Radu Jude won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. We sat down with him to discuss the film, and his career-long interest in how history shapes contemporary life.
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In their recent retrospective on Radu Jude — Presenting Histories, Confronting Fascism — the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) simply declared him “the most daring and important filmmaker to have emerged in Europe over the past decade, the heir to the probing, confrontational cinema of Godard and the late ‘60s new wave.’ It’s a bold declaration that leaves little room for other filmmakers, but it’s hard to argue against their conviction in his importance.
The Romanian director has made ten feature films and twelve short films since 2006, which is an impressive number for even the most prolific of filmmakers. Jude’s immense productivity does not come at the expense of quality; rather, the intensity with which he produces such such a high volume of work seems to indicate the ferocity of his creative passion to turn out such distinct projects in such rapid succession.
To confine Jude to a single genre or style is a reductive if not impossible task: he went from the western aesthetics of Aferim! (2015) to the clinical precision of Scarred Hearts (2016) with ease. In 2017, he made the documentary feature The Dead Nation, which he followed up with the brilliantly titled, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), a film about an artist’s reconstruction of a dark part of Romania’s history. With his most recent feature film, the pandemic-set comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), he won the Golden Bear at the 71st Berlin International Film Festival.
Jude suggests that he does not have a method of filmmaking — that he is not capable of having one — yet, when you sit down with any of his work, it is possible to identify the man behind it through his various thematic obsessions and formal sensibilities. His clever way to adapt dense philosophical or theoretical material into audiovisual art, for one, but also his more general structures and ideas is certainly a signature, if not a method.
This is not to suggest that any of his work is repetitive or unoriginal in the context of his oeuvre, but rather, that there are certain preoccupations and approaches to cinema that are distinctly Jude-ian. First and foremost, there is his clear love for theory, whether it is the historicism of Walter Benjamin in Barbarians, the aesthetic evaluations of the same writer and Siegfried Kraucer in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Eisenstein’s canonical work on cinema, or the philosophical ideas of too many to mention.
Jude is, of course, not the only filmmaker to be inspired by thinkers like Benjamin or Kracauer or Eisenstein, but he employs them in a very direct manner. Barbarians is filled with direct quotes; for instance, he dedicates four minutes to an Isak Babel story, recited in an uninterrupted take by actress Ioana Iacob. Iacob, and others in the same cast, also quote writers like Cioran and Heidegger throughout. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’s second part, “Short dictionary of anecdotes, signs, and wonders,” is also full of citations and quotes, from various thinkers and historical figures.
Jude’s films are dense in theory, but that never obfuscates their cinematic ingenuity or charm. He is a playful filmmaker, and this shines through in his projects. While most of his films deal with dark moments in Romania’s history — with notable exceptions like his early short The Tube with a Hat (2006) or Everybody in Our Family (2012) — his films never lack humour. This dialectical approach to historicism is made abundantly clear in the aforementioned “short dictionary of anecdotes” from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, where the film oscillates between fearless historical confrontations and satirical observations on modern consumerism.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is set in contemporary Romania, with the Covid-19 pandemic at full force. The film, told in three distinct parts, follows Emilia (Katia Pascariu), a schoolteacher who has been called in for a parent-teacher meeting because of a leaked sex tape that she and her partner filmed together.
The first part follows Emilia as she makes her way through the streets of Bucharest; the camera is almost documentarian in its professional distance. As she walks through crowded plazas, pharmacies, and bookstores, we get a glimpse of Bucharest in the immediate aftermath of the first lockdown. People walk around with masks around their necks or hanging from their bags, or they take them off to talk to people in confined spaces. The film is not directly about the pandemic — although Jude had a very clear idea about why he didn’t want to erase it from the film. But it is one of the few films in the Covid-19 era that uses masks, etc., to brilliant effect.
More of a video essay than a conventional narrative, the second part of the film sees Jude explore a series of topics and ideas in montage form. It covers a wide range of topics, some explicitly tied to the overall narrative and some seemingly random. It’s an exercise in dialectics: jumping from “Military,” which shows archival footage of a military parade accompanied by a text that links the Romanian military to the repression of civilians; to “Blonde jokes,” which sees a nudist blonde woman in a green screen studio (with the set dressing of a beach) being chased by a man with a bull mask. Jude talks about the dialectical nature of this montage below and also relates it to TikTok.
