It’s August at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and Radu Jude can’t get on the Wi-Fi. Six months on from his shock Golden Bear win for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a triumph as unlikely as it was overdue, the Romanian filmmaker appears as irreverent as ever. One of the younger guns of the Romanian New Wave, Jude has always stood apart for leaning away from the solemnity of some peers, regardless of the subject matter’s seriousness. And as the world is forced to wait years for a new Mungiu, Jude only grows more prolific as the years go by—a near-permanent presence on the festival circuit, with documentaries and shorts filling the gaps between his acclaimed features.
“You can just, uh, use the public one,” I offer, “doesn’t need a password.” He shoots a disarming smile. A friendly press agent hands me a pint of water that I struggle to sip from. The conversation moves to absurdity: “It’s like the two of us here,” Jude observes, “it’s like a serious thing, but if you change it or reframe it a little bit it’s very ridiculous. We sit here instead of drinking a beer, and pretend to exchange serious things, [Laughs] and for whom?”
In town to promote Bad Luck Banging, Jude had earlier that day given a panel with Ukranian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa and critic (not singer) Neil Young to discuss the ethics of archive material, discovering TikTok, and a plan to adapt Starship Troopers for the stage. We took it from there. With Jude’s Golden Bear winner now arriving in U.S. theaters and Romania selecting the film as their Oscar entry, read the conversation below, edited and condensed for clarity.
The Film Stage: You gave a great talk with Neil Young and Sergei Loznitsa earlier. How did you feel it went?
Radu Jude: [Laughs] I don’t know what to think of it. Loznitsa’s a serious guy—he was like an older teacher—but he’s nice. Neil Young is always very funny.
Loznitsa has a certain humor in interviews that you rarely see in his films. With your work it’s very different. What is the importance of humor in your filmmaking?
Well, it’s a complicated answer to give because it’s hard to define what is humorous and what is not. It changes from person to person, from time to time, from country to country, but I think there is a kind of observation that Chekov made: that anything in the world—of course, probably apart from tragedies, though even there it is debatable—but anything, if you look from a certain angle, can look ridiculous or humorous. So I’m interested in this. A lot.
You mention the tragedies. There is this Krakauer quote in Bad Luck Banging about cinema having the ability to make the horrors of the world more bearable. In a recent interview with David Mouriquand you said that it reminded you of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Could you unpack that?
I’m not sure if “remind” is the right word. There is a possible connection of cinema, with showing the horrors of the world and making them tolerable in a way—at least to ask for understanding or for thinking. Of course this is just if you want an optimistic view, because then you can take somebody like Susan Sontag, but others as well, where these things are much more questionable.
I was thinking a lot about this, because I made a film two years ago called The Exit of the Trains—it was in Forum in Berlin—about the massacre in 1941 of the Jewish population in Iași by Romania. It uses a lot of photo evidence and there was always this question: what do you show, and if so for what? My answer was: well, I show them for a kind of proof. But then this is not justice. So what is the purpose of that? It’s always questionable, and I never know what is the right answer. I don’t think Susan Sontag even answered it in the end.
You’ve been working with these kinds of films for many years. Do you feel you are closer to an answer?
No, I don’t think there is an answer. Of course there are situations where these kinds of images are used or shown completely unethically—used for exploitation or for commercial interests, for whatever it is. Or sometimes they are used for justice, like the Srebrenica photographs. But between these two extremes there are a lot of grey zones that can be addressed only individually.
You questioned Loznitsa on his use of audio, and how he adds what is basically foley work to archival images—how that might be unethical.
Do you agree with me?
It’s interesting. I think it brings the history to life, in a way, although it can feel dicey when dialogue is involved. Do you have any iron-clad rules for working with archive footage?
In the case of Loznitsa, it wasn’t to dismiss; it’s a question that I’m not sure of the answer. I’m not sure that it brings something to the film, apart from the immersive quality. I try not to have any rules. I sometimes think that the potentialities—or the richness, or the materiality of an archive image—is so big sometimes in itself it is enough. So when I mentioned Sergei’s film Blockade, I was just thinking that probably with a soundtrack or just leaving the film silent could be enough: the constellation with the past, to quote Walter Benjamin, because you see it now in the light of the present. This trace of history is so powerful and so big and so important, you don’t need too many things.
Is it fair to say that juxtaposing images, as you do in your work, is in some ways just as powerful a tool as using audio or foley?
Yes, it’s true—I believe in this. I mean, that’s cinema-thinking in a way, starting from Eisenstein, or Walter Benjamin, or all these people in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Of course it’s a very tricky thing, because all the propaganda that we see, it’s made usually with these juxtapositions to create fake ideas.
Obviously it’s a big factor in Bad Luck Banging. What was the starting point for this middle section, the image montage, how did you approach it?
