Purchase Nothing by Moonlight: Eight Postcards from Utopia and Sleep #2

Still image from Eight Postcards from Utopia (Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală, 2024), dir. Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz.

In his unfinished Arcades Project, written between 1927 and 1940, Walter Benjamin described advertising as capitalism’s virtual reality. The section “Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville” notes how advertising transforms the meaning of things: “Laid out on a side table in a tavern, stockings make for an ethereal meat counter.”1 In advertising, objects take on a magical meaning, creating a collective dreamworld. Eight Postcards from Utopia (Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală, 2024), directed by Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz, plays with the magical allure of commodities, featuring witches, flying plates, brooms moved by an invisible hand, and an enchanted vacuum cleaner that sucks images out of a television.

Composed entirely of found footage, the film weaves together ads from postcommunist Romanian TV, creating what Benjamin called “dream kitsch,” a trashy collage of desires and illusions in the wake of state communism’s collapse. Eight Postcards from Utopia had its US premiere at Doc Fortnight 2025, New York MoMA’s festival of international nonfiction film and media. Jude and Ferencz-Flatz’s seventy-one-minute montage is both a bizarre, laugh-out-loud satire and a nostalgic reflection on the decade after Ceauşescu’s execution in 1989, when Romania was undergoing neoliberal shock therapy. If one were to interpret the film as a document of post-socialist transition, it is a distorted one, where the complex, disorienting realities of transition are suspended in the cuckoo land of capitalist commercials.

The montage preserves something of the psychedelic flow of zapping through nineties trash TV at night. Bears, vodka, tracksuits, horses, gypsies, vampires, and TVs flying out of windows flash across the screen. Edited by Catalin Cristuțiu, the film is structured into eight thematic chapters and an epilogue. Some clips are shortened, others are defamiliarized by removing and adding sound or through abrupt cuts, are some punchlines are deferred. At times, the montage of scenes is ingenious—moving from a brothel, through a curtain, into an operating theater.

In the West, advertising had grown increasingly sophisticated by the 1980s, embracing postmodern aesthetics and self-referential irony. The post-socialist ads in Eight Postcards from Utopia, however, feel naive in their attempt to seduce comrades-turned-customers. This raw sincerity gives the fictionalized material an almost documentary truth. Glossing over the country’s harsh economic reality, the ads in the film offer deodorant for “men who feel like men,” mobile phones, casinos, cars, beer, call girls in leopard-print dresses, hotels, fridges, banks, printers, and an endless parade of meat—everything bathed in neon light and set to a Eurotrash soundtrack.

The project is a perfect fit for Jude, known for his devilishly satirical comedies, and Ferencz-Flatz, who translated Benjamin and Adorno into Romanian. In the nineties, before becoming an award-winning director associated with the Romanian New Wave, Jude himself worked in advertising to make a living, eventually directing commercials for Romanian television. It is unclear whether any of the trashy clips in the film are his own.

The opening vignette, “History of the Romanians,” features a Roman soldier on a battlefield, his thinly plucked eyebrows and tribal bicep tattoo evoking nineties imperial glory fueled by Pepsi. Romania’s capitalist future is tied to its heroic yet barbaric past (“Maybe we’ll never be Germans! But if I don’t start acting civilized, who will?”). Later we see a medieval feast laden with meat; only Dero Activ can clean the tablecloths afterward, and it’s even bartered for the princess. In one surreal clip, an astronaut floats in a spaceship, trying to catch sausages. Of course there is also a Dracula amusement park.

Memories of not-so-recent communism and the horrors of Ceauşescu’s iron rule morph into dark satire when a party congress is interrupted by a phone call. Thanks to Nokia (“For us the future started yesterday!”), the Romanian consumer is finally freed from their socialist straightjacket: “First you earned your right to speak freely! Now you speak for free!” Meanwhile, the “imperial party” turns out to be dedicated to a popular vodka brand (“For imperialism!”).

