Kontinental '25

17/10/2026

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Absorbing the Moment

From one perspective, Radu Jude might seem like a polemicist who, in works like Bad Luck Banging, Loony Porn, Don’t Expect Too Much From the End of the World, and now Kontinental ’25, has a few things to say about contemporary Romania, and none of them is good. Other directors in recent Romanian film have usually couched their contempt within the depiction of events, whether in The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or Police, Adjective, but Jude absorbs aspects of agitprop and the essay film into works that could seem to undo elements of New Romanian Cinema, one that has resolutely remained realist in its exploration of a given crisis. We will have more to say about that resolute realism later, and how NRC added to what neorealism generated, and that Ken Loach and Maurice Pialat developed in different ways, before the Dardenne brothers offered the visually inverse of the neorealist, but for the same ends. This realist aesthetic is still evident in Jude's work but not in quite the same way as in earlier films by the director, like The Unhappiest Girl in the World or Everybody in Our Family.

To understand this shift, without quite the negation of his earlier approach, we might think of a scene about two-thirds of the way through Kontinental ’25. The central character Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), is a bailiff in crisis after she seeks to eject a homeless man from a basement dwelling, who then kills himself. Her husband and kids have gone on holiday to Greece without her, and she tries to sort herself out in various exchanges with a friend, her mother, a priest and an ex-student. Orsolya and the ex-student are getting a drink at a cinema cafe, and while they talk in a lengthy fixed shot in the foreground, the viewer sees various events unfold in the background.  None of these adds up to narrative purpose, but all of them have the texture of the plausible. While the student and Orsolya discuss her family, Buddhism and the homeless man’s death, as they sit drinking at the bar,  behind them people are ordering drinks and food, going to the bathroom, leaving the cafe to take a phone call, ordering another drink, or reading a book. Each of these background stories has its own internal pertinence. The viewer can follow them and watch characters come and go not just as extras in a film that has to make them look like they are doing something, but as people who are doing things, however apparently trivial. When the young woman goes off to what we can assume is the bathroom, she is away for long enough for the man to look like he is beginning to wonder if she has disappeared. When, at another table, the woman leaves to take a call, or to make one, the man sits and looks like he is checking his hair in the phone’s camera. We don’t know if these are dates, just friends hanging out, or long-term relationships. But by offering the shot as both a long single take of about nine minutes, and a depth of field that keeps everything in focus, we can move between what can seem like foreground self-indulgence, and background magnanimity. As the student tells stories about Buddhists, and as they discuss Goedel and the axiomatic, while getting ever drunker, so we can move between their discussion that the ear takes in and the events the eye can observe.

It is a fine example of Jude’s respect for the New Romanian Cinema he comes out of, and the assertively essayistic, verbally oppressive approach that shows Godard’s influence. Like Godard, he comprehends both the importance of the directorially dictatorial and simultaneously the indifference that comes from this assertiveness. While many a director rescues themselves from this indifference by containing the images within a story that gives each of those captured images a narrative relevance, Jude, like Godard, flirts with that indifference by refusing to compress the images into the story, and risks the viewer seeing a filmmaker who doesn’t quite know what they are doing, while insistently telling the audience what to think. It might be more the case that a director who tells a story is more crudely asking us what to believe, while surreptitiously containing it within the content of the tale. Godard and Jude aren’t telling us what to think but asking us to think. This isn’t to decry narrative filmmaking, and certainly not to undermine the brilliance of earlier Romanian film like The Death of Mr Lazarescu and 4 Months…. It is merely to defend the type of cinema Jude is making from the type of criticisms that wouldn’t help define the work, as if the films are so self-absorbed they are against the notion of an audience. Jude says, ‘‘Of course, I consider that the film is made for an audience, like Godard used to say when he was asked, ‘Who do you make the film for?’ And he said, ‘For the audience.’ And the interviewer said, ‘Which audience?’ And Godard said, ‘The right audience.’ What can I add? I don’t know.’” (Interview Magazine) Will the right audience see that the emphasis on background detail, while also seeing the various discussions Orsolya has with her friend, priest, etc., as propositional and, finally, no more assertive than the quotidian scenes that might at first appear irrelevant?  

We can think of how films assert dramaturgically and how they resist this assertion, while still holding to the principles of show don’t tell, of exploring through mis-en-scene, dialogue and situation the claims they wish to pursue. Though films might give the impression they have nothing to say and only things to show, then even with great narrative works try to propose a counter-meaning; and see how they hold up? Is Chinatown saying that a great man is entitled to rape his daughter and his granddaughter because powerful people can do whatever they wish, and this is their right? Is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest insisting that disruptive people in a mental institution deserve to have extreme electroshock that leaves them zombified so that the institution can return to its general function? We think not, even if Noah Cross believes that he can abuse his offspring in Chinatown, and even if the film shows him getting away with it, just as Nurse Ratched would accept that McMurphy will have to receive extreme electroshock after the extent of his insubordination, as the film shows him zombified. Films can have the unhappiest ending, but that isn’t the same as proposing they insist on the most despairing of values. The narrative despair is evident all the better to make clear what better values happen to be. Whether Chinatown had shown Cross captured or killed, or surviving with his daughter dead, as we find, the value would have remained the same even if the ending had been completely different, and the same with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The films may show rather than tell, and seem to show all the more by offering pessimistic narrative conclusions, but the value would be the same whether Cross dies as a villain and McMurphy survives as a hero, indicating that both films are still telling. We know what we are supposed to think.