It was a very long process—because it’s a very old idea, making this film. It was supposed to be more of a traditional narrative, then little by little I started to collect ideas for it, or around it, and at some point I wanted to find a way to incorporate these materials into the film and I didn’t know how. At some point I saw a cubist exhibition in the Pompidou. It was like a eureka moment, in a way.
I said, “Well, I would like to make this film a little bit like a cubist painting.” You have a face—you have the eyes here, mouth here, nose here—and you as the viewer of the painting create the face, so to speak. If you want a more pedestrian metaphor, I found one in Pizza Hut in Bucharest. At the salad bar you make it yourself. You know, there is tomato and sauce and cucumber and you go with a plate.
A few people have compared these moments to memes. I wonder what you make of that?
Absolutely. It’s a mixture between memes and a literary, older form. It’s something I’m interested in, too; maybe it’s a little bit of a perversion. I like to incorporate things that come from other disciplines, photographs or paintings or texts, or in this case it’s more a literary device than a cinematic tradition. But I agree with Rohmer. He said in his seminal essay For a Talking Cinema, I think it’s called, in ‘50 or ‘51, that words can be used in cinema not only for advancing the plot and for characterization, but that words can be part of cinema.
Is it true you’re also using TikTok a lot?
Well, I have two kids—one is six and one is sixteen—so I try to understand their world a little bit. I’m interested in this. It was an essay on BFI, I don’t know who wrote it, comparing TikTok with very early cinema forms—because of the shortness, because sometimes it’s one shot, sometimes it is some kind of performance.
You mean like Muybridge or something?
A bit, yeah, in a way. I think it’s accurate. I really believe, in the end, to make cinema, people talk about cinema or art of cinema, but let’s face it: it’s made mostly by the camera, by a machine, or by the editing computer. You, as a filmmaker, just put the things in; sometimes you don’t even have to do that. Sometimes you look at a surveillance camera and you can get a beautiful cinematic moment there. So I think we should be a little bit more modest, you know? Jean Epstein said it 100 years ago: “The intelligence of a machine.” Of course, you can use it better, you can use it stupidly, you can use it more interestingly than others, but still it’s this.
You mentioned your two kids. Was Bad Luck Banging inspired in some way by your own experiences with the education system?
Partly yes. I think the original idea for this story came after I went to a parent-teacher meeting. I decided I wanted to make a film with a meeting like this, and then later this other idea with the porn tape came into it. I’m living in Romania, so my experience is only with the Romanian education system, which has gone from bad to worse, and from being underfunded to being criminally underfunded.
The level of illiteracy is growing and the class divide is growing because of this. It’s really a crime, what all governments do, more and more. Apart from that you can notice when they speak about the fate of their children: middle-class parents like myself, living in the big cities, many of them all of a sudden forget all rules of human society. The selfishness takes over very easily, because it’s not for me—it’s for the kid. So you can see their real faces in these meetings.
I’m curious what you’re working on next? Has the Golden Bear opened up some possibilities to do something you’ve always wanted to do?
Well, I think this is also kind of a trap that filmmakers sometimes get into: now you have to make a bigger film with a bigger budget with a crazier theme. And I think if you look at the people who’ve done that, it hasn’t always worked. So I’m making two shorts now. I had one in Locarno. One is around the Battleship Potemkin, which actually ended up in Romania in 1905, and it’s a bit of a dialogue with the Eisenstein film. The other is also a story of Romania’s involvement in the Holocaust, using photos, so it’s a photo film.
I’ve made two or three like this already; it’s become a genre for us. I also have a feature film project to shoot next year, but a small one, a social film dealing with the relationship between individuals and private corporations in Romania, which is something that has not been done—I don’t think.
Did you attend the Starship Troopers screening in Locarno? You mentioned at the talk that you were working on a stage adaptation of the text.
No, I didn’t see it there. I wanted to but it was too late. I’m not doing it yet—I don’t have time—but I was thinking it would be great to make Starship Troopers as a kind of anti-theatre thing, because of course it would be completely crazy and I wouldn’t use video; just people playing the bugs or something like that. So it would be against the seriousness of theatre, because to put that on a stage would be completely unserious—but serious in another way, of course, and against the conservativeness of theatre, so to speak. Which is always a serious topic. You cannot just have people with guns shooting bugs for thirty minute [Laughs] and I think that would be very nice in a theatre.
Would you move the story to Bucharest?
Probably. I don’t know. It was just an idea I’ve had for some time. I was a big fan of science fiction in my teens because it was immediately after the revolution and a lot of translations were coming in. Like Dune, it was a big event in 1992, or Asimov’s books. So I didn’t say it publicly until now, but at some point I will do it.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn opens in theaters on Friday, November 19.