Ads acquire poetic or comedic qualities through montage. In Benjamin’s view, advertisements function much like surrealist texts; both “treat words like trade names,” revealing “figments such as those earlier thought to be hidden in the cache of ‘poetic’ vocables.”2 His example, a streetcar poster for Bullrich Salt, demonstrates how an ad can be as memorable as a great poem. Jude and Ferencz-Flatz play with this idea, presenting ads as concrete poems that fuse images, graphics, and rhythm: “But guests will be guests and stains will be stains.”

Not all the footage comes from TV advertising; the directors also incorporate behind-the-scenes material and promotional events. One of the most surreal of these snippets is a rehearsal of a one-line ad, repeated endlessly in different intonations. Some clips were found online, others came from video cassettes salvaged by scavengers at Bucharest flea markets. YouTube was a goldmine for kitsch, and postproduction companies provided copies of their ads. The result is a wildly entertaining Arcades Project of post-socialist Romania—a chaotic, overwhelming archive that evokes nostalgia and melancholy.

Anything can be commodified, everything absorbed into commercial logic—and anyone can become a billionaire. One clip has an ambulance racing to a newsstand: “Universal newspaper—read it before it goes bankrupt!” In the virtual reality of ads, the rocky transition to a free-market economy gets muted by giddy excitement: “The great privatization race—you must win it too!” Watching those ads, it seems as if history ended in a consumerist Wild East. The political rhetoric of state socialism is replaced by the wonders of technology and automation.

In his critique of advertising, Benjamin reflects on “the artificial light and isolation in which advertising presents its objects.” In ads he found “new synthetic realities” belonging to “the dream consciousness of the collective.”3 Eight Postcards from Utopia turns this collective dream consciousness inside out, unveiling how communist propaganda was seamlessly replaced by get-rich-quick schemes and dreams of an automated capitalism where hair washes itself and detergent does not only remove stains but makes people invisible.

What is the “utopia” evoked in the title of Jude and Ferencz-Flatz’s film? Are these ads not, in fact, dystopian? Benjamin saw in advertising an “image (Gleichnis) of the everyday in utopia.”4 In a similar vein, Eight Postcards from Utopia can be read as a parable of postcommunist utopia. Like a surrealist text, ads construct a virtual reality. Benjamin’s Bullrich Salt poster “contained nothing else besides the words; but around these written characters there was suddenly and effortlessly configured that desert landscape of the poster,” which furnishes “an image for things that no one in this mortal life has yet experienced,” an “image of the everyday in utopia.”5

Commodities shape capitalist bodies. In Jude and Ferencz-Flatz’s montage, the body itself becomes a consuming, gulping, desiring, and broken machine linked to other miraculous devices, including an automated hair-washing machine resembling a space helmet. The film also plays with gender stereotypes and the cheesy eroticism of advertisements; it sexualizes profane objects while objectivizing female bodies when it pairs blonde and brunette women with different kinds of beer (a trope also used in Western ads from the nineties).

The directors not-so-subtly intervene by setting images of meat to the moaning plea of a phone-sex service. The effect of the montage is ridiculous, if a little clichéd. Jude’s cinema has been described as a mix of “deadpan, unsparing black humor” and “a politically urgent, inclusive sensibility that resists the prejudices of a resurgent far-right,” as exemplified by films such as Uppercase Print (2020) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021).6

While Uppercase Print dissects communist propaganda TV, Eight Postcards from Utopia makes an even bolder argument: commercials can be just as surreal, if not more so, than political propaganda. The film uses absurdity and slapstick to express social critique. The vignette “Anatomy of Consumption” is perhaps the most edited and conceptually layered part, stripping away sound to focus on gestures. A curated mashup of clips zooms in on gazes, hands, and bodies, weaving them into an artificial choreography directed by the commodities. Here, the film goes under the skin, exposing how advertising seeks to seduce all senses, smell, taste, and touch.

