Radu Jude presents two films at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The second one (about the first, here) is not so much a remake as a playful postscript to Andy Warhol’s work, built on the same creative principles: an acuity for both new and older forms of technology, attention to the social unconscious present in the image, and even a provocative indifference towards the viewer.

I’m more and more certain that to fully grasp the significance of Jude’s gesture in Sleep #2 – and especially to feel it in your gut beyond any rational understanding – you need to experience the film on a cinema screen. Watched on a laptop, its nature as a desktop movie risks being neutralised. Transferring these tortured pixels to a big screen is what allows the film to reveal itself in all its technical starkness, coupled with a rich conceptual depth. Just over an hour long, Sleep #2 is not quite a new Warholian endurance test, but like its predecessor, it, too, speaks of time (fluidity and live experience), of the world here and now, and of everything that transcends it. And it does so with an openness to the metaphysical that does not exclude an undercurrent of irony in every moment.

In Empire, an eight-hour film shot in only one night, Warhol endlessly focuses on the Empire State Building, managing, through this single device, to simultaneously film a gigantic phallus, a certain idea about modern society, and a symbol of America. In Sleep, he films a man sleeping for five hours in a similarly static position, and in doing so, he is, of course, recording death at work, live. Sleep #2 is equally open to interpretation. Over the course of a year, Jude recorded his desktop while accessing the live feed of a surveillance camera at Warhol’s grave in Pittsburgh. Many small things happen during these months: the film imposes a rhythm and a method, and by the end, it positively influences our perceptual abilities. After all, Sleep #2 is a series of micro-events, an infinitesimal art of the universe.

Sometimes, nothing happens on screen – but these moments are rare, as Jude includes ample footage featuring various visitors who either pay their respects at the grave, have a picnic, write in a notebook, or even moon the camera. Ultimately, extending Warhol’s insight of “15 minutes of fame”, the film clearly belongs to this historical moment where everything, everywhere, is already filmed, recorded, and surveilled, with a camera doing its job at every corner. At its core, Sleep #2 presents a classic situation of observation: beyond the inherent voyeurism of any CCTV – i.e. this relation where we, the viewers, watch from safety into the lives of strangers – there’s a sense that we are also being watched. The film is complex precisely because the people in the frame seem to be aware of the camera’s presence (and the microphone recording sound) and often act accordingly. The pilgrimage to the gravesite is then free to become both a personal spiritual act and a public performance, with the object of observation rebelling and reclaiming its power.

Sleep #2 presents a classic situation of observation: beyond the inherent voyeurism of any CCTV – i.e. this relation where we, the viewers, watch from safety into the lives of strangers – there’s a sense that we are also being watched. The film is complex precisely because the people in the frame seem to be aware of the camera’s presence (and the microphone recording sound) and often act accordingly.

At night, the human procession is replaced by an animal one. More than any of Jude’s previous films, Sleep #2 works with animal presence. When two deer approach the grave, it’s as if the place is being visited in both senses of the word: for a brief moment, Sleep #2 turns into a paranormal ghost movie. Other times, the movement is more random, but never anecdotal: squirrels and rabbits blend into the camera’s night vision, an amorphous grey paste, its abstraction betrayed only by these bright dots – the animals’ glowing eyes. The film is remarkable because it redraws the rules of visibility according to the limited possibilities of the camera, asking us to discern the figurative as best we can: a spot of colour, a disturbance of forms, etc.

The film gains in “seriality” – another Warholian concept – when we realise that Jude has organised it into seasons, each marked by a thematic haiku. The project proves permeable to any natural flow, having the intelligence to turn a spring blossom, an autumn sunset, or the first snowfall into true audiovisual events with which the camera must struggle, to invent on the spot a way to make them intelligible first to itself and then to us.

In fact, this is the key: as I said, moments when nothing happens are rare, because even when there’s no movement, the image continues to pulsate, to vibrate from within, and thus to change. By inviting us to watch this low-resolution output, which organises the world into coarse, almost geometric chunks of visibility, the film transforms this significant surface that is the image into a true form of relief. Even the poor-quality digital versions of the audiovisual – despised precisely for their lack of depth, like this camera meant to document the mundane rather than generate art – begin to outline a jerky landscape, an almost pointillist pattern that compares the pixels to the brushstrokes of the Impressionists.

The film gains in “seriality” – another Warholian concept – when we realise that Jude has organised it into seasons, each marked by a thematic haiku. The project proves permeable to any natural flow, having the intelligence to turn a spring blossom, an autumn sunset, or the first snowfall into true audiovisual events with which the camera must struggle, to invent on the spot a way to make them intelligible first to itself and then to us. Almost primitive in its depiction of the “spectacle of the world” and yet clearly belonging to a post-cinematic sensibility, this “hunted footage” – as experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov called it – revitalises our cinephile reflexes and shows us the somewhat masochistic pleasure of working with the limitations of technology. A film that goes against today’s marketable trends – always a higher, sharper resolution – aiming to rediscover, like Warhol, the raw force of the essential.

Victor Morozov

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