A teenager with some chalk
Interview
A teenager with some chalk
By Nick Pinkerton
An interview with Radu Jude about his 2020 film Uppercase Print.
Uppercase Print plays Metrograph Friday, November 12 and Sunday, November 14, as well as streaming At Home through November 23.
Before Radu Jude’s Uppercase Print was a film, it was a 2012 stage play by Gianina Cărbunariu; before it was a stage play, it was a mountain of documents. These documents, collected in the National Council for Studying the Secret Services (Securitate) Archives (CNSAS), pertain to the case of Mugur Călinescu, a 16-year-old from the small city of Botoșani who, in 1981, ran afoul of Romanian state security for putting up graffiti critical of general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian government. Jude, following Cărbunariu’s lead, tells Călinescu’s story through dramatic readings excerpted from Securitate documents, adding a new twist of his own to the material by interspersing these staged sections with archival footage taken from Romanian television, combining to offer a two-sided view of the country’s secret and public-facing life during the long Ceaușescu years.
I first saw Uppercase Print at the Ghent Film Festival in 2020. The following year at the same festival, where Jude’s Golden Bear-winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) was playing, I caught up with the director, then fresh from Bucharest, which became our first topic of conversation.
I was there only once, on a jury for the NexT Festival, which was being held at the Romanian Peasant Museum because it had lost its usual venue—as I understood it, because most if not all of the cinemas in the city center had been shut down due to concerns over safety and structural integrity following that huge nightclub fire in 2015
Yes, and Bucharest is in a seismic hotspot, there are earthquakes.
I was told much of the danger had to do with shoddy, shabby construction in the 1970s and ’80s, unqualified, corner-cutting contractors, things like this.
Yes, but it’s not only that, because after that there wasn’t a program to rehabilitate these buildings, to reinforce them. It’s an old problem, never fixed; it's always the same problem.
The Cinematheque was still open, at least.
Yes, I grew up in that cinema. This is how I started to find films. I was in high school, a colleague took me there and it was a magical place, because this was in ’93, ’94, ’95, when Romania was still culturally isolated after the revolution. It was impossible to see films in other places, I mean classical films. We still had only one television channel, which showed nothing interesting. So yeah, that was a really great place.
But you know, [the Cinematheque] has remained in exactly the same state that it was in 25 years ago. Now that the world has changed, nobody wants to come and see a black-and-white print of a color film by Coppola or Fellini when you have it on your computer. The people running the cinema are still making the same mistakes over and over again. They didn’t adapt the structure to take on the new changes, and they don’t receive funding… The last time I was there was like ten years ago, for an Ozu 35mm copy screened by the Japanese Embassy.
Otherwise, it’s probably a lot of the same prints that have been run to death.
Not even that. Yes, some of the prints are broken. It’s really a mess... It’s because the procedure to submit a film for distribution in Romania in the ’60s and ’70s, I think, was to submit it to censors on 35mm, because it was before video or VHS tapes. So Romania received these prints. They rejected the films—American films mostly, but also European films. But they made a copy, a pirate copy, in black-and-white. So this is why I saw Apocalypse Now (1979) in black-and-white; A Clockwork Orange (1971), black-and-white; The Godfather (1972), black-and-white. I knew them, I saw them in black-and-white. Because it was before the internet, you couldn’t check.
Yeah, Scorsese talks about that, growing up in New York…
And watching movies on the television.
Exactly. Watching on a black-and-white television, and then, 10 years later, discovering that Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) is actually a color film.
But even then, I read an interview with Scorsese where he said he was never pleased about the red color in Taxi Driver (1976). He said the red is not good. I said, ‘Man, if you knew how I saw your films in black-and-white copy, there was no red problem.’
That reminds me of a Paul Schrader interview where he’s talking about issues of availability and access, and the degree to which these problems are constantly being spoken of today. He says something to the effect of: “Listen, I went to film school in the ’60s. We watched Carl Theodor’s Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) on a stomped-on 16mm dupe projected on a bed sheet. You kids don’t have too much to complain about.”
And you know what the problem is? Now, with access to everything almost instantly… I feel it’s a loss. Because the excitement to wait for months to see a film like that—A Clockwork Orange appeared [at the Cinematheque], and I was watching it with all the concentration in the world. Now, I have 100 films on my laptop and I forget what I have.
I think we’re close to the same age. And I grew up in the States, where obviously there aren’t going to be the same access issues that you grew up with, but even still, I remember going to film school and going through film history books and seeing stills that would stick in my craw, and I’d spend months just imagining the movie from the still, waiting for the opportunity to actually see it. What is this thing? What is this movie actually like when it moves?