The third and final part takes us back to Emilia and her story. She’s arrived at the school, where the parents of the school’s children await to pass judgment. Unlike the first part, this is almost entirely rooted in dialogue and direct conflict, as Emilia states her case to the unsympathetic and judgemental mob.
In this conversation, Jude talks about the creative process of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, what it was like to make a feature film during a global pandemic, and reflects on his career and inspirations.
Seventh Row (7R): The three-part structure Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn allows you to play around with form. How did you conceive of that structure?
Radu Jude: It was not a decision taken from the start. It was based on many changes that this project suffered until it finally became a film. The first idea was to make it a straightforward film, with a traditional form [and structure]. Little by little, I discovered that what’s interesting [about this project] is not the story itself, which is a trivial, tabloid-like story with the woman and the sex tape. What’s more important is what’s behind the story: how this small event connects with society and other values, and how this small story is right at the crossroads of many, many problems of our [contemporary] societies. Like issues of morality, the definition of obscenity, and what becomes of rights in the digital world where everything is fuzzier and more complex; things related to cancel culture and to education. All these things get together in this small story, although it might seem like a superficial story.
One day, I was in Paris working on the post-production of I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians. While I was there, I went to an exhibition of Cubist art, and suddenly, I had the idea for the film — not during the exhibition, but back home. I wondered, what would it be like to make a film with the structure, mutatis mutandis of course, of a cubist painting? To have different parts and have the viewer put them together to create a representation of something. Little by little, this idea found its shape in this three-part structure.
7R: In part one, in which Emilia walks around in Bucharest, I found it really fascinating how the camera had an almost observational gaze. It stopped, sometimes, just to observe monuments and places and people. The way I’ve perceived your movies is that you are very fascinated with historicism, in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, and you try to frame that in a Romanian contemporary context. Could you talk about this?
Radu Jude: You mentioned Walter Benjamin, and of course, mentioned in the title of this part is One Way Street, a book by Benjamin. He wrote the book using the street as a metaphor for a book, so I thought, what if I take Benjamin’s book literally, and get back to the street and transform it into a street again?
Of course, he is a big influence, not only because of his concept of history, and his insistence on the connection between past and present, but also because Benjamin is someone who was extremely attentive and extremely careful. He looked with great attention at every single small detail around him, like what’s happening in a street. He wrote texts about cartoons, radio shows, toys, and all kinds of things like that. So yes, there is an influence here, and maybe a sociological impulse, if I can call it that. A kind of question: if we look at the surface of things, in this case, a small line in the city — that of a street — can we see something deeper? More hidden, somehow?
We had the character that the actress plays, but then we shot without preparation for most of these scenes. If we shoot something like that, without preparation, do we have access [beyond the] surface that the camera watches? Can we see something which is hidden, which is deep? It’s like looking into water, in a way. You see the reflection in the water, but if you look on a sunny day, you can see the depth of the water.
Many people called it an observational documentary, which is, of course, true for the way that part one was shot, but the way the camera connects things makes it a kind of montage film because it forces the viewers to make these connections. And these connections, in some cases, mean something very specific and very obviously connected to the story. But in many cases, they are quite opaque: the interpretation belongs to everybody. Everybody can find his or her own meaning.
7R: I wanted to ask about the practicality of shooting this during COVID. Was it a big crew, and what was it like shooting like this in public?
Radu Jude: We shot the first part on 35mm film, which means that you cannot have a very small crew because you need the focus puller, the loader of the film stock, and so on and so forth. So it wasn’t that small, but it was much smaller than regular film productions. We didn’t block the street. We didn’t block the sidewalks. Everything was open. We were just four or five people around the camera and that was all.
7R: What was that like? It feels very different from the last part, which is set in a very small location.
Radu Jude: The difficult thing was that, to make a film like that, you need a permit from the mayor’s office, and we didn’t have it in the beginning. So, we shot illegally, so to speak, for half of that part of the film. In the end, they gave us permission — but it was too late anyway.
I think it was two or three months after the first lockdown, so people and institutions were still very reluctant to let film crews do anything. For instance, the location of the school was extremely difficult to get, because all the schools said, “We cannot let you do anything because this is the law now.” I said, “Okay, we cannot have a school, high school, or a university. Let’s get some other place, like a factory, that can resemble a school.” And it was almost impossible. It was really, really complicated. We were very lucky, in the end, that I personally spoke with a guy from the Polytechnic University and explained to him what we wanted to do and how careful we would be with the COVID protocols. In the end, he gave me permission. I think it’s easier now because the situation somehow gets normalized. Now it’s easier to do it, but immediately after the lockdown, everybody said, “No, no, no, no.”