These are both wonderful films, so our purpose in defending Jude’s recent work isn’t to contrast them qualitatively, but to address an aspect that Jude picks up from Godard. This is the dismantling of the representational apparatus so that it can replace text and subtext, narrative assertiveness and ethical nuance, with unassertive mise-en-scene and propositional insistence. If the scene in the cinema cafe bar is so important to us, it rests on this claim. The viewer who focuses on the garrulous foreground might miss much that is going on in the busy but apparently unimportant background. One reason why this background remains ostensibly of little note is that the protagonists in the foreground don’t invoke it. Though there are occasional moments when Orsolya or the ex-student look around (when the young woman returns from the bathroom, for example), they remain distinct planes in the way that in Goodbye South Goodbye, Hou Hsiao-hsien surprises us with their sudden interrelation. As we focus on foreground action in Hou’s film, someone collapses in the background, and we might feel we have missed something by concentrating on what has been more pertinently in front of our eyes. In Kontinental ’25, the background remains secondary, but it also has a clear delineation that can leave us to follow the coherence of this space, one that could have been made easily irrelevant by a different lens turning it into a background blur. (That it was shot on an iPhone needn’t leave us thinking that this isn’t cinema.)

Like Godard, Jude understands that while text and subtext, or rather narrative event and extracted value, can work in conjunction (or rather a disjunctive conjunction), so too can the dialogical and the quotidian, the apparently assertive evidenced in the dialogue, and the apparently irrelevant in the background. Yet this is surely all the better to bring out not the ethos that underpins a story, no matter if the ending is positive or negative, so that Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are as ethically clear either way, but to show the broader interaction between the dialogically foregrounded and the apparently mundane,  one that can often appear all but ignored. In a scene between Orsoloya and her friend on a bench in the centre of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, where the entire film is set. The scene concentrates on the discussion between Orsoloya and Dorina, and the background is invoked only once when Dorina looks behind her and says, for all the talk of Transylvania having always been Romanian, a person just needs to look around and see how much the buildings resemble those to be found in Vienna and Budapest. The rest of the time, they discuss contemporary culture rather than historical identity, as Orsoloya explains what happened to the homeless man, and Dorina discusses a homeless figure in her neighbourhood.  Dorina despised the smell of shit in the summer, and felt terrible about how the man must have suffered in winter, during minus 30 degrees. But at least the smell had gone away, so her life became better while the homeless man’s surely became much worse. She gives modest sums to charity, probably more to accommodate her guilt than to find abodes for the homeless.

Jude of course doesn’t dramatise Dorina’s story, which could have been offered in flashback and would have made foreground and background pertinent, as we see the neighbourhood homeless man’s life and how it impacts on Dorina. Instead, it remains another dialogical scene and the background, apparently, of secondary importance. This is also evident in the scene with the priest, as it takes place in a park with people passing, with variations of it in the interior scenes with her husband, and later with her mother, with the television prominently in the frame. The presence of the TV in the shot may resemble TVs in Haneke’s work. Yet while Haneke’s televisions seem constructive (part of the narrative meaning we can extract from the film), Jude's seem distractive, part of an attention deficit that makes us wonder how much mental space people are giving to the matter to hand. If Haneke may have believed the most pressing problem was media manipulation and control, Jude might see the televisual as part of an attentional deficit. It is another thing that can claim our attention and rob us of our concentration. While Orsoloya frets over her moral crisis, the TV is pumping out images of football when she speaks to her husband, and some random programmes when she sees her mother. Jude may be conveying specific meaning in these scenes, and a Romanian viewer might be better able to extract a specific purpose from them, but they don’t seem integral to the broader diegesis. They instead add to the distractive dimension of the mise en scene, just as the people in the cafe bar don’t add anything to the film’s content but give it a broader sense of possible absorption. This needn’t mean we can’t read anything into these images that don’t push the story along narratively or thematically. Nevertheless, they don’t possess the pressed quality of images which are doing one or the other, or both at the same time.

This pressed quality would be there in numerous great filmmakers: Resnais, Bunuel, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Bergman and, yes, Haneke, all have in very different ways this pressed element to their work. One way of understanding this is to think firstly of conventional narrative filmmaking and how they all deviate from it, and secondly how within this deviation they create their own self-imposed conformities and expectations. When a Hollywood filmmaker cuts to an object, it usually has an immediate use function. It might be the car sitting in the driveway the characters then get into, or the axe out in the backyard that we then expect a character to grab as someone hammers furiously at the front door. The cut to the object may anticipate the action, but it doesn’t confuse it. Sure, the director could show a character looking out the window at the axe, looking back at the front door, and sneaking out the back to get it. But that creates a slightly different complicity that no one better than Hitchcock could generate by eschewing the shot/ counter-shot (point of view/object/point of view) and turning it into object/point of view/object. We anticipate the character’s thoughts rather than share them, as the filmmaker guides us to the object before the character reveals the thought. Nevertheless, whether it is point of view/ object/ point of view, or the reverse, the object has a clear narrative role. In the work of Bunuel, Tarkovsky and others, the object takes on a function one might too easily call symbolic, but we might more usefully describe as narratively superfluous, and it is often this superfluousness to the story that leads the viewer to try and read in the image a symbolic meaning. When Tarkovsky in Stalker cuts to overhead shots of objects rusting in water, or when Bunuel alertly hones his camera in on objects like a set dining table in Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the images contain what we might call a surplus narrative value. We sense the camera isn’t moving simply to tell the story, but to infer a broader thematic dimension. Equally, when Antonioni often shows us characters who seem to have no impact on narrative development (the person in Blow Up picking up bits of rubbish; the man selling grey fruit in Red Desert), subjects and objects seem thematically to disperse rather than narratively congeal.

Yet this dispersion still seems to possess a pertinence we cannot quite name and reveals a sensibility we can readily locate. In Godard’s work, while the sensibility holds too, the image becomes much more dispersive, less likely to reveal a thematic than reflect the symptomatic. If Godard and Jude can be compared, it lies in this: they wish to take the temperature of their times, and seek to find a symptomatology in their images that will dismantle the story and thus discover a zeitgeist. This is potentially an odd demand, and perhaps a reckless one. Film as a recording medium often cannot avoid capturing an element of their times, in the cars they show, in the fashionable clothes the actors wear, and in the soft furnishings in the houses where the characters dwell. A work of literature can avoid all this as a car becomes no more than a vehicle to transport a character from one place to another, and the person’s clothing not mentioned at all. If a film finds it so unavoidably easy to reflect its moment, why bother seeking to discover it?

