Radu Jude presents two films at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The first, made in collaboration with phenomenologist Christian Ferencz-Flatz, delves into Romanian commercials from the early post-communist transition years, searching for the seeds of who we are today.

Eight Postcards from Utopia comprises a series of cross-sections through a sample of Romanian commercials that filled our TV screens after the fall of Ceaușescu (the most recent example dates to Stefan Bănică Jr. announcing the arrival of 2013, while the oldest are from the early ’90s). Some sections are grouped by theme (the opening one focuses on Romanian history), others are formal (Magic Mirage features commercials with a “fantastic” element), and others discuss gender representation (Masculine Feminine shows the heteronormative line between roles, with men lifting weights and women doing laundry, or luring audiences with a sex hotline). The critical element is present in every chapter. In the most complex one, Anatomy of Consumption, the directors craft a minimal grammar of recurring acting gestures in advertising, from the longing gaze for an object to discarding it in favour of a new purchase. The loop is complete: the film cycles through the local social imaginary, from Burebista to outer space satellites, and from the baby swimming in amniotic fluid to the coffin.

The filmmakers’ intuition is sharp. Commercials constitute a kind of subconscious of the era. In terms of discourse, unlike art, they have the immense advantage of not hiding: with their content concentrated into a few seconds and absolutely frank, commercials are designed for selling and nothing else, as openly acknowledged. What would be impossible for a film to admit, even out of decency, a commercial can display in broad daylight. Hence the need for this creative gesture to playfully and purposefully hijack it. If money is the religion of the hour, if the brand is God, then advertising is a kind of bible. For Jude and Ferencz-Flatz, all the commercials included here possess, beyond their intrinsic falsehood (everything here is good and great) – in fact, it’s due to this falsehood – a form of truth: as long as the era is subject to consumerism, advertising is the best gateway into its core. Today’s and tomorrow’s researchers would do well to take note: despised and disposable (the lowest archive of all, broadly pornographic), these audiovisual forms contain within them pure contemporary sensibility. The ideology is very clear and transparent, there is no subtext or hidden meanings, it’s just a festival of socially and politically dominant discourses: one only has to look here – to take a deep breath and dive into this aggressive-consumerist blowout – to understand where we come from.

Like most of Jude’s films, Eight Postcards from Utopia is both anthropological and essayistic. The universe of advertising – with its black holes and supernovae of dazzling-stupid brilliance – becomes ever more clearly one of the main concerns of this great filmmaker. With one exception – where an actor undergoes not so much a humiliating as an absurd process of uttering a meaningless phrase to the point of nausea – this film is the reverse (or rather the front) of those titles, from The Happiest Girl in the World (2009) to Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), which plunged us into the behind-the-scenes of this traumatising activity, seen from the perspective of those involved in it. This is, then, the “world” – the result, the finished product: no wonder the film is so coherently connected to the previous efforts, so clearly has vulgarity asserted itself as the raw material of Jude’s cinema. Generally countered by the cinematic device of fiction, vulgarity is allowed here to parade in its original state, in a violent neoliberal delirium, only for the critical discourse to build on the quiet a conceptual counter-image through irony and montage.

How could we let this happen? And how do we avenge everything we see? The shock of watching these insightful pieces is real. Advertising has encapsulated its immediate time and swallowed destinies and years (see, for example, the thrill of discovering Doru Ana or Mihai Constantinescu in full fervour). With its ample selection – from commercials encouraging you, by simulating a sprint, to win in the “race for privatisation” to ads promising some windfall coming out of nowhere – the images pile up, speculating on inevitable emotions of nostalgia, wonder, and regret. Naivety was mentioned during the Q&A following the screening: indeed, the further we move from the present moment, the more hardcore the commercials become – at the same time freer, more fanciful, and more politically incorrect or even offensive, the expression of a world where everything was new, to be fiercely invented or reclaimed, in fast-forward mode. Not that things have settled down in the meantime: they’ve just been standardised according to Western norms, which makes the surprise of experiencing them not quite the same, while the “values” promoted remain just as questionable.

Of course, the commercials “suck”. Obviously, the excessive consumption they generated is problematic. We can kid ourselves by making an ideological critique from Marxist positions. However, the film’s merit lies in taking us beyond such reflexive reproaches, leading us to where the images themselves come to communicate and critique each other. Mixing bits and pieces of commercials, the film builds an alternate mega-universe – the real one, in fact – where everything is in plain sight and for sale. For every need, there is a solution, and it has a recognizable name. The film’s dystopian magic is unsettling. It uses the elasticity of the cinematic medium to serve us something evidently external but related: something that is not cinema but borrows its codes. Projected on the big screen, this displacement provokes a new shift in our perception, as it requires, albeit involuntarily, a specific cinematic gaze.

For commercials exist despite justified protests, and their presence has become so ingrained in our lives that we hardly notice them anymore. Instead of condemning them outright and dismissing them with superiority, the film modestly and productively asks us to pay close attention to them. Not out of cinephile fetishism – the petty joy of identifying a silent film parody here, a gangster film spoof there – but to test the limits of the system. How far does the analogy go? How much of cinema is in commercials and how much of commercials is in life? The inquiry in the film is not made for the sake of postmodern relativism or as a consequence of the invasion of cultural studies (“all objects are equally good”) – but because this confrontation of forms can reveal the sensitive cracks in our collective imagination, disrupting established cultural hierarchies. There is a pedagogical gesture to be found in Jude and Ferencz-Flatz’s initiative. It’s not so much about glorifying advertising as it is about playing with its potentialities, seeing in it a form of mad archaeology of recent times.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.