7R: Was this a movie you conceived of before the pandemic?
Radu Jude: It was conceived before [the pandemic]. As I said, it took a long time to do this film. Previously to this, I made some films about history, so I wanted to make something very contemporary. But in a way, I stayed in my ‘method’ [with Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, as well]. I don’t have a method, but let’s use this term.
The attention that we have for details when we speak about history is much bigger than the attention that we have for details in our everyday lives. When you research a historical film or a film which deals with some historical events, everything you find might be important: the name of a song or a specific costume. When you find it, it’s like a victory. But today, we don’t pay attention like that.
I thought that I would like to make a film about contemporary times using the gaze of somebody who makes a historical film. All the details should somehow be telling us something, like when you go to Pompeii or some ancient site, suddenly, every stone is extremely important. And every painting and every sculpture is important, because we don’t have many details from that time and each detail gives us a clue about how that time was.
When COVID started, I said to my producer and to our crew that it’s no problem. It’s just part of the contemporary life of when we made the film, and we must somehow accept it in the film and make use of it; not hide it. I’ve seen a lot of contemporary films, and I’m not speaking about genre films or historical movies, but films about contemporary issues, shot in the pandemic where the pandemic is wiped out completely. I’m always amazed. It’s probably because they are afraid to show people with masks, because the acting isn’t as visible, and maybe it’s because you don’t want the viewers to think about sickness or the virus all the time. But still, it’s been part of our life for two years already, and I don’t see how I can take it out of a film about contemporary issues.
7R: As you mentioned with the masks, I think that has become part of the costume design of the movie, because you can tell a lot about the characters from what type of mask they use or if they don’t wear a mask at all. What did you want to say about the characters through their masks?
Radu Jude: It’s very simple, because like every piece of clothing, it says something about the personality of the one who wears it. Especially when something new appears, suddenly, the symbolism is even bigger, I think. For instance, a t-shirt doesn’t mean that much anymore, [or rather] now, it means too many things; it doesn’t have any real symbolism now. Although, when you see Mark Zuckerberg with a t-shirt, it means something. But one or two months after [the pandemic started], the use of masks was becoming more and more imposed, and suddenly, different models appeared with messages and so on.
When we did the film, it was only two months after the end of the lockdown, and I collected [many masks with different designs] with the costume designer [Ciresica Cuciuc]. We looked at all the masks available in Romania and made a selection from those. But of course, now there are many more models. You have an infinite amount. But those were the models that were available at that time, in August 2020. And like all the other details in the film, they’re important. It’s like the anthropology of the mask.
I gave one of the reactionary characters in the film, the priest, a mask that says, ‘I can’t breathe,’ which was, of course, related to the murder of George Floyd. I saw these masks used not only by people who wanted to honor the memory of George Floyd but also by people protesting lockdown measures. So, suddenly, this message, which was very specific, became used in an opposite way.
And now, after one year, I had some Q&A sessions with some people, and, especially in this part of the world [Europe], nobody remembers this message very clearly: it’s already losing the meaning that it originally had. I think it’s interesting to notice these kinds of details. The film is conserving these details, and I think it will be interesting to see how someone ten or twenty years from now will react [to these details].
7R: I wanted to ask about the opening sequence with the sex tape that is at the centre of the story. Was that always how you wanted to open the film, and can you talk a bit about how you go about shooting such an intimate scene?
Radu Jude: I cannot say I always wanted to open the film like that because it will be like accepting that I’m a dirty old guy. No, the truth is that I never knew that we would open the film like that; it wasn’t supposed to be like that.
At some point, I realised that the film is about that. There is a judgment around this video, so in order to have an opinion about something, you have to know what it is. In order to judge an image, you have to see it; in order to judge a film, you have to see it; in order to judge this video, you have to see it.
So, I said, well, I will let the viewers watch it. In this way, they can have a judgment of their own: for the film or the teacher, or against it, it doesn’t matter, but to have an opinion on it. And then, of course, it’s a little bit perversely done because it puts the viewers in the exact same position as the parents in the third part. There’s a bit of voyeurism in that, of course.