Perhaps because film, as a medium of insatiable perception, capturing images within the camera that a writer might be inclined to ignore, risks lacking discernment in its moment. Let us say the director films a high street, well aware that they can’t avoid showing shops; otherwise they are showing an empty high street. But do they show them open for business or closed down? Do they show elegant shop fronts or boarded up windows? If many a high street in Europe and especially Britain is no longer a thriving thoroughfare, how do you show it on screen? Portraying it accurately might indicate poverty and deprivation, but your film isn’t about that, so do you show it thriving and bustling, one that suits your narrative, but doesn’t reflect reality?

A variation of this question comes up frequently when aesthetic sensibility clashes with the pro-filmic location shoot. Speaking of his L’inrockuptible colleague in an article about Amelie, Frederic Bonnaud said, Serge ‘‘Kaganski emphasized that this all-white vision of the popular Abbesses neighborhood, with its countless caricatures of the ‘little people of France,’ was hardly credible in a film that was supposedly set in 1997 (as opposed to 1951 or even before the war), and plainly revealed the suspect basis of Jeunet’s spectacle.’’ Bonnaud adds, ‘‘Riding the momentum of his polemic, Kaganski stuck his neck out by asserting that Amelie would make a fine promotional film for France’s xenophobic extreme Right. He made it clear that he was not ascribing any racist intentions to Jeunet, but maintained that that was the end result just the same.’’ (Film Comment) This is a pro-filmic problem that a writer needn’t fret over in quite the same way, and filmmakers like Godard and Jude are likely to insist that the fret has a place, rather than to ignore it. If film as a medium absorbs the world that it films, then all sorts of questions become pertinent in that absorption. Bonnaud and Kaganski claim Jean-Pierre Jeunet pretends these questions don’t exist, and Jeunet’s response wasn’t to defend the partiality of his presentation. It was to attack Kaganski, saying the critic was ‘‘wallowing in bitterness like a pig in its own shit’’ and that his “taste was complete crap.” (Film Comment)

Kaganski expected cinema to take responsibility for the Montmartre it was filming; Jeunet reckoned he could show it as he liked. For Kaganski, this wouldn’t just be pressing the images into a necessary narrative or, as we have explored, a given filmic sensibility, like Tarkovsky or Bunuel, but repressing the reality out of which they come. A debate that really should have been about film and that responsibility, or at the very least that question, descended into insult. But we should remember Godard’s comment, offered in Richard Linklater’s new film, Nouvelle Vague, about the making of A Bout de souffle: ‘that the film is a documentary about Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo acting out a fiction.’’ Filmmakers can mask the fact they are making documentaries about actors in given places, or they can deny it. Jeunet seemed to say he had no responsibility towards the pro-filmic; in different ways, Godard and Jude insist they acknowledge the fact, and the works become tension points between the obligation towards the world, and the necessary presence of their subjectivity. This is greater than cinema and a problem of the image, even if we might insist that it becomes a cinematic problem, no matter if, as we’ve noted, Jude shot Kontinental 25 on an iPhone, about as far away from the (understandable) celluloid fetishism of Nolan, Tarantino and P.T. Anderson.

Cinema becomes a question of representation, but not in any narrow sense that has preoccupied cinema and TV in recent years, and it seeks race and gender quotas in front of and behind the screen. This is all very well but not really the question. Such an approach imposes on the image an obligation over an observation: what it thinks the image ought to be showing rather than what it can reveal. In this sense, whether a film wants to include minorities, say, or exclude them, is part of the same question, even if coming at it from opposite ends. They both risk a manufactured image based on prior assumptions. But they will do so within a narrative that gives the impression of objectivity, as the story is embedded within the characters and the situations, without any discursive claims or socio-political monologues. The setting will be preconceived right down to race and gender quotas, but this will be implicitly the case from the audience’s perspective, as we will be expected to accept its plausibility on the narrative level. The film or TV series will be ‘showing’ a story that contains aspects of race or gender, but it won’t be revealing it in the sense that Jude seeks. Instead of a double embedding that hides the decision-making that goes into the production, and allowing it to play out as characterisational specificity, Jude creates a dispersive aesthetic that symptomatically reveals aspects of the society his film happens to be placed within. He might also say, like Godard of A bout de Soufffle, that Kontinental ‘25 is documentary, with characters acting out a fiction. If we have made much of the scene in the cafe, it rests partly on this question: a loquacious foreground where the characters don’t shut up, and an observant background where we have to infer the relationships between these various incidental characters. But these are incidental figures who, if we pay enough attention, have coherent actions. The foreground may feel polemical, but the background is observational, as though indeed the director has insisted on an upfront and flimsy fictional premise all the better to plonk his characters into the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, and to take its temperature in a particular place.

This place is far from irrelevant as Cluj is a flashpoint that asks interesting questions about insider and outsider status that can seem more integrally complicated than the ones we more commonly hear about. It is one thing, and a very important thing, to have immigrant stories like Soulemane’s Story and The Old Oak, where characters are escaping for political or economic reasons from their home country, and others that explore an integration that is at the same time a dislocation, as in 35 Shots of Rum and Head On. But in Transylvania this is surely the narcissism of the smallest apparent differences, and a point  Dorina makes when discussing the buildings in the city.  Yet there is a large difference between Cristian Mungiu’s recent film set in a Transylvanian village and Jude’s, with Mungiu containing the film within the conventionally (but brilliantly realised) dramatic parameters we have discussed, as the film takes an actual incident from 2020 in the region and turns it into an intricate drama often using elaborate long takes. The film has its own ironies as Sri Lankan bakery workers are deemed a threat to the Hungarian minority, but Mungiu’s film takes the incident to dramatise a situation rather than to symptomise it, no matter if there will be symptomisation as well.  Mungiu understandably sees in it a broader dilemma, and was wary of making it too temporally specific. ‘‘When I was shooting, I considered that by the end of the film some of the extras could have masks, but I thought that that would be too precise in terms of positioning the film. It was important to have it be a bit more fluid and still have these ideas about the effect of globalization.‘’ (Screen Slate)

