I recently wrote to a colleague in Paris that I thought Radu Jude—the prolific author of farcical tragicomedies about our contemporary lives under surveillance, diminished by rapacious capital, plagued by nationalist stupidity, and subject to conspiratorial thinking and multiple pandemics, virtual as well as actual—might be the most important filmmaker in Europe today. For me, this unpretentiously erudite, cheerfully transgressive, often outrageously funny director of recent highlights like Kontinental ’25 (2025), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) is comparable to the legendary Jean-Luc Godard. No less than Godard, Jude thinks in filmic terms, twinning his interest in the nature of image production with concerns regarding the current situation in politics and cinema. Jude understands, following Godard, that the film of history is the history of film—albeit a history now deranged with the erosion of civil society and rational discourse promoted by the internet, social media, and A.I.

Having grown up absurd in Balkan backwater Romania, Radu is less mandarin and more humanist than JLG. I haven’t yet seen his reimagining of Octave Mirbeau’s decadent anarcho-Dreyfusard The Diary of a Chambermaid, a novel variously adapted by Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and Benoît Jacquot. Jude’s version just premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes, and I’m looking forward to his Romanian critique.

Earlier this spring, we exchanged a series of emails with each other, touching on making historical films in the present, his novel use of A.I. images in his 2025 Dracula, what it means to call a film “vulgar,” and more.

Dear Radu,

It’s a pleasure to be in touch. I don’t mean to embarrass you, but for me you are one of the most significant film artists in the world today. Among other things, you are a great historical filmmaker in an Eastern European tradition that includes Andrzej Wajda, Miklós Jancsó, and Dušan Makavejev (whom we both especially admire), and possibly also František Vláčil. Many things set you apart from this group, not least that they are all Cold War filmmakers. Your feelings about these old masters is something we might touch on later, but one thing that distinguishes you from them is that you make historical films about the present moment, which is what I wanted to ask you about first.

Sincerely,
Jim

Dear Jim,

Let me embarrass you as well and tell you that since I discovered your books many years ago—mostly after many passionate mentions on Facebook by Andrei Gorzo, a brilliant Romanian film critic and teacher, who deeply admires you—I consider you not only significant but essential, and one of the very few critics who, for better or for worse, changed my understanding of cinema and my films as well.

Now on to your question. I guess it is quite simple: you remember Italo Calvino writing in the ’60s about what he loves in cinema? He mentions “the essay films” (which meant basically the Nouvelle Vague films; the term means something quite different today) as being important only if they come with a perspective different from other fields—like sociology, history, et cetera. I believe the same, and I have made seven narrative films and documentaries in a row, all dealing with history—maybe too many. In all of them I tried to the best of my capacity to offer a perspective that only cinema can offer.

Along the way I discovered something that became fundamental for me: a thinking about history that links past and present—be it Walter Benjamin or W.G. Sebald, Godard or Eisenstein. And this thinking informs my subsequent films as well. Also, maybe there is something else: while not being a historian, I did a haphazard kind of research for all these movies and after all these years and films, my mind is trained to see everything from a historical perspective. Which means I’ve also acquired a kind of attention to the flows of our life and a desire to use cinema to capture something from that.

Not sure I succeeded, but I have an intention.

Sincerely,
Radu

Dear Radu,

You have indeed succeeded. Your films are both topical (in the best sense) and distanced. In that sense, I understood your latest feature Dracula as both a send-up of Romanian (or pseudo-Romanian) pop culture and a comedy about the horror of A.I., necessarily overlong and outrageous in demonstrating A.I. as a vampire technology, an inhuman form feeding on the living. Is this a misreading of your intentions? I know there’s more going on in the movie as it relates to Romania’s “vampire tourism” (and the attendant manufactured history). In an email to me last year you implied that Dracula was an intentionally “bad” movie. Still, I’d like to know what you make of A.I.

Sincerely,
Jim

Dear Jim,

I have difficulty answering directly, so maybe if I briefly summarize my steps, things will be more clear. In Dracula, I wanted to emulate the spirit of “bad” movies—and your essay [from Film Comment’s July-August 1980 issue] was extremely important for this. The avant-garde spirit of filmmakers like Warhol or Jack Smith or the Kuchar brothers were all important models for me. But I also wanted to make a film that is an ode to the type of storytelling full of digressions from the beginning of the novel—like Boccaccio or Fielding, for instance.