It’s good not to hand them everything, have everything available instantly.
It’s just different. But I do value that experience of anticipation and fantasy.
Yeah, exactly. It’s over, that’s it.
I’d like to ask you a few things specifically about Uppercase Print. I don’t know anything about the theater piece it originates from, and I’d be interested to know about its history and how you came to it.
Well, Gianina Cărbunariu, who wrote this play—it’s improper to say wrote—I will clarify immediately; she’s a theater director mostly, and a playwright, so to speak. She always writes her plays but she also does a lot of what today is called documentary theater, or political theater, historical theater, where she interviews people and re-stages their experiences, this kind of thing. In this case, the text of the play was, in a way, already made. She didn’t write the words, she just found this secret police Securitate file of this teenager, organized it chronologically in order to have a clear arc with the story, and then staged it.
I had the rights, of course, it’s in the credits, but how to put it—you could say it’s ‘based on a play,’ but it’s not a play, it’s actually based on this file. She staged it and I saw it. That was like ten years ago. I was very impressed. It was very well acted, and extremely cinematic, with a lot of movements and projections on the set.
At the time, I didn’t think, ‘Wow, I would like to make a film about that.’ That came something like five years after. [But] it stayed in my head. I had wanted to use the text for a bigger project, actually, which didn’t happen. The good part is that even though it didn’t succeed in being made—because I wanted to make a big historical thing with many time periods, with many stories, and that was supposed to be only one small part in this big project—what remains was still so big that I could do something with it. I said, “Why not make a film only with this text? With this not-complicated film?” To make a dialogue between what is called history, cinema, theater—I started to think about these kind of things.
Then I had this idea to try to make it break the text. I wanted to stage it, I knew I wanted to stage it more theatrically than Janina did. Then I said, “Well, maybe I should break it up with images from the same time?” Because the file actually had the dates of all the events, all the interviews. So it was like, “What’s the most secret thing? It’s a Securitate file. What’s the most public thing at that time? It’s the television archive.” So it was a matter of going to both ends of the spectrum of documents that we have; you have the most secret one here, and the most public there. Let’s clash them together and see what happens.
With the juxtapositions or the interstitials from the television archives, is it largely chronological? Or is it more thematic?
Well, first of all, the criteria for the research was chronological: what can we find from the same dates? Or actually, what was broadcast? It’s not the production date, it was the broadcast date—that’s how the archive is organized. We researched that a lot. But because the archive is quite badly organized you don’t really find... you don’t know what exactly is on which roll of 16mm or Beta tape, because you only have the title.
So, the research was done, let’s say, based on serendipity or intuition. Just taking [material] from the shelf and seeing what was there. There is quite a lot of material from that time, actually, surviving in bad conditions, but still surviving. So it was impossible to search very methodically. It was also the fact that I wasn’t searching for anything specific. Sometimes the lady in the archive would say, “What are you looking for?” I said, “I don’t know. I want to see.” I really didn’t know what I wanted to see. Of course, when you say this kind of thing, it doesn’t seem serious—especially in cinema, because people in cinema always say that they want to control everything. It’s one of the marks of a great director, sometimes, that everything was under their control. In this case, it was not.
Even still, if you’re looking day and date, you have a fair amount of broadcast television to choose from. Within those constructs that you’ve designed for yourself, you’re making choices.
Oh, of course. But sometimes I did it randomly, because we didn’t have the budget at that time to see the whole archive. What was interesting was when other chance things appeared. For instance, you took a print or a Beta tape that, according to the catalog of the television archive, was supposed to be something, but was something else. And it was much more interesting. The beginning of the film—that is not a broadcast, it was from a tape with people reciting a poem for Ceaușescu, and it’s one of the takes. It was at the end of a Beta tape with other material, which had been recorded over it. So, at the end, I found this small piece, which seemed to me strongly symbolic, very strong like that.
A little chance operation.
A chance operation.
You’re getting onto your John Cage thing there.
Yeah, I think all the avant-gardes operated—sometimes more, sometimes less—using chance encounters like that. I was a little bit doing it this way.
You mentioned there were projections in the original staging. Was it archival material that was projected?
No, it was only the pages from the file, or photographs.
Looking at the set that you had built, I feel like that had to be very different from the stage set. Everything turned in on itself in a way that I can’t imagine would work in a theater in the round.
It’s true. It’s made only for the film. [The stage set] was very different. Janina staged it in a minimalist set.
A sort of black box?
Sort of. Using the walls of the theater hall for the projections. So it was almost no set, an empty space. And she had only four or five actors who played all the parts. I liked the device, but I couldn’t use it; no one would have understood if all of a sudden the same actor was playing multiple roles.