The vignette “Epilogue: The Green Apocalypse” explores how commercials recreate the natural world, featuring bees, pets, animated clouds, and a waterfall of milk. Advertising as capitalism’s virtual reality ultimately blurs the line between the natural and the artificial. In the world of commercial dream kitsch, nothing exists beyond artifice. Benjamin’s reflections on advertising culminate in a note both cautionary and mysterious: “Purchase nothing by moonlight.”7

The artificiality of nature also pervades Jude’s Sleep #2, a sixty-two-minute experimental desktop documentary. This eerie montage is composed of live footage from Andy Warhol’s grave, now a pilgrimage site for pop-art aficionados. Warhol rests alongside his parents, Rusyn immigrants from present-day Slovakia, at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Warhol’s performance is not over yet; a twenty-four-hour live webcam is installed at his grave, capturing all sorts of strange postmortem visits by people during the day and animals at night. The film consists entirely of screen recordings that Jude collected over a year, assembling them into an absurd posthumous portrait of Warhol.

Sleep #2 was first screened alongside Eight Postcards at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival. Although conceived separately, it’s impossible to watch the two films back-to-back without seeing them in dialogue; both deal with death and desire, commercialization, and the spectacle of performance. Sleep #2 opens with an ironic quote from Warhol: “The most wonderful thing about living is to be dead.” The film begins in darkness, with the camera fixed on a moonlit gravestone, birds singing in the background, with a caption that reads: “Spring rain; / It begins to darken; / Today also is over.”

Haikus by Yosa Buson, Matsuo Basho, and Shoha mark the changing seasons, with Warhol’s grave lending them a morbid tone: “To wake, alive, in this world, / what happiness! / Winter rain.” The scenes shift between day and night, as if stage lights were being turned on and off. The grave is nestled in an enchanted forest of grass and flowers; the bush beside it blooms and withers as life swirls all around. At night deer, squirrels, and rabbits pay their respects, just as humans do during the day.

The camera fixed on the grave reveals subtle changes, shifting colors, light and dark, and extreme weather, from torrential rain to snowstorms. Jude alternates between close-ups and wide shots, capturing visitors who leave flowers, Ukrainian flags, and Campbell’s soup cans, take selfies, pose, smoke, joke, or scribble notes, all within their fifteen-minute slot. A gardener tending the grave and a family of nosy deer become recurring figures.

The static shot creates a strange atmosphere, part CCTV, part landscape painting, with white noise, voices, breath, and birdsong in the background. When heavy wind shakes the camera, nature becomes an active participant in Jude’s Warholian experiment. A thunderstorm strikes and lightning floods the screen, followed by raindrops on the lens. At times, the sun burns so brightly that the sepia image gets overexposed: “Not a leaf stirring: / How awesome / The summer grove!”

A tribute to Warhol’s voyeuristic films, Sleep #2 channels pop-art paranoia into a portrait of our age of twenty-four-hour surveillance and social media. Like Warhol’s Sleep (1963), a five-hour loop of his lover John Giorno sleeping, Jude turns the unstaged into performance. Sleep #2 is an anti-film that pushes our attention to its limit. Warhol’s mentor, Jonas Mekas, described how his films “recorded a world unlike any other.”8 They “cannot be recreated, cannot be repeated, just as Eisenstein’s films cannot be repeated, recreated by somebody else.” Similarly, Jude’s Eight Postcards and Sleep #2 are, to borrow from Mekas, “anthropological documents of a certain sensibility,” offering a hyperreal “slice of a period.”

Some pilgrims in Sleep #2 are aware of the camera, waving enthusiastically, while others remain oblivious; one man, absorbed in his phone, is unknowingly watched from behind. A group gathers for a performance led by a man in a blonde Warhol wig and a signature sixties blue-and-white striped shirt, carefully staging a photo. In another shot, people play guitar, their faint folk songs adding a macabre soundtrack. One man, cheered on by friends off-screen, hesitantly flashes his backside to the camera, nodding to Warhol’s Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964). If anything, Warhol does not rest in peace.