Then, the money was not enough and the obligation to make the film with only half of the budget informed most of the aesthetic decisions. One of those solutions was the use of A.I. images, which I hated at the beginning. I started using them to make scenes for which we didn’t have enough money. I worked in amateur mode together with Vlaicu Golcea, a composer interested in A.I. During this process, two things happened: first, we discovered that there must be a lot of human creativity involved in how you achieve some images—Vlaicu found very creative ways to create some of the images, moving them from one A.I. program to another, et cetera. And then, more importantly, something else: I must confess I started to like the A.I. images, and to find in them a trashy digital poetry. When you work with something, you start to be more attentive and find more complexity in it. In the end, didn’t John Cage say he did something similar with his radio pieces—that he composed them only in order to get rid of the unpleasant feeling of hearing the radios blasting music all over in L.A.?

Perhaps A.I., with its tendency to hallucinate and to produce images that are almost right, but not quite, was unconsciously the perfect instrument for a film about Dracula—a figure who is himself a simulacrum of the living, and who feeds himself with the blood of others. Now, I am fully aware A.I. is posing a lot of threats, and there are ethical, ecological, and economic issues at stake that should be solved, and they can be solved only politically, I guess. Also, most of these tech bros are despicable, no question about it. But I would also add in my defense that in Romania, where our cinema industry is almost nonexistent, we are not as afraid of A.I. as people in the U.S. are—there is almost nothing at stake. So, for me, A.I. can be just another tool—but yes, I am aware of the dangers it poses.

Now, if I may, dear Jim, I would like to know two things starting from your Dracula question. The first is my curiosity about how you yourself consider the A.I.-generated images. And second, as my film was accused of being vulgar, is there a relation between the avant-garde spirit and (at least some type of) vulgarity?

Sincerely,
Radu

Dear Radu,

Regarding A.I., I’m most concerned with its contribution to disinformation. For example, a program trained on vernacular videos could certainly offer opposing “evidence” to the phone footage that implicated ICE agents in Minneapolis earlier this year. Although useful as a search engine or a means for slop translations (which are really the only ways I use it), A.I. will certainly eliminate jobs in the academy as well as Hollywood—or perhaps bring them back. American film critics still mourning the loss of Pauline Kael might employ a program trained on her writing to enjoy her undead take on the latest releases.

Sincerely,
Jim

Dear Jim,

I am as worried as you are about all these things and more. By the way, in August 2025, Kevin B. Lee organized a panel at the Locarno Film Festival about A.I. images and started it with a small experiment. In front of an audience of around 200 people, he screened a few images and asked everybody to guess which photos were A.I.-generated and which ones were “normally” taken. For the first batch he showed, which were made more rudimentarily, it was pretty obvious—but after a while it was literally impossible to guess. And now, one year later, the development of A.I. programs is even more advanced. I must admit I don’t understand how we can navigate a world of images when all are or could potentially be animation. I think we need exactly people like you, and scientists and philosophers, to offer some guidance. I am just a filmmaker trying to use what is around. But I understand very little…

Sincerely,
Radu

Dear Radu,

I’m hardly an expert, although I agree that A.I. can be a tool with which artists and others—including Donald Trump, who has variously represented himself as the Pasha of Gaza, an imperial shit-bomber, and Jesus Christ—might usefully experiment. It would be illuminating, at least for me, to know what you and Vlaicu Golcea asked your A.I. program to do. The notion of A.I. hallucinations is of course fascinating. Is there a way to induce them?

Sincerely,
Jim

Dear Jim,

Our approach was, to put it simply, based on trial and error and accepting what the program was generating. I’ll give you one example. There was a scene where we wanted to create a kind of dialogue with a Romanian-language scene from Coppola’s Dracula (1992). And I wanted to transform it into something pornographic. For the first part of the scene, Vlaicu Golcea uploaded a few stills from the Coppola movie and we ended up with a few A.I.-generated stills. These stills were then animated in another program—but the clips were only four seconds long and we had to combine them somehow. (I think the newer programs no longer have this limitation.) We then combined this scene with other A.I.-generated ones, but for the sexual scene, the program wouldn’t offer anything—they don’t do porn. So Vlaicu studied online forums and found ways of tricking them, and he created many stills that were not quite “correct” anatomically speaking—the sexual organs appeared in the wrong places, for instance. But I actually loved these errors, so I finished the scene with a montage of all these wrong images. Many people felt even more horrified than they would feel watching a regular porn movie—seeing women with two vulvas, or a man with a penis coming out of his neck like a tie. As for me, I found the images beautiful…

Sincerely,
Radu

Dear Radu,

In its way, A.I. is anxious to please. Perhaps that’s why some people thought your Dracula was vulgar. The program was pandering. In any case, “vulgarity” is a tricky concept. I used it in my essay “Vulgar Modernism” to delineate between mandarin and popular modernisms that shared certain traits (mainly self-reflexivity, concern with the specific properties of the medium, or the conditions of its making). If we take “vulgarity” to mean tastelessness, then it often applies to the avant-garde, like Duchamp, Joyce, Warhol—to name three long-since-recuperated artists who violated prevailing notions of taste. Your Dracula does this as well, which brings me back to the A.I. program. Did you request “bad taste,” or was it a happy accident? Could A.I. remake Last Year at Marienbad (1961) in the style of Ed Wood, starring Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley, using a color scheme derived from Viva Las Vegas (1964)? And would that really be “bad” filmmaking?