In contrast, Jude is happy with that temporal specificity: after all, if we are right, he is making a documentary with actors thinking they are in a fiction.  When he shows masks in the street scenes in Bad Luck Banging...or Looney Porn, he dates the film just as he literally dates Kontinental ‘25, even if it is, too, a nod to Rossellini’s Europe 51, with the poster seen on the wall of the cinema cafe. If we are also right that film is a promiscuous medium of the real, with the camera constantly exposing itself to the world around it as literature can hermetically seal it off in specific nouns, verbs and adjectives, then maybe cinema is inevitably going to be a dated medium. To read a few passages from a book written contemporaneously may not reveal the decade in which it was written, but a film is much more likely to expose that temporality in the clothes, the hair, the cars and the phones it cannot so easily hide. The writer merely needs to eschew a few adjectives and his work can seem timeless. The filmmaker can eradicate the image (like Derek Jarman does in Blue; like Joao Cesar Monteiro does in Snow White), but this is so deliberately a reductive use of the medium it can only be an exception to the rule.

Jude not only accepts film’s indiscriminate nature; he also accepts that film is chiefly a recording device and that what interests him is the capacity to do so using whatever means are to hand. As he says, ‘‘I try not to make any hierarchy. I’m not saying that if I compare a small idiotic A.I. video with a masterpiece of cinema, with Citizen Kane, that they are the same. But from a certain perspective, they are the same. They belong to the empire of images and are all parts of the same house in a way. It gives me the curiosity to work with all that’s new and also everything that’s also old. I made films on 16 millimeter black and white, to try and see how it works. It’s the same with what is around, with TikTok videos, with Instagram, with Reels, with A.I. I still think A.I. images are such a shocking new thing that it’s still problematic for everybody to have a definite opinion or a definite interpretation of them. Also, this puts us in crisis, not only for cinema as an art but our relationship with images.’’ Jude adds, ‘‘If I open my computer and see a photograph, I cannot say if it’s A.I. generated or a real photo. This creates a world where our relation with images changes forever. I don’t think we have all the tools, philosophical or aesthetic tools, to really understand them.’’ (Interview Magazine)

The purpose isn’t to fetishise the image and the form, but to find forms for images so that we can understand how they function as manipulation and message, as a regime that can liberate us or incarcerate us, that can lead to that common recent phrase, allow for brain rot, or allow for synaptic reinvigoration. It takes the absurd from everyday life and asks us to see it anew, well aware that in a system based on greed and exploitation there is plenty of absurdity around. It is as if Jude wished to call out capitalism without falling into well-meaning tropes. As he says, ‘it’s a film about the moral crisis, and actually I hate films about moral crises.’’ (YouTube) But he also insists that he is more interested in the material crisis than the moral one; the historical circumstances over the metaphysical questions. If Orsoloya’s tortured conscience is a source of humour, it isn’t just because her response is to get screwed from behind by her ex-student, while her husband and kids are on holiday in Greece. It rests more on Orsoloya thinking she is a good person caught in a bad predicament, while how good or bad a person she happens to be is of little relevance, just as how good or bad the man she feel responsible for happens to be as well.

All things considered, Orsoloya is a lot more agreeable than this homeless figure Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), who cusses and curses, says fuck you to people behind their backs after they give him food, and urinates without much consideration for those who pass by. But Jude might say disagreeable to whom. He might not have a pliant nature, but is this worse than Orsoloya’s compliant one, when compliance suggests submissiveness and compromise? Ion is a difficult character, and probably no less smelly than the homeless man Dorina discusses. But the point isn’t that Orsoloya and Dorina are decent, and the homeless men indecent, but that the system positions them in such a way that they feel guilt and the homeless man feels contempt. Clearly, the homeless man Dorina discusses shits where he likes, just as Ion pisses where he wishes. It is as if they are animals marking their territory, but aware as humans they have none they can call their own.  As a bailiff, Orsoloya may refuse to throw people out during the coldest months, but her job is nevertheless to do so, and she is well aware that if she doesn’t, someone else will. It makes her moral quandaries understandable but irrelevant, as housing becomes more and more a commodity rather than a place to live. Orsoloya may complain that her suburban home is now less luxurious as more and more housing is built around her, but she doesn’t discuss this as a question of over-development for capitalist gain, or necessary housing due to the sort of crisis that leaves people on the streets, or living temporarily in basements - as Ion does. She can’t at all register the absurdity of a man being thrown out of what is already less than a home. This dark and dingy space is essentially a cupboard, and there he is, getting turfed out by various police officers looking like they are involved in a major drug bust, with Orsoloya playing good cop to some pretty nasty ones.  

In other circumstances, Orsoloya might be a person who acts well, and Ion someone who wouldn’t act badly. But this is their situation, and this is a material set of circumstances in a given historical moment. Jude focuses less on the moral conundrums than on the places and spaces the characters occupy, and thus the notion of a documentary, one with actors believing they are in a fiction. The moral crisis becomes a form of fiction weak next to the texture of the documented world, one that can make a mockery of people’s apparent moral dilemmas. It is also why it makes sense that Jude ends with a nod towards Antonioni as well as Godard. If the film recalls Two or Three I Know About Her, with Cluj replacing Paris, the closing moments resemble a little The Eclipse. Kontinental ‘25 ends on a series of empty shots, showing the city without Orsoloya or any of the other characters inhabiting it. While Antonioni’s ending shows the relative indifference the film’s two leading characters have for each other, as neither turns up for a rendezvous, here it may reflect more Jude’s indifference towards the story he tells, aware that what matters more is the tale of Romania as a country that illustrates growth in every new build, but will still leave people like Ion on the streets. The shots offer the rigour of a question, but Jude doesn’t pretend he is any more capable of answering it than anyone else. Yet the question counts, and film should be well aware of its role in finding ways to ask them.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Kontinental '25