Regarding the shooting, it wasn’t that complicated. I was very much afraid of this scene. We did it one month before the pandemic started. We did it early because I wanted to be sure I had this scene and to be able to organise the script around the scene. It was quite complicated to organise it logistically, because, of course, we are not porn producers or filmmakers, so we had to find a porn actor to play the husband. The actress, Katia Pascariu, was very brave and open; she didn’t have any problems. For the penetration scene, it was a double.
Katia works a lot in independent, underground political theatre. In a conservative country like Romania, to undress like that and to perform a sex scene on screen, many people will judge you for that, but she didn’t care. I’m really grateful to Katia. I admire her as an actress, and I admire her performance in the whole film, but for this scene, I really admire her. But yeah, we just did it, and it didn’t take very long. Two hours or something like that, with a bit of rehearsal and so on.
7R: You talked about the audience reaction, or that the spectator can take the role of the parents regarding this video. How do you feel this reaction has been from people who have seen it? Do you see the scene as a provocation or a controversial scene?
Radu Jude: I didn’t intend it as a provocation, because in my opinion, it’s quite a banal sex scene. I mean, it’s nothing spectacular. I just saw a video of this woman, a singer, pissing on a guy at a concert, have you seen it?
7R: I don’t think so?
Radu Jude: Let me see, what’s the name of it? The festival is called Welcome to Rockville or something and at some point, I will show you, just a second… [Jude scrolls on his phone]. I got it! The lead singer was pissing on the guy, on a fan? She pissed on a fan who seems to like it, I mean, it was consensual, the fan was very happy for that.
So I mean, it’s not even a scene like that. It’s not provocative, it’s just a banal sex scene. I’m quite amazed to hear people calling it provocative. I would like to be a provocateur, but I’m not.
7R: How would you describe part two of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn?
Radu Jude: I would describe it as a montage essay, and maybe trying to find a counterpart to the Dictionary of Received Ideas of Flaubert in a way? It’s a dictionary. I call it a dictionary.
7R: It’s a very dense segment, and it seems to be about many different things, like the semiotics of historicism. And it’s also very dialectical, in the way it is sometimes very funny about serious topics, and then very serious about some more silly topics. How did you decide what you wanted to focus on in this part?
Radu Jude: There are three things there. One point is about things that deal directly with the questions of the film, such as obscenity, body, sex, and sexuality, and trying to see them in a different light than commonly done. Then, there are things that are connected very loosely to these things, in a way that creates a context of ideas or context of history for the story. And then, there are things that I think are very much related to the construction of the film itself. Like, one entry in this dictionary is about what montage means. There are several like that, that speak about how the film is done. It is like my self-justification or self-explanation.
These are connected in a poetical way, but poetry, like Malraux said… he says something like: poetry is irrational because it substitutes the established relationship of the things between them with a new system of relations. We have some relations between things, and poetry means to break this chain of relations and to throw in something else, instead. I think that’s why I would call this part poetical, because at least, in some instances, it’s noncausal. There’s not a cause-and-effect way to put the images together, but a more intuitive way to do it.
Of course, some people can be put off by that. On the other hand, because someone can say that they don’t know what it means, I think everybody can find his or her own explanation of it. Or even if they can’t, at least some scenes are funny in themselves, and some are interesting in themselves. If you don’t find a relationship [between the scenes and the rest of the film], I hope you can at least enjoy them for what they are.
7R: This idea of the fragmented also seems to go back to Benjamin in a way, and the way in which his work is presented in many editions, where the chronology isn’t obvious. I don’t know how it is in Romanian, of course, but the order in which you read his work allows you to see it in different ways, gaining new meanings again and again. I feel like this is true for part two of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, as well.
Radu Jude: Yes, that’s related. Do you know his book called Arcades Project? It’s a book of his that was left unfinished, and there is still a debate about whether it’s a real book or just notes taken for a book. I think it’s obviously a book. What Benjamin does there is to take the intellectual garbage of the nineteenth century in France, and use these quotations from all kinds of sources, organised in a specific montage logic way, to create a portrait of the society, using only the quotes. He is using something which is already forgotten, not only the main writers or poets which have remained, but a lot of obscure sources.
It’s a very annoying book. My experience of reading that book is very interesting because I was enthusiastic for the first fifty pages, and then it became quite boring, to, again and again, read another quote and another quote for hundreds of pages. But then, for the last 400 or 500 pages, it all suddenly starts to take shape in your brain, and it becomes fascinating. Not only that, but it is one of these books that changes the way you see the world after [you read it].