Sincerely,
Jim

Dear Jim,

As you know much better than me, the way something is “good” or “bad” aesthetically depends a lot on how we frame it. In the case of my Dracula, I consider the images we have chosen as rather clichéd and ugly and broken, but the way I used them in the film as good—but good in a “bad” filmmaking way, so maybe this hall of mirrors is hard to pin down, even for me. Anyway, it seems to me that when you use an A.I. machine, you must be able to choose well what the A.I. generates—it feels like you are somehow in front of a potentially infinite number of ready-mades, so it depends what you choose and then in which context you use what you have chosen. Otherwise, your idea of an A.I. remake of Marienbad seems pretty funny—someone should try it!

Sincerely,
Radu

Dear Radu,

The pithiest comment on the film appeared in The New York Review of Books: Dracula “compels thought in the space of its absence.” It makes us wonder what we are looking at and how it came into existence.

Sincerely,
Jim

Dear Jim,

Someone told me that a very important film-festival director expressed the idea that, for him, not only A.I.-generated images but also TikTok reels, Instagram images, or more generally films shot with a smartphone are ugly, and he doesn’t even consider them cinema. What is your take on this? And how can we define what cinema is or could be in this new age of images of all kinds?

Sincerely,
Radu

Dear Radu,

I can’t say that I’ve made a study of TikTok videos, although I appreciate the way you used them in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023). The artist Arthur Jafa is especially notable for incorporating TikTok reels and all manner of internet detritus in his found-footage videos. A number of distinguished filmmakers, including Steven Soderbergh, Sean Baker, and yourself, not to mention Jean-Luc Godard, have made excellent use of smartphones.

Relative inexpensiveness and ubiquity make these pocket recording devices an invaluable vehicle for “citizen journalism.” Darnella Frazier’s Pulitzer citation–winning recording of George Floyd’s execution is a case in point, and so are the cell-phone recordings of the ICE murders in Minneapolis. These little movies changed the world. Peter Snowdon uses the term “vernacular videos.” Hundreds were made during the Iranian Green Revolution and the Arab Spring, some of which he assembled as a feature-length movie called The Uprising (2013). If that’s not cinema, it’s something better.

In explicating the gilets jaunes [“yellow vests”] protests in France, The Monopoly of Violence (2020) by the French journalist David Dufresne makes exemplary (not to mention dialectical) use of both vernacular videos and police surveillance material. I recently showed it to my seminar on Documentary Activism and it prompted more discussion than any film on the syllabus.

Speaking of documentaries, there’s one thing I’ve always wondered regarding I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, your great 2018 film in which a radical theater director organizes an outdoor spectacle dramatizing one of the darker events in 20th-century Romanian history: was the enthusiasm with which the audience cheers the staged roundup and ensuing massacre of local Jews something you directed or provoked?

Sincerely,
Jim

Dear Jim,

The answer here is both yes and no. For the readers who didn’t see the movie: the scene is a military reenactment—shot with TV cameras—of one of the blackest pages of Romanian history: the massacre by the Romanian army of Jews from Odessa in 1941. I chose a historical place, where fascists used to gather, in front of the Royal Palace in Bucharest. We shot over a few hot summer nights, and this place is pretty crowded with people who take walks in the evenings. We had hired extras to perform as an audience for the show, but, as I consider myself a student of the Nouvelle Vague, I left the space open to passersby. So when the hundreds of soldiers, the guns, and the tanks appeared, many passersby were curious to see what was happening. Then, in a scene where a few (extras playing) Jews were supposed to run away, I instructed a few other extras to stop them and bring them back. And other people—non-extras, passersby—joined in the game. Did they do it because they noticed it was a performance and wanted to have fun? Were they anti-Semites? Was it just gregarious behavior? All of these? No idea. But the cameras captured the scene—and isn’t this unknown quantity, this lack of certainty about reality, this questioning of it, what we still love about cinema?

Sincerely,
Radu

Dear Radu,

Yes, and yours, Radu, in particular.

Sincerely,
Jim