Despite his increasing arthouse acclaim, Radu Jude has never been associated with a distinct stylistic stamp; indeed, he has long flitted between various formalist modes, so much so that the uninitiated might not realize that the same filmmaker made, say, The Happiest Girl in the World and Aferim!. His most popular films, Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn and the recent Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, at least share an elastic approach to structure — the former a triptych, the later a diptych — as well as a fascination with engaging with extremely current events (namely, Covid and its immediate aftermath, political polarization, and the gig economy, amongst other hot-button subject matter). Interspersed between his features are a series of documentaries and experimental essay films, although projects like The Exit of the Trains and The Dead Nation have found limited distribution outside of the festival circuit.
Which is to say, one very much gets the sense that Jude is interested in so many different things, both politically and aesthetically, that he’s perfectly willing to churn out smaller-scaled, experimental efforts in between his more traditional, narrative-driven projects. And at the 2024 iteration of the Locarno Film Festival, he has dropped two new mid-length projects — Eight Postcards from Utopia and, under consideration here, Sleep #2. A title card lists only two credits: “A desktop film by Radu Jude,” followed by “Editing Cǎtǎlin Cristuțiu.” A second shot gives us a pertinent Warhol quote: “The most wonderful thing about living is to be dead.” From here, the brief, 60-minute film consists entirely of found footage compiled from the 24-hour video feed of Warhol’s grave site at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, PA. The material appears to have been arranged in a loose chronology, starting off in warmer, sunny weather and ending in winter, complete with delicate snowfall. Otherwise, the footage is a hodgepodge of various “events”; visitors come and go, some taking selfies or kneeling at the gravestone; a landscaper is seen cleaning up the area and applying fertilizer to some plants; and occasionally, the footage switches to a kind of low-fi night vision look. There are sunny days and rainy days, and sometimes the camera is zoomed closer or further away from the locus of the action. It’s all very splotchy, fully of digital artifacting and crushed, pixelated blocks of color.
Overall, this results in an appealing aesthetic, and one that links the film to a lineage of recent works including Joële Walinga’s Self-Portrait and Éléonore Weber’s There Will Be No More Night. Of course, dubbing the project a “desktop” film also evokes the work of Kevin B. Lee (who is thanked in the end credits here) and Chloé Galibert-Laîné, although their films typically forefront the human labor that goes into their making, an element missing in Sleep #2. And then there are the parallels between Jude’s project and Warhol’s; the title obviously suggests that Jude’s film is a sort of sequel to Warhol’s own 1964 opus Sleep, which documented via looped footage approximately 5 hours of John Giorno sleeping. indeed, duration was one of many ideas Warhol explored in his film work; besides Sleep, 1964’s Empire runs around 8 hours, while other assorted projects are shorter but still otherwise elongated (Blowjob lasts about half an hour at 16 frames per second; Eat is 45 minutes long). Then there are his numerous “screen test” films, which Jude surely had in mind as the parade of mourners pose and snap photos beside the late director’s tombstone. To keep the temporal in mind, and given Warhol’s justly famous maxim that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” one also wonders here if these visitors are hoping, consciously or not, to absorb some of Warhol’s celebrity via proximity or osmosis (or if the revelers are even fully aware that they are being recorded). And so, while Sleep #2 is a simple, even minor film, a sketch of an idea really, it’s one loaded with suggestion, potential significance, and room for intellectual play thanks to the long shadow cast by Warhol’s art ad legacy.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 1.