7R: How do you deal with these heavy, complex thinkers — like Benjamin, Heidegger, and Cioran etc. — and put them into a cinematic landscape?
Radu Jude: I don’t know how to answer that. My answer is related to something else. If a quotation, a reference, a photograph, or whatever appears, I think it is there to become cinema in the end. Because I don’t write articles or essays or treatises, I’m making films.
This goes back to a thing I read in Cahiers du Cinema, which is very important to me. [I think it was] in the ‘60s, the Italian writer Italo Calvino says something important. He was very interested in the new cinema at that time, like the French New Wave, etc. He said that he considers these films important, because they are like essays, in a way, about topics like the anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical, and so on. But he also says that they are good if they do things in a way that traditional anthropology or sociology cannot. I really think he is right, and I try to emulate that. Even if I use quotations or texts, I think they’re important not as a historical book would be important, but as a reflection about history, using cinema.
Maybe it’s quite modest, but it’s my ambition to make a film [like that]. Barbarians, for instance, doesn’t change the information about the Odessa massacre. It doesn’t change the number of victims; it doesn’t show a different interpretation of those events. But it does something else. I think it transforms the reflection about that into cinema. A historian cannot do that. He or she can use words and make a history book, which is, of course, something else and might be extremely good and important, but I wanted to transform this historical information into cinema.
7R: This might be a difficult question, but how conscious is that decision? How do you make it into cinema? Or is that just an impulse when creating stories?
Radu Jude: Let me reframe it a little bit: sometimes, people ask me, why don’t you make a film about this or that topic? Why don’t you make a film about this or that character? Why don’t you adapt this novel? They mean it with good intentions, and they are right [in a sense]: in many cases, it could be a good starting point for a film. But my answer is always the same: I cannot make a film if I don’t have an idea about the form [it will take]. I cannot take every subject and turn it into a film; I need to find the form for it.
For me, the most difficult and important thing is not to find the topic for a film, because they are all around. I can find a hundred ideas for a topic or subject in ten minutes for you. But how to then transform them into dramaturgy and cinema? That’s the most difficult question. To finally answer your question, it is both: it’s part intuition, that in the end, you feel something that can become cinema; and then, it is part premeditated when you struggle to find an idea about cinema.
In my case, it is even worse, because I don’t have a style. I don’t have a method to make everything the same. I admire filmmakers who have a method, style, or direction very much. For each film, it’s a double struggle because I not only have to find the subject, but I have to find the form for it or vice versa. It’s quite difficult, but fascinating. I like [the struggle]. It’s enjoyable, but it’s still a big effort.
7R: In part three, as opposed to part one, there’s a lot of dialogue and conversations. I realised that, in most of your movies, there’s a lot of heavy monologues or difficult dialogues. How do you write these dialogues? Is it all scripted? Or is it explored on set with the actors?
Radu Jude: Yes, most of the films that I’ve done have a lot of dialogues. This is a kind of perverse thing, because cinema is considered the art of moving images, and to have a lot of text is sometimes considered non-cinematic. I don’t believe it’s like that. Let’s remember that there is a famous old article by Éric Rohmer called Pour un cinema parlant, or “talking cinema” in English, where he argues that words also belong to the cinema because you show them. You show people talking. I think that is right.
For instance, there is a moment in Barbarians where the main character, played by Ioana Iacob, is reading an Isaak Babel story, which is like four or five minutes long. Many, many people were against that scene. They said, “If I want to go to the library, I’ll go to the library and read a book. If I’m going to the cinema, I want to see a film, not hear a book read to me.” But that [Babel] text was read in a specific frame, with a specific duration, and a specific light, with a specific costume for the actress, who did a specific voice and specific gestures. This is part of that scene. Sometimes, viewers only relate to the text. They’ll say, “Oh, I want to read that story. If I hear it or see it, it’s the same thing.” And I say it’s not the same thing, because there’s a mise en scène. All these details are sometimes much more important than the text itself, or as important as the text.
Regarding improvisation, it’s not that much. It’s quite scripted. Maybe it’s my limit or maybe the actors’ limit, I don’t know, but I cannot work with improvisation. What actors do when they improvise is mostly very bad, in my opinion (laughs). It’s less good than what I write, with one exception: in Barbarians, there’s a guy from the mayor’s office, like a censor, who comes there. That guy is a theatre director called Alexandru Dabija, and he’s amazing. He’s always taking the text and he comes up with ideas and new angles. So, with him, it’s a pleasure to sometimes let him improvise. But he’s the only one who can make the text of the film better.
