The „Individual Responsibility“ Con
Help, the Austrians are coming! Production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) races through Bucharest, in response to an Austrian company commissioning an occupational safety video for its Romanian factory. When she’s not visiting accident survivors from the factory to cast them for interviews for the safety video, the bad-tempered media worker is scouting out an exclusive evening entertainment venue for the delegation from Austria expected for the shoot. In between, Angela does Uber tours and uploads social media videos in which she absurdly outbids misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate[1], whose face she superimposes over her own.
With “Do not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”, filmmaker Radu Jude, one of contemporary cinema’s most gifted pranksters, has succeeded in creating a comedy that not only narrates the dissolution of the gig economy’s boundaries, but also makes it tangible in its rough and tumble form: a deregulated working day as a bilious stream of verbal diarrhea, to which the car radio provides unending daily material for tirades and corny jokes (note: King Charles is a quasi-local celebrity because of a Romanian estate), while penetrating beats are meant to keep the permanently overworked Angela from dozing off in traffic. On the visual level, grainy 16mm film rubs up hard against TikTok filters. During her break, Angela rushes to a cemetery to move her father’s grave before diggers arrive for a new investment property. Meanwhile, the ‘Eastalgia’ exit option is debunked by footage from a 1981 Bucharest cab driver drama, which, alongside real-socialist messages of edification, reveal plenty of sideways glances at the economy of scarcity and toxic-masculine routines.
The two and a half hours of unrelenting ranting from the filmmaker and protagonist is exhausting. (Anyone who finds all two Slavoj Žižek quotes in the film, which are listed in the credits: please don’t contact me). But the know-it-all cleverness and exasperated bad mood are not ends to themselves, they want more. Like the dancing reflections in Angela’s car that emanate from her glittering sequin dress, all the assembled material crystallizes coherently around some angry, very concrete observations on the current relationship between work and image production.
Two of these observations should be briefly mentioned here: firstly, the narrative of Angela’s agonizingly endless day with the accident risk of overtired crew members puts the spotlight on a long and hotly debated issue of occupational safety in the film industry. As the inspiration for the film, in interviews (for example here), Jude himself refers to the recent traffic fatality of a worn-out Romanian film worker exhausted from shooting. Similar cases of life-threatening fatigue from long days of filming are common in the US – long before recent #metoo and last year’s US union strikes – and well-known enough that legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler (“The Conversation”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) made a documentary on that subject back in 2006. An insightful report on the topic from 2018 can be found here.. For the general theme of the film – a deregulation of work that attempts to advertise new forms of exploitation as a gain in autonomy (the ‘con’) – such incidents are a welcome example as unlike set accidents they do not usually fall under the liability of production companies.
Interestingly, and secondly, the satire surrounding the Austrian safety video aims to achieve something similar: The advertising for safety measures is intended to shift the responsibility for past workplace accidents entirely onto the side of the workers. Jude takes this audacity to the extreme in a final sequence lasting over half an hour, which shows the safety video shooting in a few static shots. From behind the camera, the director and the company representative (Nina Hoss) who has travelled to the location talk to Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrsan), who is sitting in a wheelchair, to ‘adapt’ his experience report to the requirements of corporate PR: Please don’t mention any deliveries to Russia, and certainly no cost-saving security risks for the company, while the dilapidated factory barrier falls apart in the background of the picture.
This planned sequence fits in with the Romanian art cinema of the last two decades, which has attracted attention since the breakthrough successes of Cristi Puiu (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”, 2005) and Corneliu Porumboiu (“12:08 – East of Bucharest”, 2006) with conceptually ambitious, elastically performed radical realism. The final act of “Do not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” also alludes to an even older theme in Romanian cinema, which deals with pedagogical film production as a demonstration of power: After a sensational bank robbery in Bucharest in 1959, the Securitate[2] forced the six convicts to re-enact their alleged offenses in an elaborately produced public information film called “Reconstituirea” (1960). (Five of the convicts were executed in the same year the film was produced. Wikipedia is actually a good starting point for further research in this case). Eight years later, Lucian Pintilie, one of Romania’s central cinema modernists, took this case as the starting point for a bitter satire with the same title: “Reconstituirea” (1968) is about two young people who are forced by the police to re-enact a brawl for which they were convicted for an educational film on violence. Pintilie’s film caused an international sensation and was banned by the Romanian cultural authorities.
