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Interview: Radu Jude on Uppercase Print and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Radu Jude discusses his approach to archival material and what it’s like to make a film under pandemic-related restrictions.

Radu Jude on Uppercase Print and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

In a moment of almost too-perfect encapsulation, a slave catcher in Radu Jude’s Aferim! wonders, “A few hundred years from now, do you think folks will say a good word about us?” The 2015 film, a sly and disturbing western homage set in 19th-century Wallachia, heralded a new phase in Jude’s still-young career, a move away from the more personal subjects of his early work and toward an ongoing interrogation of our relationship to history.

Most of Jude’s recent films concern themselves directly with historical records of all kinds: public and private, state-sanctioned and subversive, televised and written, published and smuggled. For one, Uppercase Print, which was adapted by Jude from a play by Gianina Cărbunariu, is patched together from Romania’s secret police files on Mugur Călinescu (played by Serban Lazarovici), a teenage boy who in the early 1980s wrote political messages in chalk on buildings. Vignettes of actors reading transcripts of testimonies, secretly recorded conversations, and case files are interspersed with archival footage from state television, often consisting of parades, scripted tributes to Nicolae Ceaușescu, and creepy patriotic songs.

Although Uppercase Print and other recent works offer as much insight into our current political moment as the specific historical incidents they investigate, Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which also opens in the U.S. this month, is his most directly contemporary film in some time. Here, too, is a lengthy section of collage incorporating material from an archive of diverse sources, but mostly the film portrays a dramatic situation, and a distinctly 21st-century one at that: A schoolteacher’s private sex video accidentally leaks onto the internet, and she must face a kangaroo court made up of an irate gang of parents. Subtitled “A Sketch for a Popular Film,” Bad Luck Banging is a bitterly provocative satire whose coincidence with, and incorporation of, the Covid-19 pandemic only enhances its urgency of purpose.

I recently spoke with Jude ahead of the North American premiere of both Uppercase Print and Bad Luck Banging. We discussed his prolific output, his approach to archival material, and what it’s like to make a film under pandemic-related restrictions.

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You’ve been working at an impressively steady clip. How have you managed to raise funds for and complete so many projects over the past several years?

I worked all my professional life between films. I did a lot of advertising and made a lot of music videos and television programs in order to make a living. It became more and more frustrating because I only have one life and I wanted to put all my talent and energy to use by making films and not making bad commercials. In 2015 I stopped and all of a sudden I found myself with an enormous amount of spare time. I started to work on other projects [between films] to try to finance them. It’s like Godard saying that if he has one dollar he makes a one-dollar film, and if he has one million he can make a million-dollar film. If you look at my last three feature films, all of them put together were made on a budget that it takes to make your average feature film in Europe, so it’s a very economical way of working.

Also, there’s a pressure on filmmakers of all kinds, not only in Europe or Romania, but I think in the United States also, that each film has to be big, and make an important statement about the world. I don’t have big statements to say every 10 years like that. I think it’s like in painting, if you see how many paintings Paul Klee did, you see that there’s a connection between the time spent on them and the way they look. Of course, for an extremely complicated painting, the painter can be working on it for many years, but when you see a Paul Klee painting you feel that it was something that was done quickly.

I think it’s the same with films, as the rhythm of work somehow dictates the end result. I’m fascinated by Andy Warhol’s films, and you feel that the process of making them in one day of shooting put an imprint on them and made them what they are. Some of them are really impressive. I’m not comparing myself with any of these people but I try to work along these lines. I don’t want my ideas to get lost; if you only do a film every four or five years you have to concentrate on one big idea and all the others would be thrown away. I think they’re important to make even if they don’t have a lot of success or a big audience.

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Many of your films incorporate, or consist entirely of, archival images and sound, like The Dead Nation, but collage films are still labor-intensive in their own way. How do you go about collecting material? Do you usually know what you’re looking for?