7R: I think some of the scenes with Dabija and Ioana Iacob in Barbarians, when they walk around the set, are very fascinating in a visual sense. It’s just them talking about history and historic reconstruction, while in the setting of what they are talking about.
Radu Jude: Yes, and especially when a film deals with a historical topic like that, [it’s hard for the actor] to improvise. This is why someone like Alexandru Dabija can improvise, because he’s somebody very cultivated. He read about these things and prepared for that. But otherwise, it’s a historical film, and you have actors who don’t take the time or the interest [to learn], or they don’t have the time. I don’t want to sound judgmental, because it’s not that, but [it’s difficult]. If they don’t have any idea about that historical problem, how can they improvise?
7R: I want to talk more about part three of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and specifically, the social commentary there. It’s a very dense and layered sequence, which says a lot about our hypocrisies about sex and education and even masks, with some characters refusing to wear masks because they perceive it as limiting their freedoms. How do you feel that movies can talk about these things in a specific cinematic way?
Radu Jude: This is the kind of question that always puts me into trouble because it forces me to give answers that cover the humanities or the history of humanity. I’m not a neurologist or a psychologist or anything like that, but I think it’s obvious that we are always judging. If you don’t judge, you die.
If you cross a street, you must judge if the cars are coming at a certain speed or not. If somebody comes toward you with a gun, then you judge that person at that moment as being dangerous. I wouldn’t speak much about this because I’m not a specialist, but I think it’s obvious that we judge all the time, and sometimes, this becomes a nuisance and dangerous, or ridiculous and hypocritical, because you judge the behaviour of the other and you never judge yourself in the same way. It’s a very old lesson. We know that from the Bible and other religions, as well. I think the film shows that, but does it help us to change? I’m not sure.
I think it’s also a great pleasure to judge. It’s one of the pleasures of life. I spent my childhood in the countryside, in a village, and one of the things that people did when it was dark was that they would get together and discuss everybody else around. It was like constant gossip.
7R: I feel like some of your main preoccupations are, like we’ve said before, historicism and how Romania’s past leaves an impression on its present. The way Romania, from my impression, seems to have a collective forgetfulness about some things in the past. That’s true for every country, of course, but I feel like especially with Barbarians, The Exit of the Trains, and maybe Uppercase Print, as well, you seem to speak about these themes. Do you have anything you think of as your main themes or interests?
Radu Jude: We can speak a lot about that. I’m interested in history, but I’m not interested in history in the Almanac or history magazine sense. I know people are interested in history like that. They want to know everything about Napoleon, Ancient Rome, or the history of England or America. It’s totally okay, of course, but I don’t have this kind of interest in history. I’m interested in the dark parts of history, the history of Europe, or of Romania, which is my country and my community.
The past is very much used as a tool in creating our collective identities. Who are the Romanians? Who are the Serbs? Who are the British? Every country is using history as a way of constructing identities. This is why most countries try to hide the dark parts of their history, to have a clearer or a nicer image, a nicer identity, which I think is quite dangerous. It doesn’t make you careful about the different possibilities that the present can turn into.
I’m also interested in things that deal with history that is not finished. If I made a film about the massacre of the Jews, or about racism and the slavery time of Romania, it is because I noticed that some of the ideas that created those tragedies are still around. Sometimes, in a different form, sometimes in the same form, but they’re still around. I think you need to go back in history and see where they come from.
I can give you an example. We had this referendum against LGBT rights in Romania three years ago, and suddenly, the same ideas that were used against Jewish people in the ‘30s and ‘40s were on television. It was, of course, called The Referendum for the Family, and not the referendum against LGBT rights, but it was organized exactly like that. So, suddenly, you could see that those ideas [from the past] are not finished. They find a way to creep back.
7R: How do you think cinema can deal with these ideas in opposition to text? For instance, the way an image can tell a story differently than a book, in this case, to recontextualise history.
Radu Jude: I would have to answer for each film by themselves. I don’t think there’s a general way to say that films can do this and cannot do that. I don’t have such a broad vision, and secondly, I don’t think it’s correct to have this kind of vision, because I think each film can do different things.