Absorbing the Moment

From one perspective, Radu Jude might seem like a polemicist who, in works like Bad Luck Banging, Loony Porn, Don’t Expect Too Much From the End of the World, and now Kontinental ’25, has a few things to say about contemporary Romania, and none of them is good. Other directors in recent Romanian film have usually couched their contempt within the depiction of events, whether in The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or Police, Adjective, but Jude absorbs aspects of agitprop and the essay film into works that could seem to undo elements of New Romanian Cinema, one that has resolutely remained realist in its exploration of a given crisis. We will have more to say about that resolute realism later, and how NRC added to what neorealism generated, and that Ken Loach and Maurice Pialat developed in different ways, before the Dardenne brothers offered the visually inverse of the neorealist, but for the same ends. This realist aesthetic is still evident in Jude's work but not in quite the same way as in earlier films by the director, like The Unhappiest Girl in the World or Everybody in Our Family.

To understand this shift, without quite the negation of his earlier approach, we might think of a scene about two-thirds of the way through Kontinental ’25. The central character Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), is a bailiff in crisis after she seeks to eject a homeless man from a basement dwelling, who then kills himself. Her husband and kids have gone on holiday to Greece without her, and she tries to sort herself out in various exchanges with a friend, her mother, a priest and an ex-student. Orsolya and the ex-student are getting a drink at a cinema cafe, and while they talk in a lengthy fixed shot in the foreground, the viewer sees various events unfold in the background.  None of these adds up to narrative purpose, but all of them have the texture of the plausible. While the student and Orsolya discuss her family, Buddhism and the homeless man’s death, as they sit drinking at the bar,  behind them people are ordering drinks and food, going to the bathroom, leaving the cafe to take a phone call, ordering another drink, or reading a book. Each of these background stories has its own internal pertinence. The viewer can follow them and watch characters come and go not just as extras in a film that has to make them look like they are doing something, but as people who are doing things, however apparently trivial. When the young woman goes off to what we can assume is the bathroom, she is away for long enough for the man to look like he is beginning to wonder if she has disappeared. When, at another table, the woman leaves to take a call, or to make one, the man sits and looks like he is checking his hair in the phone’s camera. We don’t know if these are dates, just friends hanging out, or long-term relationships. But by offering the shot as both a long single take of about nine minutes, and a depth of field that keeps everything in focus, we can move between what can seem like foreground self-indulgence, and background magnanimity. As the student tells stories about Buddhists, and as they discuss Goedel and the axiomatic, while getting ever drunker, so we can move between their discussion that the ear takes in and the events the eye can observe.

It is a fine example of Jude’s respect for the New Romanian Cinema he comes out of, and the assertively essayistic, verbally oppressive approach that shows Godard’s influence. Like Godard, he comprehends both the importance of the directorially dictatorial and simultaneously the indifference that comes from this assertiveness. While many a director rescues themselves from this indifference by containing the images within a story that gives each of those captured images a narrative relevance, Jude, like Godard, flirts with that indifference by refusing to compress the images into the story, and risks the viewer seeing a filmmaker who doesn’t quite know what they are doing, while insistently telling the audience what to think. It might be more the case that a director who tells a story is more crudely asking us what to believe, while surreptitiously containing it within the content of the tale. Godard and Jude aren’t telling us what to think but asking us to think. This isn’t to decry narrative filmmaking, and certainly not to undermine the brilliance of earlier Romanian film like The Death of Mr Lazarescu and 4 Months…. It is merely to defend the type of cinema Jude is making from the type of criticisms that wouldn’t help define the work, as if the films are so self-absorbed they are against the notion of an audience. Jude says, ‘‘Of course, I consider that the film is made for an audience, like Godard used to say when he was asked, ‘Who do you make the film for?’ And he said, ‘For the audience.’ And the interviewer said, ‘Which audience?’ And Godard said, ‘The right audience.’ What can I add? I don’t know.’” (Interview Magazine) Will the right audience see that the emphasis on background detail, while also seeing the various discussions Orsolya has with her friend, priest, etc., as propositional and, finally, no more assertive than the quotidian scenes that might at first appear irrelevant?  

We can think of how films assert dramaturgically and how they resist this assertion, while still holding to the principles of show don’t tell, of exploring through mis-en-scene, dialogue and situation the claims they wish to pursue. Though films might give the impression they have nothing to say and only things to show, then even with great narrative works try to propose a counter-meaning; and see how they hold up? Is Chinatown saying that a great man is entitled to rape his daughter and his granddaughter because powerful people can do whatever they wish, and this is their right? Is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest insisting that disruptive people in a mental institution deserve to have extreme electroshock that leaves them zombified so that the institution can return to its general function? We think not, even if Noah Cross believes that he can abuse his offspring in Chinatown, and even if the film shows him getting away with it, just as Nurse Ratched would accept that McMurphy will have to receive extreme electroshock after the extent of his insubordination, as the film shows him zombified. Films can have the unhappiest ending, but that isn’t the same as proposing they insist on the most despairing of values. The narrative despair is evident all the better to make clear what better values happen to be. Whether Chinatown had shown Cross captured or killed, or surviving with his daughter dead, as we find, the value would have remained the same even if the ending had been completely different, and the same with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The films may show rather than tell, and seem to show all the more by offering pessimistic narrative conclusions, but the value would be the same whether Cross dies as a villain and McMurphy survives as a hero, indicating that both films are still telling. We know what we are supposed to think.