It depends on the project itself. In some cases, I start from the archive and then construct the film. I’m finishing a 30-minute film from an archive of photographs: A Romanian soldier on the Eastern front in the 1940s was a photographer and made a kind of album, exactly like a photo album you’d have at your house, and we worked around that. For Uppercase Print, I searched the Archive of National Television, which isn’t very well organized, and apart from the chronological criteria—images from the same time that the story was taking place in—I said that I want everything you have from this time period, even things on the end of a roll of a film or something on a Beta tape. In Bad Luck Banging, in the second part there’s a montage of quotations—you can call that a literary archive—and all kinds of images. I’m a bit of a hoarder, so I collected them over the years, and then in the last two years before filming, knowing I was going to incorporate this kind of material, I made some folders and a backup on a hard disk, I made a lot of notes, and then I started editing even before the actual filming.

As you mentioned, text also occupies a prominent space in your films. Do you see this as connected with your archival work or do you just like making the audience read?

It’s a complicated thing because, of course, when you take a text and put it into a film it becomes a part of the film material. Rohmer, in his essay “Pour un cinéma parlant,” said that words in cinema can be used not just to advance the plot, as they usually do, but can be something more than that. I think he was right in more than one way. For instance, in my film I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, the main character is reading an Isaac Babel story to her lover on Skype and she was shot in a wide shot. I remember people complaining about that, saying it lasts 20 minutes—actually, it’s only four—and stuff like, “If I want to read a short story I can go to the library, but when I go to the cinema I go to see images.” This is wrong, because they mention the story—they mention the text by Isaac Babel—but they don’t mention the image. That was an image! It was an image of that woman in a specific set with specific lighting and specific elements around her, and it’s like this doesn’t matter to people, like the text was the only thing important for them.

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In what sense is Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn a “sketch”? Is this a formal conceit, or is there some literal sense in which it’s unfinished?

My friend Alexandru Dabija, a very important theater director, was doing the unfinished play by Chekhov, Platonov as it’s sometimes called. I asked why he wanted to do it, and he said, “As a director, I can work on it, I have more freedom.” That stayed with me. Now, this isn’t exactly like that because it’s more like an artistic device, and it’s not really unfinished. But when you work on a film you try to cut out anything that isn’t necessary for the story, “kill your darlings,” etcetera. In this case, the story would be 20 or 30 minutes. So, all the extra material becomes part of the film. Maybe the best title would have been “materials for a possible film.”

A number of films and TV series have been produced during the pandemic, but Bad Luck Banging is one of the first I’ve seen that’s set amid the pandemic. How much did you have to revise your original idea to the radically changed circumstances?

We adapted it quite a lot. The first part of the film was quite complicated to do because it was right after the lockdown and the mayor’s office didn’t give us permission until very late in the process. So we shot part of the film like real cinema verité, with no permission. My producer, Ada Solomon, was very brave. She said, “Let’s just do it.” The third part of the film suffered most because it was devised initially to take place in a classroom with people cramped together. I imagined having a lot of people in the same shot. Then I had to move it outside of the school into the courtyard, and we had to comply with all the sanitary measures. But I wanted the film to be very contemporary, so I wanted to see that, to see what it means to be on chairs at quite a distance from one another. All of a sudden my mise-en-scène ideas didn’t work, so I had to find alternatives. Our Czech co-producer, who was more optimistic than all of us, phoned me just before we started to film last summer, saying to take out all the Covid stuff, like the masks, because in a few months the pandemic will be over and forgotten, so when the film comes out it will look like an old film. But, to me, the films made during the pandemic that don’t have any sign of it look like historical movies from five years ago.

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Did you entertain the idea not to show the sex tape at the beginning of the film? Showing it is the more confrontational choice, but not showing it would keep the discussion around it in a purely theoretical realm for the audience.

Yes, actually, I put it in and took it out many times while editing. I also had the idea of not showing it at all in the classroom scene [when the parents watch it]. But the audience wouldn’t know exactly what it’s about because a sex tape or something like that can mean a lot of things, it can be extremely violent, perverted, dirty, boring, or ridiculous. There are a lot of possibilities that you can imagine. But if you see it, the imagination stops. Also, I think it was my DP, Marius Panduru, who said that it would look exactly like those shots in films where somebody’s naked but they are only shown from the neck up. A film has a lot of wide shots but all of a sudden somebody undresses and you shoot it like that? It’s ridiculous. It shows that you’re afraid or unable to show it. So, we showed it and that’s it.

Seth Katz

Seth Katz's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, and other publications.

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