Radu Jude shares his Top Ten

1–3. AS I WAS KINDLY INVITED

by Artforum to “compile a list of ten of [my] favorite (and preferably art-related) things,” I wanted to start off with three big art exhibitions that occurred in Romania, my home country. But I can’t—save for the great Brancusi show that took place at the Muzeul Național de Artă Timișoara (organized on the occasion of Timișoara being named a European Capital of Culture in 2023), there were no other important shows staged. And no traveling exhibitions on, say, African art, Bruegel, Cézanne, Klee, Marisol, or Rothko will ever see the light of day here. To experience such presentations, one must have the privilege to travel abroad. I was at the Berlin International Film Festival in Germany this year with my new film, Kontinental ’25, and had a bit of time to see the Nan Goldin exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie. I was impressed by her slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1981–2022, beyond measure.
4. UBUWEB

For those of us who live on the peripheries of Europe, ubu.com is the greatest museum without walls that one can access to study the avant-garde. Alas, my imperfect knowledge of this history—and the taste I’ve developed for it—is all owed to this website. A huge THANK YOU FOREVER! to poet and artist Kenneth Goldsmith for creating it. Btw, I also love Goldsmith’s books, including Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011), which he edited with Craig Douglas Dworkin, and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Poetics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020). I actually sent a PDF copy of the latter to a real lawyer who helped my team find a legal way to make a feature film composed entirely out of TV ads.
5. NO WAVE CINEMA

Through UbuWeb I’ve discovered the work of No Wave auteurs such as Vivienne Dick, Richard Kern, Amos Poe, and Nick Zedd (Eric Mitchell’s films aren’t on the site, but you can find them on YouTube). I am inspired by the artists’ raw energy and fuck-you aesthetics. Not all of these movies are good or even watchable, but it doesn’t matter—that’s the whole point. It’s a shame that many of these films haven’t been restored and presented as they’re meant to be seen. I want to sort of remake Mitchell’s Kidnapped (1978), which itself is a take on Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1965). Both of these films were shot over the course of a day, which I’d do with my Mitchell homage. I hope to have the courage to invite the wonderful Lydia Lunch to act in one of my films sometime.
6. FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

This self-described “research agency” has discovered new and profound ways to engage with politics, history, and digital imagery—FA’s mind-blowing videos would’ve even made film theorist André Bazin scratch his head. Go to the group’s website to study its projects—I recommend A City Within a Building: The Mariupol Drama Theatre, 2023, a work about Russia’s bombing of Ukraine, and A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023, 2024. FA’s director, Eyal Weizman, has also written some great books, including Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2017), where he expands upon the organization’s goals and methodologies.
7. ANDREI GORZO, FLORENTIN POPA, AND GEORGE STATE

State and Popa are poets—I am in awe of the ways they work with the Romanian language, especially in their newest books, the former’s Sarx (2023) and the latter’s Sutta (2024). I hope they get translated into many different languages—these writers deserve a larger audience. Gorzo is Romania’s best film critic. His newest book, Ce am învățat de la Graham Greene (What I Learned from Graham Greene, 2024), is centered around his father’s (and our country’s) complicated past. This work, both a memoir and a montage, is incredibly affecting.
8. SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Many of Žižek’s recent essays and articles have been lucid pleas for supporting Ukraine (and Europe) against the Russian invasion. Infuriatingly, there are some who stand behind Vladimir Putin’s barbarity. Žižek, however, is an unabashed dissenter—he has never done any kind of victim-blaming or -shaming with Ukraine. In a filmed 1964 interview with journalist Günter Gaus (which can easily be found on YouTube), Hannah Arendt discussed how certain intellectuals used extravagantly complicated arguments to defend Hitler. This is also true of Putin’s advocates, especially Donald Trump, whom many Americans gleefully voted into the White House for a second term. Fuck them all!
9. HONG SANG-SOO

I have watched Hong’s The Novelist’s Film (2022) several times already. I am always so moved when Jun-hee, the titular writer (played by Lee Hye-young), is reminded that in order to make a movie, she needs an actual story, which she gracefully says can be found anywhere. (This is so true! But hard to accept as a filmmaker.) Hong’s work—intelligent, funny, moving, elegantly crafted—is very much like the small stories told by the novelist. I highly recommend Dennis Lim’s 2022 book about Hong, Tale of Cinema. It describes the director’s approach to filmmaking beautifully, and it manifests a certain direction for cinema that should be followed, in my opinion, by more people.
10. BRUCE LABRUCE

I’ve liked every movie I’ve managed to see by LaBruce—thus far, L.A. Zombie (2010) is my favorite. I mention him here because he put me on his Artforum Top Ten in the magazine’s March 2024 issue, and that made me very happy. I hope to meet him one day.

Radu Jude

1–3. AS I WAS KINDLY INVITED

4. UBUWEB

5. NO WAVE CINEMA

6. FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

7. ANDREI GORZO, FLORENTIN POPA, AND GEORGE STATE

8. SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

9. HONG SANG-SOO

10. BRUCE LABRUCE

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