For instance, in a film like Barbarians, I tried to speak about the massacre of the Jews in Odessa in 1941 by the Romanian army and authorities, but to show how difficult it is to represent it from an audiovisual point of view, and then to try to work around these difficulties of representation. I think this is something that history books cannot do in the same way. I don’t know how well I’ve done it, but the ambition of that film was to speak about representational problems and issues.
7R: You also use a lot of archival footage. How do you usually go about doing that? Is it easy to get access to these clips that you use?
Radu Jude: Well, some are easy to find and to use, but of course, some of the archives are very, very difficult to find. I try to use archive images like all other elements that become cinema: to recontextualise them, and to remediate them, in a way. They are archive images, but they take part in the discourse. They are like actors: you don’t have actors, but you have images that you have to work with; to move, to place, and so on. Cinema is a lot about making these juxtapositions.
7R: In the latest edition of Mark Cousins’ Story of Film series, he talks about I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians. I’m not sure whether you have seen it or not, but he uses it to speak about how the modern cinema audiences respond to violence or spectacle on screen. I wanted to ask how you perceive the modern audience when you are creating films that play with form and break conventions?
Radu Jude: I have only seen the first part of that film, and I was very much interested in it. I think Mark Cousins was the head of the jury who gave me the main award in Karlovy Vary, so he appreciated the film, and he was very supportive. I admire him, and I was very touched by that. I didn’t know that he put it into the film. I must see it.
We say audience, but what does an audience mean? Who’s the audience? And then you find that there are a thousand different types of audiences: a group that appreciates the film, and another that doesn’t. I have a feeling that, especially now with streaming platforms and social media, what we call the viewers are much more into categories. If you go on Netflix, they recommend the same films to you over and over again. When I walk on the street and have my headphones on and play some music, if I play a punk song, then they recommend the same thing again and again and again.
It’s a change that is good, in a way, because you can find anything that you’re interested in now. I remember my high school days when I was just discovering the Cinematheque in Bucharest, which was a very poor Cinematheque, but with quite good programming. [Back then] sometimes, you had to wait for months and hope that a certain film would appear in the program. Now, you have it in one minute. So, in a way, I think it’s very good that you have access to everything.
But at the same time, this fragmentation of the audience, where some people only want to watch essay films, others only want to watch horror, and some only want to binge TV shows… I think it’s a little sad.
Olivier Assayas wrote a great text about the state of cinema in 2020. Cinema [used to be] a kind of art that put different kinds of audiences together, and I don’t think it’s the case today. Remember how a Chaplin film was seen by every category of audience, from what we call regular audiences to intellectual audiences? It’s not the case today. Maybe it’s not that bad in the end, I don’t know. I’ve seen it as something that’s lost.
7R: You have done a lot of short films, as well. Recently, you’ve made some pandemic shorts. How do you see the different formats, from feature to short film? Do you see them as separate entities?
Radu Jude: Yes, they are separate, but it is cinema, and for me, it is important that it can take a lot of shapes. Sometimes, I want to do short films because I think there’s a bit more freedom than with features, because of the way they are financed and the money that they can bring in, which for short films is not much. In the case of feature films, they have producers, co-producers, sales agents, financing funds… It’s a lot of pressure. It’s less so when you make a short film.
I also think some cinematic ideas can be expressed better in short films, and they would be lost if you don’t do it. I’m in the studio right now finishing two short films, and it’s important for me to do them. Of course, I know that they won’t be widely distributed or widely seen, but I don’t care. I need to make them and want to make them. There’s a necessity to experiment, and I’m happy I’m doing that.
7R: This idea of experimentation with short films is very apparent online, so I wanted to ask how you feel about the democratisation of filmmaking with sites like YouTube and even TikTok. There’s a lot of strange and absurd things on these services, but there’s also a lot of cool ideas that play with the form of cinema.
Radu Jude: I have TikTok, of course! For me, TikTok is real cinema. You don’t [usually] see these spaces or these people in film, and I’m very interested in that. I don’t know how to use it, but I really think that they are important. If cinema is about seeing things, then you can see things with a phone camera. And sometimes, the platform itself, using this montage device, putting them one after another, creates a kind of spectacle, and can show an image of the world that is not accessible to other things. The second part of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a little bit like a TikTok montage; it’s a bit inspired by that.
