“Mad Men” did much to romanticize the art of the advertising agency, with many of the series’ most memorable scenes captivating the creative and strategic genius that goes into a successful sale. Not all advertising is so elaborate or so expensive, but as ‘Eight Postcards From Utopia’ makes clear, even the most practical or traditional commercials have their own cultural value. Compiled entirely from a vast archive of post-Revolution Romanian TV ads, Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s witty, chaotic documentary traces a tumultuous, more than thirty-year history of a country’s transition from socialism to capitalism – all through the ways in which everything from beer to laundry detergent to banking is presented to the viewing public.
Seemingly experimental in form but straightforward in concept, ‘Eight Postcards From Utopia’ is presented as a ‘found-footage’ film in the true sense of the word – with these vintage advertisements, often on grainy video footage, giving little sense of they have ever been. preserved with great care or with attention for future research. Working with Bucharest-based philosopher Ferencz-Flatz, who is currently working on a research project specifically devoted to postsocialist advertising, firefighter author Jude takes a more rhetorically passive approach here than in his sharper fictional work. There is no narrative or secondary commentary to contextualize the excerpts, aside from the nine chapter headings (the eight postcards of the title, plus an epilogue) that roughly divide this deluge of content into (often overlapping) thematic sections.
It’s left to viewers to parse the implications of the way the filmmakers and Jude’s long-time editor Cătălin Cristuțiu have sequenced and pieced together these banal flashes from an ambitious past: some connections are blatant, others oblique, though it’s always fun to puzzle them out. That curiosity factor, plus a high degree of comedy of how we lived at the time in the selections themselves, should make the short, digestible ‘Eight Postcards’ a favorite of festival programmers beyond Locarno. In distribution terms, though, it’s perhaps better suited to specialist streaming platforms – not at all inappropriate for a work that can feel like a very confused dive down the YouTube rabbit hole. (The film was presented in Locarno as a double bill with Jude’s ‘Sleep #2’, a hypnotic, hour-long observation of the year-round scene at Andy Warhol’s grave in Pittsburgh; however, the two are not formally siblings . they fit well as a double reflection on cycles of popular culture and nostalgia.)
“What belongs to everyone belongs to no one,” says an advertisement in the opening chapter of the film, “The Romanian Paradox.” It is a slogan that, depending on the context, can be read as an idyllic promise or a threat regarding the communal way of life. Here, as with a 1995 PSA that proudly announced “the largest privatization program in Romanian history,” it is indicative of a country that, having just shed its status as a socialist republic, is eager to sell its population to the possibilities of personal wealth.
To this end, overtly political advertisements blend with consumer commercials that blend individual empowerment with national pride, leapfrogging recent history into the distant past. “Long Live the Imperial Party,” boasts a place for imperial vodka, the pun referring not to a progressive future but to the muscular hedonism of Roman Dacia, while other ads similarly indulge in the ennobling gladiator iconography, too even if it’s just for Pepsi. A beer advert takes a different approach, putting a positive spin on national hardship by promising a taste ‘as intense as life in Romania’ – not a drink, nor a country, for the faint of heart.
This macho attitude is echoed in many of the film’s other chapters, but becomes most specifically gendered in “Masculine Feminine,” which exposes the predominantly patriarchal perspective of capitalism. Even ads explicitly aimed at women have a misogynistic side, from the leering pan over evenly lithe female legs in a panty spot to the dutiful feminine domesticity depicted in all kinds of detergent ads. (In an oddly toned exception, a short chapter entitled “Magique Mirage” sees a male sailor approvingly eyeing his shipmate’s fluorescent white trousers: only straight Romanian men are, it seems, exempt from Ajax’s lure.)
An additional chapter, ‘The Ages of Man’, portrays the Romanian male condition as viewed by advertisers, in tones ranging from taunting to sympathetic. In contrast to a Ministry of Defense recruitment drive that promotes a violent masculine ideal, a real estate agency advertisement depicts a young man caught in the act with his girlfriend at his mother’s house – highlighting the disempowering reality for many young men who cannot afford to leave home. The economic benefits and pitfalls of life in post-socialist Romania are most directly addressed in the ‘Money Talks’ section – while one advert from a lottery company invites viewers to ‘get ready to get rich’, sees another a woman who recently earned 12.5 million euros. leu in which she declared her intention to invest her fortune in the Romanian Investment Fund. What belongs to everyone, indeed belongs to no one.
Only the closing epilogue, “The Green Apocalypse,” feels half-baked, pointing to the environmental crisis through kitschy advertising images of Romania’s natural landscape – a sequence that would work better interstitially than as a gentle conclusion to such a vibrant anarchic story. work. Yet ‘Eight Postcards From Utopia’ sticks in your mind as a sharp socio-political tangram that can be put together in any number of ways with different academic and emotional effects: a vision of reconstruction or destruction, hope or nihilistic collapse, depending on what you are . willing to buy.
