken up by commercials for Coca-Cola, Vicks, and Hyundai. More than any one product, these commercials seemed to sell the idea of choice itself, the glitz of abundant options at the tips of our fingers.
In Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez’s wry, autofictional Invention, which screened in the Filmmakers of the Present Competition, we meet the late, estranged father of protagonist “Carrie Fernandez” (Hernandez, riffing on herself) through infomercials, another ’90s TV fixture. An alternative doctor, Fernandez Sr. invented an experimental healing device that he hawked on late-night television before it was recalled. He has left Carrie the patent in his will, and in a series of sweet, oddball encounters, she meets his former associates, patients, and friends, seeking answers. Was he truthful, lying, or deluded about his invention? Did he believe what he told his prospective buyers? Did the device work? A daughter’s quest to understand her father takes the shape of a customer’s quest to decide whether to buy in—though Carrie gradually realizes that in the matter of parentage, there is no decision to make. Her father will always be her father, no matter his integrity or sanity, and the illusion of choice when you really have none is a cruel mirage.
In the retrospective section of the Locarno lineup, dedicated to Columbia Pictures’s output from the late 1920s to the late ’50s, George Cukor’s It Should Happen to You (1954) tapped into the dream life of a different era of capitalism and advertising. The comely Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) arrives in New York City during the post–World War II economic boom, eager to make a name for herself—and she finds a shortcut to doing so by paying an ad company for a giant billboard overlooking Columbus Circle, and getting her name painted on it. A soap mogul (Peter Lawford) covets her prime advertising real estate, and he offers to put her name on six billboards across the city in exchange for the original one. The gambit works—soon “Gladys Glover” inspires awe and mystery, and she has modeling offers and invitations to appear on TV shows. Like a proto–Kim Kardashian, she’s famous for being famous, much to the chagrin of her would-be lover, a documentary filmmaker played by Jack Lemmon. A name should stand for something, this purveyor of verité insists.
In a strange coincidence, I saw Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times) at Locarno a few hours after It Should Happen to You, and noticed in the credits a French production company named “Gladys Glover”—a love child of Holliday’s good-hearted self-promoter and Lemmon’s purist documentarian, perhaps? Last year, Wang premiered the three-and-a-half-hour Youth (Spring), the first installment of a monumental trilogy immersing us in the privately run garment workshops of Zhili, China, where twentysomethings from the countryside live and toil in cramped rooms to make children’s clothes. Where Spring inculcates us into the rabid rhythms of this backbreaking industry, Hard Times, which also runs nearly four hours, hones in on ruptures—workers’ (sometimes violent) conflicts with managers, their painstaking negotiations for better pay, the fears and precarities that keep them stuck in exploitative conditions. Like its predecessor, Hard Times had me blinking occasionally, unsure of whether there was an issue with the frame rate or the workers on screen were actually moving that fast, sewing zippers onto puffer jackets at lightning speed for two or three yen apiece.
A hallmark of Wang’s work is the discomfiting, shifting position in which he places the viewer. While watching Hard Times, I felt terribly helpless, hopeless, and sometimes angry at Wang for allowing us such intimate yet coolly distant access to misery; I also felt confided in, when subjects spoke directly to the camera about their lives. Like the early Soviet films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, which insisted on pulling back the veil of the market—showing, for instance, the exhaustive sequence of labor that turns a cow on a farm to a slab of beef in the hands of a consumer—Wang’s project reveals the monstrous production needed to sustain the ceaseless consumption promised by the ads overrunning our world. It stands in stark contrast to the commercials Jude and Ferencz-Flatz assemble so suggestively in Eight Postcards, which offer fantasies of process: intricate visualizations of shampoo particles with “patented technology” to blast away dandruff from magnified blades of hair. With Youth, Wang shows us how the things we buy are made—there are no magical transformations, no technical breakthroughs, just calloused hands working rough scraps of cloth.
#Sell #Locarno