These are both wonderful films, so our purpose in defending Jude’s recent work isn’t to contrast them qualitatively, but to address an aspect that Jude picks up from Godard. This is the dismantling of the representational apparatus so that it can replace text and subtext, narrative assertiveness and ethical nuance, with unassertive mise-en-scene and propositional insistence. If the scene in the cinema cafe bar is so important to us, it rests on this claim. The viewer who focuses on the garrulous foreground might miss much that is going on in the busy but apparently unimportant background. One reason why this background remains ostensibly of little note is that the protagonists in the foreground don’t invoke it. Though there are occasional moments when Orsolya or the ex-student look around (when the young woman returns from the bathroom, for example), they remain distinct planes in the way that in Goodbye South Goodbye, Hou Hsiao-hsien surprises us with their sudden interrelation. As we focus on foreground action in Hou’s film, someone collapses in the background, and we might feel we have missed something by concentrating on what has been more pertinently in front of our eyes. In Kontinental ’25, the background remains secondary, but it also has a clear delineation that can leave us to follow the coherence of this space, one that could have been made easily irrelevant by a different lens turning it into a background blur. (That it was shot on an iPhone needn’t leave us thinking that this isn’t cinema.)

Like Godard, Jude understands that while text and subtext, or rather narrative event and extracted value, can work in conjunction (or rather a disjunctive conjunction), so too can the dialogical and the quotidian, the apparently assertive evidenced in the dialogue, and the apparently irrelevant in the background. Yet this is surely all the better to bring out not the ethos that underpins a story, no matter if the ending is positive or negative, so that Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are as ethically clear either way, but to show the broader interaction between the dialogically foregrounded and the apparently mundane,  one that can often appear all but ignored. In a scene between Orsoloya and her friend on a bench in the centre of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, where the entire film is set. The scene concentrates on the discussion between Orsoloya and Dorina, and the background is invoked only once when Dorina looks behind her and says, for all the talk of Transylvania having always been Romanian, a person just needs to look around and see how much the buildings resemble those to be found in Vienna and Budapest. The rest of the time, they discuss contemporary culture rather than historical identity, as Orsoloya explains what happened to the homeless man, and Dorina discusses a homeless figure in her neighbourhood.  Dorina despised the smell of shit in the summer, and felt terrible about how the man must have suffered in winter, during minus 30 degrees. But at least the smell had gone away, so her life became better while the homeless man’s surely became much worse. She gives modest sums to charity, probably more to accommodate her guilt than to find abodes for the homeless.

Jude of course doesn’t dramatise Dorina’s story, which could have been offered in flashback and would have made foreground and background pertinent, as we see the neighbourhood homeless man’s life and how it impacts on Dorina. Instead, it remains another dialogical scene and the background, apparently, of secondary importance. This is also evident in the scene with the priest, as it takes place in a park with people passing, with variations of it in the interior scenes with her husband, and later with her mother, with the television prominently in the frame. The presence of the TV in the shot may resemble TVs in Haneke’s work. Yet while Haneke’s televisions seem constructive (part of the narrative meaning we can extract from the film), Jude's seem distractive, part of an attention deficit that makes us wonder how much mental space people are giving to the matter to hand. If Haneke may have believed the most pressing problem was media manipulation and control, Jude might see the televisual as part of an attentional deficit. It is another thing that can claim our attention and rob us of our concentration. While Orsoloya frets over her moral crisis, the TV is pumping out images of football when she speaks to her husband, and some random programmes when she sees her mother. Jude may be conveying specific meaning in these scenes, and a Romanian viewer might be better able to extract a specific purpose from them, but they don’t seem integral to the broader diegesis. They instead add to the distractive dimension of the mise en scene, just as the people in the cafe bar don’t add anything to the film’s content but give it a broader sense of possible absorption. This needn’t mean we can’t read anything into these images that don’t push the story along narratively or thematically. Nevertheless, they don’t possess the pressed quality of images which are doing one or the other, or both at the same time.

This pressed quality would be there in numerous great filmmakers: Resnais, Bunuel, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Bergman and, yes, Haneke, all have in very different ways this pressed element to their work. One way of understanding this is to think firstly of conventional narrative filmmaking and how they all deviate from it, and secondly how within this deviation they create their own self-imposed conformities and expectations. When a Hollywood filmmaker cuts to an object, it usually has an immediate use function. It might be the car sitting in the driveway the characters then get into, or the axe out in the backyard that we then expect a character to grab as someone hammers furiously at the front door. The cut to the object may anticipate the action, but it doesn’t confuse it. Sure, the director could show a character looking out the window at the axe, looking back at the front door, and sneaking out the back to get it. But that creates a slightly different complicity that no one better than Hitchcock could generate by eschewing the shot/ counter-shot (point of view/object/point of view) and turning it into object/point of view/object. We anticipate the character’s thoughts rather than share them, as the filmmaker guides us to the object before the character reveals the thought. Nevertheless, whether it is point of view/ object/ point of view, or the reverse, the object has a clear narrative role. In the work of Bunuel, Tarkovsky and others, the object takes on a function one might too easily call symbolic, but we might more usefully describe as narratively superfluous, and it is often this superfluousness to the story that leads the viewer to try and read in the image a symbolic meaning. When Tarkovsky in Stalker cuts to overhead shots of objects rusting in water, or when Bunuel alertly hones his camera in on objects like a set dining table in Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the images contain what we might call a surplus narrative value. We sense the camera isn’t moving simply to tell the story, but to infer a broader thematic dimension. Equally, when Antonioni often shows us characters who seem to have no impact on narrative development (the person in Blow Up picking up bits of rubbish; the man selling grey fruit in Red Desert), subjects and objects seem thematically to disperse rather than narratively congeal.

Yet this dispersion still seems to possess a pertinence we cannot quite name and reveals a sensibility we can readily locate. In Godard’s work, while the sensibility holds too, the image becomes much more dispersive, less likely to reveal a thematic than reflect the symptomatic. If Godard and Jude can be compared, it lies in this: they wish to take the temperature of their times, and seek to find a symptomatology in their images that will dismantle the story and thus discover a zeitgeist. This is potentially an odd demand, and perhaps a reckless one. Film as a recording medium often cannot avoid capturing an element of their times, in the cars they show, in the fashionable clothes the actors wear, and in the soft furnishings in the houses where the characters dwell. A work of literature can avoid all this as a car becomes no more than a vehicle to transport a character from one place to another, and the person’s clothing not mentioned at all. If a film finds it so unavoidably easy to reflect its moment, why bother seeking to discover it?

