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Uppercase Print (Radu Jude, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-03-06 08:35:56 +0000 UTC
Romanian director Radu Jude's previous film, "I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians" (quotations marks are part of the official title), was an intellectual endeavor whose ambition frequently outstripped its formal capacities. An openly Brechtian exercise designed to examine the problem of historical representation and national memory, "...Barbarians" strongly resembled the films of the German Marxist director Alexander Kluge (especially his The Patriotic Woman), but I found that it lacked a certain discipline. Jude touched upon fascism, corporate media, the attention economy, and entrenched sexism, but failed to draw firm connections between these different critical problems. It felt like a film designed to tug at various loose strands in the hope that they would all eventually unravel the same large net.
Jude's newest film could not be more different in approach. An adaptation of a 2013 piece of "documentary theater" by Gianina Cărbunariu, Uppercase Print is doggedly fixated on one specific footnote in the history of Romanian communism. While there is no doubt that this individual case represents hundreds more like it, to a greater or lesser degree, Jude takes advantage of the obsessive file-keeping and fastidious tyranny of the Securitate secret police in order to provide a deep dive into the systematic destruction of one young man's life by his own government.
Told in two parts of unequal length (a prelude and a main event, essentially), Uppercase Print is the story of 16-year-old Mugur Călinescu, who in 1981 was ratted out by friends for writing subversive messages on various public walls in chalk. The messages included statements of support for Poland's independent (and illegal) Solidarity union, and plaints regarding food shortages. Using performers who declaim their lines in a hard Brechtian style, straight to the camera, Jude presents the interviews with Călinescu, his friends, his mother and father, various teachers, and other people who were debriefed regarding the case. They are all posed on highly artificial stage sets. (More than once I thought of the similarly stilted documentary theater piece Charlie Victor Romeo, a performance of airline disaster "black box" transcripts. Same tone, same Kenneth Goldsmithian approach to textual appropriation.)
Wisely, Jude does not simply produce a piece of filmed theater, and it is in his specifically cinematic interventions that we learn something about the director's own attitude toward Călinescu and those in his orbit. Between the police case set-pieces, Jude has edited in contemporaneous segments from Romanian state television. We see awkward variety shows, over-produced folk dances, a visit to a refrigerator factory, a segment on agriculture, and of course, many parades and speeches praising Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu.
With the comparison of these two categories of material -- television and police interviews -- Jude shows us that, under Romanian communism, every public action is a kind of performance. Double-consciousness abounds. You are saying and doing some approximation of what you think you are supposed to believe, with enough conviction that, when someone inevitably listens in with the intention of informing on you, they can report that you were saying and doing what you should have been, or at the very least, working as hard as possible to seem as though you were.
Mugur Călinescu's act, in and of itself, was hardly dangerous. But it was its spontaneity, the unmitigated gall of behaving like a free agent, that had to be quashed. In the end of Uppercase Print, we learn that the boy died of leukemia, under mysterious circumstances. A trio of Securitate officials perform their dismay at the very idea that they poisoned Călinescu's coffee with radium. After all, they were rehabilitating him, reaching out to him. The state does not kill anyone. When duplicity and double-talk are the lingua franca, the simplest statement becomes a death sentence.
