“A nostalgic supercut of gloriously kitsch media relics, this acerbic film wittily brings out bald-faced narratives around money and success. Behind the blunt messaging of television adverts, filmmaker Radu Jude and philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz find pernicious political messages at play.” - Mubi
Postcards from Utopia by Radu Jude
By Owen Hsieh
Postcards
from Utopia
Directed
by Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz
Runtime: 70 minutes, 2024
Postcards from Utopia is a feature-length montage comprised entirely of advertisements from Romania in the 1990s, selected from a period following capitalist restoration across the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. The pseudo-documentary is the product of the sardonic and sarcastic wit of prolific Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, in partnership with critical theory scholar Ferencz-Flatz.
The film is quite entertaining as the curated selections of advertisements are either quite funny, lyrical or kitsch. Radu highlights many original, novel concepts in this curated set of advertisements within a largely self-referential, distinctly Romanian, advertising culture. The advertisements are novel and creative, a product of circumstances that restricted access from ordinary sources of imitation and pastiche.
Generally speaking, the advertising industry recycles and reuses creative concepts, creating familiarity and nostalgia, or by the strategy of imitating successful concepts from competitors, however the Romanian advertising industry has been deprived of these influences and been forced to go its own way – hence their originality.
Simultaneously, it is evoking a defining moment in history; capitalist restoration in Romania and its later journey to EU membership.
The advertisements trace changes in the Romanian economy during the 1990s with the implementation of “shock therapy” to break up the remnants of planned economy and privatise former state owned assets. With a corresponding shift from an economic orientation centered on heavy industry, to the burgeoning production of consumer goods.
 |
| Commercials depicting the virtues of privatisation |
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| Commercial depicting the new good life in a capitalist Romania. |
This is due to capitalism’s need to development of a range of artificial wants and needs. As the art critic John Berger wrote,
Capitalism
survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own
interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive
deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing
a false standard of what is and what is not desirable. [1]
Berger added,
Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal it proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. [2]
The newly celebrated medium of advertising was seen to be particularly exciting and ‘intoxicating’ as the corporate images were associated with an affluent western lifestyle and its freedoms:
Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy, it is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of ’The Free World.’
For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice. [3]
Despite this heady optimism, the restoration of capitalism inaugurated a catastrophic and precipitous decline in living standards within Romania:
Initially, the Bulgarian and Romanian post communists tried to keep domestic industries afloat with state subsidies. When the burden on the state budget became too great, they privatized the industries, mostly by means of so-called manager buyouts. This entailed farming out or auctioning off businesses to their own executives. The practice created warped incentives by making it worthwhile to intentionally mismanage or break up state enterprises in order to buy them cheaply. The bidding process, moreover, was frequently distorted by nepotism and bribery. In the end, the state attained much smaller revenues from privatization than projected, and industrial production dropped, causing tax revenues to fall again.
Romania and Bulgaria responded by printing more money. By the late nineties, they were suffering another period of crippling inflation. [4]
Through this process inequality and poverty rates rose steeply, with millions in Romania across Eastern Europe living below the poverty line. Further compounding this process, Romania was particularly vulnerable to adverse material conditions due to the debilitating experience of decades of Stalinism:
Romanian society, had suffered such oppression under the neo-Stalinist Ceausescu regime that its subsequent recovery from collective trauma left little strength and few resources to build a resilient market economy.[5]
Knowing this essential context tinges the somewhat comic selection of advertisements with a tragic air. Ultimately, the outcome was the unfortunate confirmation of a process earlier identified by Leon Trotsky.
After calling for a political revolution to oust the Stalinist and defend the gains of the October revolution, Trotsky prophetically noted the likely outcome in the absence of a political revolution,
Against
the mistaken idea that from the present Soviet regime only a transition to
socialism is possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible.
[6]
Trotsky explicitly
pointed to the fate of the Soviet Union should capitalism be restored,
A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus the abolition of state property… The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture. [7]
Radu summarised some of his thoughts on this national experience recently on the Klassiki podcast:
‘The position of Romania, from a historical point of view, is very particular, it’s a country who just got out of a terrible communist dictatorship, in a long transition to a neoliberal capitalism with no social protection, or very little, and almost getting back to fascism again,[8] we just avoided in the new elections, but still the tendency is still there.’ [9]
To
conclude, this remarkable concept film is the product of Radu’s playful,
creative and incisive vision. He is one of the most interesting contemporary
directors and undoubtedly the preeminent representative of the second
generation of directors in Romanian New Wave Cinema.
Previous noteworthy films of his include:
Caricaturana (2021): a remarkable short film which was based on the unrealised vision of Soviet director Eisenstein. It featured satirical lithographs by 19th-century French artist Honoré-Victorin Daumier, and culminated in a critique of tabloid journalism.
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018): which dealt with the legacy of the holocaust in Romania in very sensitive, acerbic manner. This is part of a triptych of films dealing with the holocaust in Romania.
Radu Jude is, in this authors opinion, one of the most interesting contemporary directors practising today.
Postcards
from Utopia is currently streaming via Mubi.com https://mubi.com
[1] John
Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1990, Penguin Books, pp. 154
[2] Ibid,
pp. 131
[3] Ibid,
pp. 130-131
[4] Philip
Ther, Europe since 1989, 2017, Princeton University Press, pp. 97
[5] Ibid, pp. 112
[6] Leon
Trotsky, the Revolution Betrayed, 1937, Dover Publications (2004), pp. 193
[7] Ibid,
pp. 190
[8] Romania
was plagued by the fascist Iron Guard movement during World War II.
[9] Radu
Jude, From Rossellini to Dracula, 2025, the Klassiki Podcast, 5:30-6:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBkTSJnNfoc
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