How did you cast for the film? Because you have such an incredible variety of types. Looking at documents that were close to 40 years old, were you after a continuity of type in your casting? Like in 2019, this person is the equivalent to the kind of man or woman I could envisage playing whatever the equivalent role would’ve been in 1981?
I never thought about that, not explicitly. It was more an intuition thing. But now if you mention, for instance, the main guy. I met him because I did a casting among high school theater groups and he was in one of these. He was passionate about theater. He’s really a little bit like the character. He’s a kind of idealistic teenager, and very, I would say ‘pure,’ but it’s maybe a word to be... but somehow a clean guy, a nice person, an idealist, in a way.
"It’s one of the marks of a great director, sometimes, that everything was under their control. In this case, it was not."
One of the things that really strikes me about the film and, I suppose, the original text, is that it gives a sense of what an incredible bureaucratic apparatus once existed in your country.
Because we’re dealing with, to most contemporary minds, such a minor infraction. And watching, you have a sense that you’re hearing only a tiny fraction of the total documentation that piled up around it. Getting the perp’s school friends in to testify against him, planting bugs… it’s an incredible amount of bureaucratic busywork set in motion by a teenager writing stuff on the fences with chalk.
Actually, it was very interesting to see that the secret police—apart from the nastiness of it all, even apart from the bureaucratic side that you mentioned—was partially ineffective. People were more scared because they knew it existed. And you never knew—that was, I think, the dark part of it. Because in Ceaușescu’s [regime], it wasn’t like in the Stalinist times, being afraid that that they will take you and send you to a gulag or something, it didn’t happen like that. But people were afraid because they felt surveilled all the time. It was like a paranoia. Everybody was afraid of everybody else, everybody was suspicious of everybody else. This poisons the everyday life, because people were afraid to have friends, in a way. Many of them, especially in the big cities. Of course, you see it. I think this bureaucracy was also trying to justify their existence.
I mean, so much of it just feels like busywork. So many people employed by the secret police but not much to do. When there is even a hint of excitement, like, ‘Ooh, we had some insurgent activity in our midst, we’ve got to get 30 plainclothes cops to loiter around construction sites to crack this case.’
Actually, this feeling of being the surveilled, from my generation, disappeared after the revolution of 1989. But now—and this is one of the reasons Janina made the play, and one of the reasons I made the film—nowadays you feel again that you’re being spied on or surveilled. Not only in Romania, where the secret service is somehow getting bigger and shadier in its operations, but also the stories from the Cambridge Analytica, from the possibility of being surveilled through Facebook accounts, laptops, smartphones.
Uppercase Print and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn are very interesting to look at next to one another, which I had the opportunity to do recently.
Because you watch Uppercase Print and, ‘Oh my God! Authoritarian communism. This is the worst system in the entire world. It’s such a boon to be rid of this.’ And then you watch Loony Porn and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, actually maybe global capitalism is the worst thing that’s ever existed. We need to move on to literally anything else.’
Yeah, it’s true.
You’ve really got a ‘fucked both ways’ kind of dialectic going on between these films.
With the difference being that what is happening nowadays, my feeling is that it’s our own creation. It’s not being imposed.
Absolutely. We are our own secret police and we’re not even getting paid for it anymore.
Not only secret police, but–
At least they had some job security.
Exactly. It’s something that you feel that, in theory, at least we could stop if we wanted to. It’s like global warming; you can say that we can stop it if we want, but you have to want it in a deep way, not just to say we want to, and not just personally, but collectively.
I feel the same—of course, on a lower scale—about the organization of cinema institutions in Romania, which is centralized to an organism called the National Film Center. There are a lot of problems, as in every institution, but it’s a lot of problems that I think, in one week, if we wanted to, could be changed. If everybody involved—film directors, producers, actors—wanted to, if for one day we had some solidarity just to go there and demand it... But it doesn’t happen because everybody has their own agenda, their own hatred against others, competitive spirit or whatever. You cannot put together the people to change it.
One of the things that’s fascinating about the rise in conspiracy-minded thinking is that I think often it actually gives a great deal of credit to people’s organizational skills by advancing this idea that there’s some kind of Machiavellian command from above going on that accounts for the world being as it is, rather than things being the result of a gradual snowballing of the intolerable, and people becoming accustomed to a certain way of doing business, which I believe is more likely.
It happens today, in Romania, only 30% of the population have been vaccinated. It feels like a collective psychosis, I never saw anything like it. Somebody was making a report, a small documentary, in a hospital, and you can see people dying of COVID and still refusing an oxygen mask because they believe they will be infected with something through the mask. People really prefer to die than to take the vaccine? I don’t know where it comes from.
