Mad Men has gone to great lengths to romanticize the art of advertising, with many of the show’s most memorable scenes revolving around the creativity and strategic genius that goes into making a successful sale. Not all ads are elaborately designed or expensive, but as Eight Postcards from Utopia demonstrates, even the most useful or well-crafted commercials have their own cultural value. Radu Jude and Cristian Ferencs-Flatz’s witty and chaotic documentary, compiled entirely from a vast archive of post-revolutionary Romanian TV ads, charts the turbulent history of a country’s 30-plus-year transition from socialism to capitalism—all through the ways in which everything from beer to laundry detergent to banking services is presented to the viewing public.
Although experimental in form, the film is clear in concept, presented as a “found footage” film in the truest sense of the word—these old advertisements, often on grainy video stock, give no sense of having been carefully preserved or preserved for future scrutiny. Collaborating with Bucharest-based philosopher Ferenc Flatz, who is currently working on a research project specifically dedicated to post-socialist advertising, the diehard author Judd takes a more rhetorically passive approach here than in his more strident fiction. There is no narration or secondary commentary to contextualize the passages, save for the nine chapter headings (the eight postcards in the title, plus an epilogue) that roughly divide this torrent of content into (often overlapping) thematic threads.
Viewers can only parse the implications of the way the directors and Judd’s regular editor Catalin Christotio have sequenced these clichéd snapshots of the ambitious past: some connections are blatant, others oblique, though there’s a constant fun in untangling them. That curiosity factor, plus a high degree of comedy about how we lived back then in the same choices, should make the short, digestible Eight Postcards a favorite among festival programmers outside of Locarno. In terms of distribution, however, it may be better suited to niche streaming platforms—not entirely unsuited to a work that can feel like a deep dive down a YouTube rabbit hole. (The film was presented at Locarno as a double feature with Judd’s Sleep #2 , a hypnotic hour-long observation of the year-round goings-on at Andy Warhol’s gravesite in Pittsburgh; the two films aren’t officially sister works, though they fit well as dual reflections on the cycles of pop culture and nostalgia.)
“What belongs to everyone belongs to no one,” proclaims one of the advertisements in the opening chapter of the film, titled “The Romanian Paradox.” It’s a slogan that, depending on the context, can be read as either a utopian promise or a threat to communal ways of life—here, as with the 1995 advertisement that proudly announced “the largest privatization program in Romania’s history,” it refers to a country that has just shed its status as a socialist republic and is eager to sell its people the potential for personal wealth.
To this end, overtly political ads are intermingled with consumer advertising that conflates individual empowerment with national pride, and reaches beyond recent history to the ancient past. “Long Live the Imperial Party,” for example, boasts of the imperial status of vodka, not of a progressive future but of the powerful pleasures of the Romans of Dacia, while other ads delight in depicting noble wrestling, if only for Pepsi. A beer ad takes a different approach, putting a positive spin on national hardships by promising a taste “as strong as life in Romania”—not a drink, nor a country for cowards.
This male-dominated attitude is repeated in many other chapters of the film, though it is most notable for the sexuality of “Masculinity and Femininity,” which reveals the prevailing patriarchal view of capitalism. Even the advertisements explicitly aimed at women have a misogynistic slant, from the frying pan that peers at women’s shapely legs in a pantyhose store to the devout feminine domesticity embodied in various detergent ads. (There is a curious exception in a short chapter titled “Magic Mirage,” in which a male sailor inspects his shipmate’s fluorescent white chest: it seems that only straight Roman men are exempt from Ajax’s temptation.)
The supplementary chapter, “Human Ages,” examines the Roman male condition as seen by advertisers with a tone that ranges from mockery to sympathy. In contrast to the Defense Department’s recruitment efforts, which promote a violent male model, an advertisement for a real estate agency depicts a young man caught having sex with a woman. In case of possession In Romania, a young man lives with his mother’s girlfriend – highlighting the humiliating reality for many young people who can’t afford to leave home. “Money Talks” tackles the economic rewards and pitfalls of life in post-socialist Romania head-on – while a lottery company urges viewers to “prepare to get rich,” another advert sees a woman who recently won 12.5 million lei announce her intention to deposit her fortune in a Romanian investment fund. What belongs to everyone belongs to no one, in fact.
There’s only a seemingly ill-conceived “green apocalypse” finale, which references the environmental crisis through cliched advertising images of Romanian landscapes—sequences that might have been better placed in a temporary setting than as a soft conclusion to such a vibrant, chaotic work. Still, Eight Postcards from Utopia sticks out as a sharp sociopolitical concoction that can be assembled in any number of ways to achieve different academic and emotional effects: a vision of rebuilding or destruction, hope or nihilistic collapse, depending on what you’re willing to buy.
