Locarno 2024: Something Fun
Locarno 2024: Something Fun
Hong! Jude! Wang! But Lithuanian newcomers get the win.
By Joseph Owen:
The day I arrive in Locarno isn’t easy.
I awake in Devon, faintly reeling from a family wedding. Ahead of me: Portsmouth, London, Milan. 18 hours later — taxi, train, car, train, flight, train — I stumble into Rio Muralto, safely canopied among the Swiss Alps. I take to bed, imagining rest and relaxation, only to nurse a two-day hangover into the following morning, when I potter into town to pick up my accreditation. I notice I’ve had too much fun, and that some films might do me good.
I start by expecting something familiar. But after last year’s picaresque Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (2023), Radu Jude returns with two novel experiments, Eight Postcards From Utopia (2024) and Sleep #2 (2024), both of which just exceed the hour mark, and which differ vastly in sensibility and scope.
The former film (co-directed with the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, below) is an elaborate montage of Romanian TV adverts crisscrossing three decades since the fall of Ceausescu. These promos have been collected into eight loose thematic sections, constituting an ironic critique of incipient state privatisation and corporate embrace: the thrilling dawn of market reforms, equity and investment, consumption as virtue.
Clips for washing detergents, fizzy drinks and share purchases appear abridged and juxtaposed, generating a cavalcade of sounds and images, some of which are reprised, eliciting an increasingly saturated state of delirium.
One opening commercial depicts the ex-Chelsea footballer Adrian Mutu in gladiatorial costume, solemnly imploring us to “join the game.” As Mutu unlatches a colossal Pepsi crate with the swing of his right foot, his entreaty reveals the wider absurdities of post-Eastern bloc capitalism, which asks us to take part, have fun and, most importantly, do as others do. Jude extensively catalogues these wry amusements, provoking that uncanny feeling of watching old VHS recordings, the fast-forwarding of fragments from another time.
While Eight Postcards amounts to a frenetic roadshow compilation of recent cultural history, Sleep #2 (below) supplies a more meditative appraisal of contemporary social habits. Termed a “desktop film” by Jude, it gathers and sequences blocky webcam footage of Andy Warhol’s grave, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The final piece (edited into vague chronology by Cǎtǎlin Cristuțiu) functions as a cheeky, unsanctioned sequel to Warhol’s debut Sleep (1964), which surveyed the slumber of his lover John Giorno for 5 hours and 21 minutes. Here, we absorb a single year of the EarthCam video feed, cut and spliced to show Warhol’s memorial through the shifting seasons, the encroaching wildlife, the tended flowers, the arranged soup cans, and the dovetailing of day and night.
Read more over at Journey Into Cinema!