Dracula

Bad Bad Cinema

For years now, Radu Jude has been talking about the perks of bad cinema: its freedom, avant-garde clairvoyance and je m’en fiche, proudly calling himself a bad filmmaker – meaning, among other things, an "amateur" who’s not concerned with the arthouse tradition of masterpieces, storytelling, 4K, respectability and good taste. Instead, he has been on the lookout for another tradition of filmmaking that’s much more difficult to pinpoint, one that brings together unlikely names – from Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol to, more recently, Ed Wood and Oscar Micheaux. However, it was unclear what he really meant by bad filmmaking (what’s so bad about it?) as trendsetting institutions perceived his films as more Godard and Fassbinder (“arthouse” with a twist, be it scholarly or burlesque) than Wood and Micheaux (fascinating misfit make-believes that nobody believes in). Jude’s cinema, however, has always found great pleasure in playing with those two styles, making them overlap to the point at which Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World was already a Jackson Pollock landscape. In short, few believed in the self-proclaimed badness of Jude, or that his subsequent films would ever be bad. Well, his latest proves them wrong.

If anything, the filmmakers championed by Jude are all known for pace of their work (a few films every year), inventiveness (i.e. solutions on a shoestring), a taste for vulgarity, presence in contemporaneity as public intellectuals who address the zeitgeist, and irreverence to the film industry’s standards (American exploitation filmmaking being the supreme art of the latter two). They’re all good examples of what Jude, citing Godard who was referring to Hitchcock using Malraux’s words on Picasso (such a Jude situation), likes to call creator(s) of forms, filmmakers concerned with mise-en-scene rather than narrative, with what – in Fassbinder’s words (quoted by Jude once again) – the film shows rather than what it is about. No wonder then that his newest film, generically titled (a first for his filmography) Dracula, is a treatise on storytelling and narratology in a more systematic manner than how his other films (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) treated image-making. And because it’s Jude, of course, it feels less like a treatise and more like a sapiential dad joke.

Dracula consists of 14 stories (more or less), connected by the meta-narrative of Adonis Tanța addressing the audience as the director of the film, like the mad scientist narrator of B cinema – and, more precisely, the narrator of Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. Jude's unflattering alter ego is a sly, uninspired, and cynical Pat Hobby, stuck with a film he doesn’t really know what to do with. He only has a draft that was poorly received by the public, and subsequently rejected by the financers, and would become the main storyline of the actual film: a sleazy erotic show staged every night for several dubious tourists of Sighișoara, the birthplace of Vlad Țepeș (Vlad the Impaler), the historical medieval voivode who inspired the legend of Dracula. This main plot would eventually tell the story of the two leads of the XXX extravaganza – Dracula (Gabriel Spahiu), an impotent porn performer, and the Vampiress (Oana Maria Zaharia), played by a cheeky OnlyFans model. Every night, the indoor show of plastic ends with an outdoor vampire hunt – Dracula's and the Vampiress' evil plan fails, they try to escape, and the spectators must then find them and bring them back. One night, however, the two decide to escape for real, so the vampire hunt also becomes real; a hilarious blood-thirsty group of tourists with wooden spikes after them, all shot at night on a shaky iPhone, to the surprise and amusement of the unaware passers-by. Funnily enough, nowadays, with so many people filming all sorts of choreographies, roleplays, and make-believe on the street, Jude's iPhone-shot vampire hunt must've gone unnoticed as a sort of TikTok curiosity.

This kind of game of peek-a-boo between fiction and reality is an older interest of his, masterfully explored in I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians – another film about the making of a show, this time a theatrical reenactment of the WW2 Romanian fascist military campaign in Odessa, staged in one of the main public squares in Bucharest. “Barbarians” ends with the premiere of the show, which was, of course, publicly staged for the sole purpose of the film, but inevitably became a public event with a mixed audience of actors, extras, crew etc., directed by Jude, and unaware passers-by who, (seemingly) encouraged by the actors, (seemingly) got involved in the happening of history, booing the Soviets, applauding the fascists, etc. Dracula has a similar interest in the diffuse violence that’s in the air – arguably, a more virulent, more violent violence than that of 2018. Last year, following the worrisome growth of the extreme right in the 2024 parliamentary vote, the Romanian Constitutional Court cancelled the national presidential elections just a few days before the second round, citing evidence of external political intervention (allegedly Russian), which sparked controversy. Around the same time, a joke about people who share the most ridiculous AI-generated images on Facebook in delirious good faith, as if they were real, was gaining popularity on social media. Dracula, shot in summer 2024, between the parliamentary elections and the presidential ones, is an offspring of that chaos and confusion. Uncoincidentally, the figure of Vlad the Impaler, legendary for his cruelty, was heavily reappropriated by the extreme right.

Back to the film, since the story of Dracula and the Vampiress didn't satisfy the producers, Jude's alter ego uses programs of artificial intelligence to generate new stories that would complete his, creating a popular (mainstream & populist) film about vampires. The popular film is another older interest of Jude’s; in fact, the subtitle of his Bad Luck Banging and Loony Porn (2021) was “sketch for a popular film”. A subtitle that, in this sense, proved to be an artwork of detournement and ready-mades: it is indeed a film of popular tropes, kinky sex, fast and furious cars and superpowers, but Jude renders every such little spectatorial comfort uneasy: sex is cringe, cars are scrap metal (parked on the side walk), CGI is bad etc. Jude, unlike many of his favourites, is not a creator of forms so much as a philosopher of forms and, among other things, Dracula features his interest in “primitive” forms, ranging from the 18^th-century novel to silent cinema, and arranging them side by side with the much-anticipated star of the film: the moving images generated by artificial intelligence.

There are two types of AI images: the real ones, most of them replacing big budget conventional scenes – urban establishing shots, vampire erotica, cottagecore snow, a zombie apocalypse, just like filmmakers in the past used found footage of war, natural disasters etc. when necessary, with AI thus becoming a document of the popular imaginary and imagery – and the unreal ones, the films that the AI (named Dr. AI JUDEX 0.0 and speaking with Jude’s voice) directs for the filmmaker played by Tanța. The former have an essential place in Jude's cinema: now, “sketches for popular films” can free themselves of and become ideas, images, and images of ideas. We’ve seen it before, in Alexander Kluge’s filmmaking, in James Benning’s, and just like these two, Jude now seems to be doing a thing of his own… and for his own. The latter parts of Dracula, all the short and medium “AI” films that bomb the main storyline – different attempts at “popular” stories of love (an adaptation of a Romanian Komsomol novella), nostalgia (a wealthy old lady face-fucked by a Dracula/Vlad the Impaler who escaped a communist historical epic), a proletarian zombie apocalypse, all made with minimal means and maximum effect – are simply way too much, cannibalizing each other until the film disappears completely in an underwhelming act of self-effacement. The joke is not funny anymore, and the very concept of “punitive entertainment”, of a more and more grotesque deconstruction of spectatorial comfort and pleasure as avantgarde, is dubious, to say the least. In his previous films one could’ve felt a spectatorial complicity, precisely what Dracula lost. It is not his baddest film to date, but definitely his worst.