Perhaps because film, as a medium of insatiable perception, capturing images within the camera that a writer might be inclined to ignore, risks lacking discernment in its moment. Let us say the director films a high street, well aware that they can’t avoid showing shops; otherwise they are showing an empty high street. But do they show them open for business or closed down? Do they show elegant shop fronts or boarded up windows? If many a high street in Europe and especially Britain is no longer a thriving thoroughfare, how do you show it on screen? Portraying it accurately might indicate poverty and deprivation, but your film isn’t about that, so do you show it thriving and bustling, one that suits your narrative, but doesn’t reflect reality?

A variation of this question comes up frequently when aesthetic sensibility clashes with the pro-filmic location shoot. Speaking of his L’inrockuptible colleague in an article about Amelie, Frederic Bonnaud said, Serge ‘‘Kaganski emphasized that this all-white vision of the popular Abbesses neighborhood, with its countless caricatures of the ‘little people of France,’ was hardly credible in a film that was supposedly set in 1997 (as opposed to 1951 or even before the war), and plainly revealed the suspect basis of Jeunet’s spectacle.’’ Bonnaud adds, ‘‘Riding the momentum of his polemic, Kaganski stuck his neck out by asserting that Amelie would make a fine promotional film for France’s xenophobic extreme Right. He made it clear that he was not ascribing any racist intentions to Jeunet, but maintained that that was the end result just the same.’’ (Film Comment) This is a pro-filmic problem that a writer needn’t fret over in quite the same way, and filmmakers like Godard and Jude are likely to insist that the fret has a place, rather than to ignore it. If film as a medium absorbs the world that it films, then all sorts of questions become pertinent in that absorption. Bonnaud and Kaganski claim Jean-Pierre Jeunet pretends these questions don’t exist, and Jeunet’s response wasn’t to defend the partiality of his presentation. It was to attack Kaganski, saying the critic was ‘‘wallowing in bitterness like a pig in its own shit’’ and that his “taste was complete crap.” (Film Comment)

Kaganski expected cinema to take responsibility for the Montmartre it was filming; Jeunet reckoned he could show it as he liked. For Kaganski, this wouldn’t just be pressing the images into a necessary narrative or, as we have explored, a given filmic sensibility, like Tarkovsky or Bunuel, but repressing the reality out of which they come. A debate that really should have been about film and that responsibility, or at the very least that question, descended into insult. But we should remember Godard’s comment, offered in Richard Linklater’s new film, Nouvelle Vague, about the making of A Bout de souffle: ‘that the film is a documentary about Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo acting out a fiction.’’ Filmmakers can mask the fact they are making documentaries about actors in given places, or they can deny it. Jeunet seemed to say he had no responsibility towards the pro-filmic; in different ways, Godard and Jude insist they acknowledge the fact, and the works become tension points between the obligation towards the world, and the necessary presence of their subjectivity. This is greater than cinema and a problem of the image, even if we might insist that it becomes a cinematic problem, no matter if, as we’ve noted, Jude shot Kontinental 25 on an iPhone, about as far away from the (understandable) celluloid fetishism of Nolan, Tarantino and P.T. Anderson.

Cinema becomes a question of representation, but not in any narrow sense that has preoccupied cinema and TV in recent years, and it seeks race and gender quotas in front of and behind the screen. This is all very well but not really the question. Such an approach imposes on the image an obligation over an observation: what it thinks the image ought to be showing rather than what it can reveal. In this sense, whether a film wants to include minorities, say, or exclude them, is part of the same question, even if coming at it from opposite ends. They both risk a manufactured image based on prior assumptions. But they will do so within a narrative that gives the impression of objectivity, as the story is embedded within the characters and the situations, without any discursive claims or socio-political monologues. The setting will be preconceived right down to race and gender quotas, but this will be implicitly the case from the audience’s perspective, as we will be expected to accept its plausibility on the narrative level. The film or TV series will be ‘showing’ a story that contains aspects of race or gender, but it won’t be revealing it in the sense that Jude seeks. Instead of a double embedding that hides the decision-making that goes into the production, and allowing it to play out as characterisational specificity, Jude creates a dispersive aesthetic that symptomatically reveals aspects of the society his film happens to be placed within. He might also say, like Godard of A bout de Soufffle, that Kontinental ‘25 is documentary, with characters acting out a fiction. If we have made much of the scene in the cafe, it rests partly on this question: a loquacious foreground where the characters don’t shut up, and an observant background where we have to infer the relationships between these various incidental characters. But these are incidental figures who, if we pay enough attention, have coherent actions. The foreground may feel polemical, but the background is observational, as though indeed the director has insisted on an upfront and flimsy fictional premise all the better to plonk his characters into the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, and to take its temperature in a particular place.

This place is far from irrelevant as Cluj is a flashpoint that asks interesting questions about insider and outsider status that can seem more integrally complicated than the ones we more commonly hear about. It is one thing, and a very important thing, to have immigrant stories like Soulemane’s Story and The Old Oak, where characters are escaping for political or economic reasons from their home country, and others that explore an integration that is at the same time a dislocation, as in 35 Shots of Rum and Head On. But in Transylvania this is surely the narcissism of the smallest apparent differences, and a point  Dorina makes when discussing the buildings in the city.  Yet there is a large difference between Cristian Mungiu’s recent film set in a Transylvanian village and Jude’s, with Mungiu containing the film within the conventionally (but brilliantly realised) dramatic parameters we have discussed, as the film takes an actual incident from 2020 in the region and turns it into an intricate drama often using elaborate long takes. The film has its own ironies as Sri Lankan bakery workers are deemed a threat to the Hungarian minority, but Mungiu’s film takes the incident to dramatise a situation rather than to symptomise it, no matter if there will be symptomisation as well.  Mungiu understandably sees in it a broader dilemma, and was wary of making it too temporally specific. ‘‘When I was shooting, I considered that by the end of the film some of the extras could have masks, but I thought that that would be too precise in terms of positioning the film. It was important to have it be a bit more fluid and still have these ideas about the effect of globalization.‘’ (Screen Slate)