Everybody tries to find an explanation. Someone says it’s from the communist times, others say it’s because people don’t believe politicians anymore in Romania, or it’s because how fake news circulates on social media… I don’t know which explanation is true, but the phenomenon is scary and fascinating at the same time. Even in my family, there are people who took the first dose and then refused to take the second. Or people who became anti-vaxxers after they took the vaccine, in the meantime. Really!
That’s a new one on me.
It’s amazing.
With the archival work, you’re looking at material from back in ’81, a period when you would’ve been a little kid. And this is around the time when you start forming media memories, or at least it was in my case. Going through the archives, did you have any experiences of, ‘Oh yeah, I remember this guy?’
No. What’s interesting is the fact that we’re looking at ’81, but also ’85, a part of the story happens in ’85, when I was quite a bit bigger. First of all, I lived in the countryside at my grandparents’.
So you weren’t too plugged in.
We didn’t have a television set. Anyway, the programs were all full of propaganda bullshit; I remember being obsessed with cartoons that we couldn’t get, because they were only on Saturday for half an hour, cartoons. For all my generation, to see them for only 10 minutes a week was very frustrating. But what I remember was basically what I found. Now, of course, you see it with new eyes, you see other details you didn’t see as a kid, that’s for sure. That’s one thing.
The second is that I don’t come from a family who went to the movies, or only very, very rarely. So television was the most important medium … That was interesting, because my grandparents were peasants. I clearly remember that whenever Ceaușescu or propaganda material appeared, my grandfather would start cursing: “Lies, lies, lies,” all the time. Nobody believed those things. I think this is one of the traps of seeing the film like this, because you could say, “Well, people were brainwashed with this thing.” But at some point it became a kind of empty rhetorical circle. They pretended to create propaganda to brainwash the people, and people pretended they accepted. But in actuality, nobody took it seriously.
You get it in the mother-son, father-son recordings. At no point did they pose the question, “How dare you disrespect the regime?” It’s more like, “Okay, go in, tell them that I told you to stop listing to Radio Free Europe twice. Let’s just get our story straight.”
Even that material should be taken from another perspective, as well. Because that’s a recording the Securitate made by putting microphones in the house of these people and then transcribing it. It’s like a second hand who transcribed that.
When you hear them in these private moments, though, they’re not talking ideology. They’re talking in a very pragmatic way, “This is how we have to play this scene.”
Yes. Could be this, but it could be something else as well—it’s impossible to stage, of course, but the artificiality of the staging can perhaps suggest this idea—but the fact is that if they knew that somebody was listening to them, then perhaps they did something, like pretending they were having a private discussion. So the mother says to the kid, “You’re an idiot,” or the father, “Why did you do that? You’re an idiot,” and so on, because he knew. So it was like a kind of cat-and-mouse game.
It’s theater within theater within theater.
It could be, we don’t know. We just have a transcript text. It’s hard to convey this feeling...
Actually, Janina said that the play is about how a file is built; you have the image of how a file of a person is made by the secret police from day one until the day they end the file. I think this is in the film as well. But some of the information there, in some cases I am sure it’s completely fake. For instance, when they say that they searched writing samples of 40,000 people or something like that, I think they wanted to impress their superiors. They did probably 100 or 1,000. They say, “We did it for the whole city.”
To your previous point, and the impression of this incredible warren of busywork, the job is less to put down a dangerous enemy of the state rather than just to build a file. It’s this self-contained thing. Nobody thinks this 16-year-old is going to bring the regime down.
No, but still they were quite shocked that it happened. The regime was so well installed there, the control was so well-organized that normally these things didn’t happen. And if they did happen, they would find out immediately who was to blame. In this case, they freaked out because it took them a few weeks until they found the boy.
It comes through clearly with the bugging of the apartment. This is a thing that, stateside in the ’60s, this would be the treatment that Bobby Kennedy would only roll out for a mafia don, someone perceived to be a massive, massive threat.
There is a bit of irony in terms of the enemy of the state being a teenager.
A teenager with some chalk.
What’s interesting, I think, in the choice of this file, is the fact that after the revolution a lot of people from the intellectual world—writers, journalists, whatever—tried to justify their lack of courage against the regime, invoking all kinds of things, or thinking, actually, that they were very brave; “We did this, and that.” Then you can find this young boy from a working-class family in a province, in a small city in Romania, who was much braver than these grown-ups. It’s interesting to see what a bit of a real courage looks like. Don’t fool ourselves, yourselves, that you were brave. You were not, admit it. You were very complying. Nothing to judge here, nothing to accuse, but don’t spread this bullshit. But a few people like this boy were brave, and that’s it. It’s only this.
