Sleep #2

«The most wonderful thing about living is to be dead» – Andy Warhol (quoted in the opening of Radu Jude’s Sleep 2)

«It would appear that dying with dignity is just as impossible as living with dignity. (This is often the case in Jude’s films.)» Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr on Radu Jude’s A Film for Friends

At one point in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, after following its main character through the under-construction ruins of Bucharest, the camera slowly pans, stops, and takes a candid look, as if anew in this world, at an everyday flower growing out of concrete. It might seem like yet another irony of the Romanian satirist, but I find it dead-serious: the irreconcilable Radu Jude is uneasy with living, as his cinema reinforces time and time again, precisely because he thinks so highly of life. In fact, there wouldn’t be much left of his films without their capricious humanism, a very contemporary kind that is difficult to put into words: there cannot be heroes in a world deprived of dignity, which makes so many people alike, yet without them knowing. Funnily enough, Sleep #2, a desktop essay made out of EarthCam footage of Andy Warhol’s grave (https://www.earthcam.com/usa/pennsylvania/pittsburgh/warhol/#google_vignette), is his most serene film to date.

Jude’s interest for Warhol’s art has been known for a few years now, and yet nobody could’ve predicted Sleep #2. A rendition of Warhol’s radical cinematic practices – “bad filmmaking” – his static takes, indifferent zooms and philosophy of pop, the film is a poetic meditation on work, surveillance, public space, and image form. Watching a video decomposing into pixels seems to Jude no less than a formative act of understanding cinema, as didactic as punk. What makes him so special to modern cinephilia is a certain flair of his, one of watching a screen, any screen, and understanding its glass, desktop, and interface as a landscape, and the landscape as mise-en-scène, as something given yet subject to change. Warhol understood the same about portraits. In the end, there’s no principial difference between a landscape and a portrait.

Sleep #2 criss-crosses two of Warhol’s most famous works in cinema: Sleep, made in 1964 – five hours of his lover at the time John Giorno, sleeping, exposing himself to an erotic of seeing and being seen, more abstract as time passes and his closed-up body (now public, abstract, desexualized) becomes one with darkness – and his following monumental experiment, Empire (1965), where the Empire State Building, one of the most public-private buildings, is recorded statically, resulting in an 8-hour, nightlong observational. By overexposing the intimate act of sleeping, Warhol makes it public; conversely, overexposing the Empire State Building offers the viewer a feeling of intimacy with an image larger than life.

Jude’s Sleep #2 is between the two: because Warhol’s grave is a tourist attraction in itself, and the EarthCam footage shows all kind of people coming to have a look at Warhol’s one-of-a-kind. It’s an uneasy, fascinating watch: amusingly-stupid, with tens of people being there to see for themselves, to photograph themselves etc., a somehow blasphemous, somehow pious choreography, pilgrimage and grave-robbery at once… the perfect afterlife – and afterimage – for Andy Warhol. At the same time, Jude sees it all on his own private screen, which he records. Sleep #2 is a raw desktop essay about the private consumption of images, peepholes, and blind spots: most often, one wonders what is happening on screen, as most visitors have their backs turned to the camera. It’s a first-person narrative with no illusions to it – we hear Jude coughing, just as we see him zooming in and out the graveyard. He even mutes the sound once to make the tourists’ presence on camera seem more emphatic, as in a silent comedy.

He amuses himself with these images – but in no pejorative way whatsoever. The film is structured into seasons – the footage was recorded between January 2022 and January 2023 – each invoked by a text-over haiku, distressing and serene as haiku are. With them in mind, one can easily understand the poetry of small gestures in the touristic footage, which, even when “nothing happens”, is indeed full of life: one guy shows his ass (to the camera?), another poses for a tourist photo. A family visits: each one is moving awkwardly and unpredictably, making sense out of the space – the boys are yawning. The counter-images of these anonymous drifters and workers (Jude also insists on footage of the caretakers, people who, in a way, work for Andy Warhol, while Andy Warhol himself works forever) are the nocturnal shots of the same grave, with their pixeled darkness, artificial lights, and fairytalelike forest animals, cutely mysterious deer, bunnies, and other wild pairs of lightful eyes. And 1+1, image with counter-image, makes Sleep #2 Jude’s most serene film, a statement of sorts about life – and afterlife – as poetics.