In contrast, Jude is happy with that temporal specificity: after all, if we are right, he is making a documentary with actors thinking they are in a fiction.  When he shows masks in the street scenes in Bad Luck Banging...or Looney Porn, he dates the film just as he literally dates Kontinental ‘25, even if it is, too, a nod to Rossellini’s Europe 51, with the poster seen on the wall of the cinema cafe. If we are also right that film is a promiscuous medium of the real, with the camera constantly exposing itself to the world around it as literature can hermetically seal it off in specific nouns, verbs and adjectives, then maybe cinema is inevitably going to be a dated medium. To read a few passages from a book written contemporaneously may not reveal the decade in which it was written, but a film is much more likely to expose that temporality in the clothes, the hair, the cars and the phones it cannot so easily hide. The writer merely needs to eschew a few adjectives and his work can seem timeless. The filmmaker can eradicate the image (like Derek Jarman does in Blue; like Joao Cesar Monteiro does in Snow White), but this is so deliberately a reductive use of the medium it can only be an exception to the rule.

Jude not only accepts film’s indiscriminate nature; he also accepts that film is chiefly a recording device and that what interests him is the capacity to do so using whatever means are to hand. As he says, ‘‘I try not to make any hierarchy. I’m not saying that if I compare a small idiotic A.I. video with a masterpiece of cinema, with Citizen Kane, that they are the same. But from a certain perspective, they are the same. They belong to the empire of images and are all parts of the same house in a way. It gives me the curiosity to work with all that’s new and also everything that’s also old. I made films on 16 millimeter black and white, to try and see how it works. It’s the same with what is around, with TikTok videos, with Instagram, with Reels, with A.I. I still think A.I. images are such a shocking new thing that it’s still problematic for everybody to have a definite opinion or a definite interpretation of them. Also, this puts us in crisis, not only for cinema as an art but our relationship with images.’’ Jude adds, ‘‘If I open my computer and see a photograph, I cannot say if it’s A.I. generated or a real photo. This creates a world where our relation with images changes forever. I don’t think we have all the tools, philosophical or aesthetic tools, to really understand them.’’ (Interview Magazine)

The purpose isn’t to fetishise the image and the form, but to find forms for images so that we can understand how they function as manipulation and message, as a regime that can liberate us or incarcerate us, that can lead to that common recent phrase, allow for brain rot, or allow for synaptic reinvigoration. It takes the absurd from everyday life and asks us to see it anew, well aware that in a system based on greed and exploitation there is plenty of absurdity around. It is as if Jude wished to call out capitalism without falling into well-meaning tropes. As he says, ‘it’s a film about the moral crisis, and actually I hate films about moral crises.’’ (YouTube) But he also insists that he is more interested in the material crisis than the moral one; the historical circumstances over the metaphysical questions. If Orsoloya’s tortured conscience is a source of humour, it isn’t just because her response is to get screwed from behind by her ex-student, while her husband and kids are on holiday in Greece. It rests more on Orsoloya thinking she is a good person caught in a bad predicament, while how good or bad a person she happens to be is of little relevance, just as how good or bad the man she feel responsible for happens to be as well.

All things considered, Orsoloya is a lot more agreeable than this homeless figure Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), who cusses and curses, says fuck you to people behind their backs after they give him food, and urinates without much consideration for those who pass by. But Jude might say disagreeable to whom. He might not have a pliant nature, but is this worse than Orsoloya’s compliant one, when compliance suggests submissiveness and compromise? Ion is a difficult character, and probably no less smelly than the homeless man Dorina discusses. But the point isn’t that Orsoloya and Dorina are decent, and the homeless men indecent, but that the system positions them in such a way that they feel guilt and the homeless man feels contempt. Clearly, the homeless man Dorina discusses shits where he likes, just as Ion pisses where he wishes. It is as if they are animals marking their territory, but aware as humans they have none they can call their own.  As a bailiff, Orsoloya may refuse to throw people out during the coldest months, but her job is nevertheless to do so, and she is well aware that if she doesn’t, someone else will. It makes her moral quandaries understandable but irrelevant, as housing becomes more and more a commodity rather than a place to live. Orsoloya may complain that her suburban home is now less luxurious as more and more housing is built around her, but she doesn’t discuss this as a question of over-development for capitalist gain, or necessary housing due to the sort of crisis that leaves people on the streets, or living temporarily in basements - as Ion does. She can’t at all register the absurdity of a man being thrown out of what is already less than a home. This dark and dingy space is essentially a cupboard, and there he is, getting turfed out by various police officers looking like they are involved in a major drug bust, with Orsoloya playing good cop to some pretty nasty ones.  

In other circumstances, Orsoloya might be a person who acts well, and Ion someone who wouldn’t act badly. But this is their situation, and this is a material set of circumstances in a given historical moment. Jude focuses less on the moral conundrums than on the places and spaces the characters occupy, and thus the notion of a documentary, one with actors believing they are in a fiction. The moral crisis becomes a form of fiction weak next to the texture of the documented world, one that can make a mockery of people’s apparent moral dilemmas. It is also why it makes sense that Jude ends with a nod towards Antonioni as well as Godard. If the film recalls Two or Three I Know About Her, with Cluj replacing Paris, the closing moments resemble a little The Eclipse. Kontinental ‘25 ends on a series of empty shots, showing the city without Orsoloya or any of the other characters inhabiting it. While Antonioni’s ending shows the relative indifference the film’s two leading characters have for each other, as neither turns up for a rendezvous, here it may reflect more Jude’s indifference towards the story he tells, aware that what matters more is the tale of Romania as a country that illustrates growth in every new build, but will still leave people like Ion on the streets. The shots offer the rigour of a question, but Jude doesn’t pretend he is any more capable of answering it than anyone else. Yet the question counts, and film should be well aware of its role in finding ways to ask them.


© Tony McKibbin