It is difficult not to recognize an update of this scenario of public subjugation, in Jude’s film, where, by appearing in front of the camera for a small fee, a man gives up his right to sue his employer for failing to take the necessary safety measures.
Joachim Schätz, film scholar, is a university assistant at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. He led the project “Practices of educational film in Austria” in 2019–2023. Results at https://www.lehrfilmpraktiken.at
Referenzen:
Busch, Anita: Hollywood’s Grueling Hours & Drowsy-Driving Problem: Crew Members Speak Out Despite Threat To Careers, in: Deadline, 1.2.2018.
Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Tobias: „Rekonstruktion, oder: Dokument-Werden“, in: Daniela Hahn (Hg.): Beyond Evidence. Das Dokument in den Künsten, Paderborn: Fink 2016, 243–257.
Goi, Leonardo: „Rules Stop Me from Daring”: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”, in: Filmmaker Magazine, 10.8.2023.
Leu, Dora/Öykü Sofuoğlu: An Enfant Terrible in Terrible Times: Radu Jude Discusses “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”, in: MUBI, 17.10.2023.
[1] The American-British social media entrepreneur and kickboxer Tate achieved online fame and up to seven million followers on Twitter with his posts famous for misogynistic statements. A resident of Romania since 2017, he was only charged with rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal organization in June 2023 — after the film had already finished shooting.
[2] The Securitate was the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania, like the STASI in the German Democratic Republic.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, 2023, RO/LU/FR/HR, Radu Jude, Trailer
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
The „Individual Responsibility“ Con
Help, the Austrians are coming! Production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) races through Bucharest, in response to an Austrian company commissioning an occupational safety video for its Romanian factory. When she’s not visiting accident survivors from the factory to cast them for interviews for the safety video, the bad-tempered media worker is scouting out an exclusive evening entertainment venue for the delegation from Austria expected for the shoot. In between, Angela does Uber tours and uploads social media videos in which she absurdly outbids misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate[1], whose face she superimposes over her own.
With “Do not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”, filmmaker Radu Jude, one of contemporary cinema’s most gifted pranksters, has succeeded in creating a comedy that not only narrates the dissolution of the gig economy’s boundaries, but also makes it tangible in its rough and tumble form: a deregulated working day as a bilious stream of verbal diarrhea, to which the car radio provides unending daily material for tirades and corny jokes (note: King Charles is a quasi-local celebrity because of a Romanian estate), while penetrating beats are meant to keep the permanently overworked Angela from dozing off in traffic. On the visual level, grainy 16mm film rubs up hard against TikTok filters. During her break, Angela rushes to a cemetery to move her father’s grave before diggers arrive for a new investment property. Meanwhile, the ‘Eastalgia’ exit option is debunked by footage from a 1981 Bucharest cab driver drama, which, alongside real-socialist messages of edification, reveal plenty of sideways glances at the economy of scarcity and toxic-masculine routines.
The two and a half hours of unrelenting ranting from the filmmaker and protagonist is exhausting. (Anyone who finds all two Slavoj Žižek quotes in the film, which are listed in the credits: please don’t contact me). But the know-it-all cleverness and exasperated bad mood are not ends to themselves, they want more. Like the dancing reflections in Angela’s car that emanate from her glittering sequin dress, all the assembled material crystallizes coherently around some angry, very concrete observations on the current relationship between work and image production.