About democratisation, of course, I am totally in favour. I remember a few years ago, I read an interview with a Romanian filmmaker who is in his sixties, who said, “Now everyone can make a movie, it’s not cool anymore. Thirty years ago, it was difficult to find the money, to find the 35mm camera or a lab to make the film, and now everyone can do it with their phone. We are losing the aura of that profession.” and I think, ‘Oh, thank God! It’s great.’ I mean, of course, this doesn’t transform everybody into a great filmmaker, but there are a lot of ideas and a lot of things to see.
Let’s not forget that cinema is not only what the filmmakers do. It’s actually very little about that. It’s what machines do. Jean Epstein talked about that in La Inteligencia de Una Maquina, or The Intelligence of the Machine. He said the camera is the intelligent one. Someone invented the camera of the iPhone, and there you have cinema.
7R: You mentioned how the democratisation of cinema allows us to see images that are not accessible elsewhere. This reminds me of Paulo Freire’s theory in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he talks about the radical importance of naming the world. It’s a notion of putting what you see, your life experiences, and so on, into the world by talking about them in a truthful manner. I personally feel that services like TikTok can do that for many people who don’t have access to other forms of expression.
Radu Jude: Yes, but unfortunately, I don’t think it’s used to its real potential. Like every tool, you can use it in a good way, or in a bad way, or you can not use it at all. I think TikTok is something that can be used much more intelligently than it is, but still, it exists, which is important I think.
7R: You have also worked as a professor at a university in Cluj. Can you talk a bit about the differences between the relationship between a teacher and student and a filmmaker and an audience, if that’s something you have thought about?
Radu Jude: I’m not sure I can make this comparison, because it’s very different. I was rejected three times by the National Film School in Romania. I was never accepted. So the first thing I tell my students is that making films is something that is possible. If I can make films, after being rejected by the school, then it is possible for them. I think the most difficult thing for these young people is to grasp what is cinematic and what is not; to grasp what thinking in cinematic ideas means. That’s the most important thing that I try to teach them.
7R: In Barbarians, the main character, Mariana is confronted about why she doesn’t make a reconstruction about communist history in Romania. I find it interesting that your next film, Uppercase Print, is about this exact topic. There seems to be a direct dialogue between your films, or at least between these two. Do you see your films as part of a dialogue?
Radu Jude: It becomes a dialogue. Uppercase Print was also made thinking about the people that were accusing me, as the author of these films, of only concentrating on the fascist time of Romania. [They said] “Concentrate on the communist part, as well.” So I did it, but then I heard a small polemical dialogue with somebody on Facebook, with a quite famous Romanian intellectual, who accused me of the same thing, ignoring the fact that I had made Uppercase Print. The lack of intellectual honesty among Romanian intellectuals is really huge in many cases. I don’t care about that.
But speaking to that, I think what Mariana says in the film is accurate. The fact that there’s no problem to speak about the communist crimes, or the communist dictatorship in its entirety, but when you touch the ‘30s or ‘40s of the fascist dictatorship, suddenly, people jump up and ask, “Why don’t you talk about communism?”
7R: I saw you did an interview for the Berlinale YouTube channel, and they had scenes from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn dubbed in German. This made me laugh because of the fact that almost everyone in the film wears a mask for most of the run time, which means it’s difficult to see the (lack of) synchronization, but it’s still quite clearly not authentic (even though I don’t speak German or Romanian). This made me think about authenticity in film, and I wanted to ask how you relate to the notion of authenticity in film?
Radu Jude: I didn’t know the film was dubbed in German, but they do it quite often, and I am not so surprised. The problem is not even the authenticity, as you put it. The problem is that the dubbing is, in the core of it, disrespectful toward the films, the filmmakers, and even the audience. It is like the voice of the actors doesn’t mean anything; it is like a different language from your own doesn’t have the right to exist. I am not sure it is true, but I read somewhere that this obsession with dubbing has its roots in Nazi times, and it totally makes sense. It is a very violent thing. Basically, you erase the language from the film.
7R: What are you working on next?
Radu Jude: I’m colour grading a short film now, and I also have a feature film project I want to make [in 2022], a few months from now. I hope it will be possible because we don’t have all the money in place. It’s a quieter and a more straightforward film, but it’s also quite experimental in form. It deals with the relationship between individuals and big corporations in Romania. It’s a story that takes place in the cinema world, in a way. It’s in two parts: one part is a road movie, and the other part is like a making-of.
There’s always pressure that appears after an award like the Golden Bear. People either say you have to be careful about what you’re doing now, or they say you have to do a bigger and crazier film, with stars and maybe even in English and so on. So I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to make a smaller film in Romania.
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