Two of these observations should be briefly mentioned here: firstly, the narrative of Angela’s agonizingly endless day with the accident risk of overtired crew members puts the spotlight on a long and hotly debated issue of occupational safety in the film industry. As the inspiration for the film, in interviews (for example here), Jude himself refers to the recent traffic fatality of a worn-out Romanian film worker exhausted from shooting. Similar cases of life-threatening fatigue from long days of filming are common in the US – long before recent #metoo and last year’s US union strikes – and well-known enough that legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler (“The Conversation”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) made a documentary on that subject back in 2006. An insightful report on the topic from 2018 can be found here.. For the general theme of the film – a deregulation of work that attempts to advertise new forms of exploitation as a gain in autonomy (the ‘con’) – such incidents are a welcome example as unlike set accidents they do not usually fall under the liability of production companies.
Interestingly, and secondly, the satire surrounding the Austrian safety video aims to achieve something similar: The advertising for safety measures is intended to shift the responsibility for past workplace accidents entirely onto the side of the workers. Jude takes this audacity to the extreme in a final sequence lasting over half an hour, which shows the safety video shooting in a few static shots. From behind the camera, the director and the company representative (Nina Hoss) who has travelled to the location talk to Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrsan), who is sitting in a wheelchair, to ‘adapt’ his experience report to the requirements of corporate PR: Please don’t mention any deliveries to Russia, and certainly no cost-saving security risks for the company, while the dilapidated factory barrier falls apart in the background of the picture.
This planned sequence fits in with the Romanian art cinema of the last two decades, which has attracted attention since the breakthrough successes of Cristi Puiu (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”, 2005) and Corneliu Porumboiu (“12:08 – East of Bucharest”, 2006) with conceptually ambitious, elastically performed radical realism. The final act of “Do not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” also alludes to an even older theme in Romanian cinema, which deals with pedagogical film production as a demonstration of power: After a sensational bank robbery in Bucharest in 1959, the Securitate[2] forced the six convicts to re-enact their alleged offenses in an elaborately produced public information film called “Reconstituirea” (1960). (Five of the convicts were executed in the same year the film was produced. Wikipedia is actually a good starting point for further research in this case). Eight years later, Lucian Pintilie, one of Romania’s central cinema modernists, took this case as the starting point for a bitter satire with the same title: “Reconstituirea” (1968) is about two young people who are forced by the police to re-enact a brawl for which they were convicted for an educational film on violence. Pintilie’s film caused an international sensation and was banned by the Romanian cultural authorities.
It is difficult not to recognize an update of this scenario of public subjugation, in Jude’s film, where, by appearing in front of the camera for a small fee, a man gives up his right to sue his employer for failing to take the necessary safety measures.
Joachim Schätz, film scholar, is a university assistant at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. He led the project “Practices of educational film in Austria” in 2019–2023. Results at https://www.lehrfilmpraktiken.at
Referenzen:
Busch, Anita: Hollywood’s Grueling Hours & Drowsy-Driving Problem: Crew Members Speak Out Despite Threat To Careers, in: Deadline, 1.2.2018.
Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Tobias: „Rekonstruktion, oder: Dokument-Werden“, in: Daniela Hahn (Hg.): Beyond Evidence. Das Dokument in den Künsten, Paderborn: Fink 2016, 243–257.
Goi, Leonardo: „Rules Stop Me from Daring”: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”, in: Filmmaker Magazine, 10.8.2023.
Leu, Dora/Öykü Sofuoğlu: An Enfant Terrible in Terrible Times: Radu Jude Discusses “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”, in: MUBI, 17.10.2023.
[1] The American-British social media entrepreneur and kickboxer Tate achieved online fame and up to seven million followers on Twitter with his posts famous for misogynistic statements. A resident of Romania since 2017, he was only charged with rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal organization in June 2023 — after the film had already finished shooting.
[2] The Securitate was the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania, like the STASI in the German Democratic Republic.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, 2023, RO/LU/FR/HR, Radu Jude, Trailer
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
Erwarte nicht zu viel vom Ende der Welt, 2023, Radu Jude, Filmstill
© Météore Films
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