This week we publish an essay by Pip Chodorov on Radu Jude’s Sleep #2 (2024), recently presented for the first time as a video installation at The Film Gallery in Paris, in parallel with a retrospective of his films at mk2 Bibliothèque × Centre Pompidou.
Sleep #2 is a film by Romanian artist Radu Jude. An afficionado of experimental filmmaking who is known for a dozen award-winning feature films, a handful of shorts, and a hundred commercials, Jude made Sleep #2 in 2024. It is a one-hour-long homage to the Andy Warhol film Sleep (1964). Although it premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2024, Sleep #2 remains elusive to the general public, having only been shown at retrospectives and film festivals.
Jude discovered Warhol’s cinema recently, around 2018; according to Jude, the encounter was of “major importance” to him.1 Around this time, Jude’s cinema started shifting into a more provocative stance towards the viewer, with titles such as I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023). Jude appreciated Warhol’s attack on cinema’s respectability in such films as Blow Job (1964). He learned from Warhol to embrace mistakes, to let the camera just run, to seek out bad shots or to set up situations to remind the viewers that they are watching a film. As Jude makes his films more spontaneously, more quickly and with smaller budgets, he tends to emulate Warhol’s approach and process if not his style.
Jude appreciates Warhol’s cinema for its freedom and its nonchalance, aspects that can be found in his own films. Writing about Blow Job two years before making Sleep #2, he notes that Warhol’s films oscillate between documentary and fiction, a distinction that can only exist in the mind of the viewer. 2 He also points out the tension between the space in the image and the space outside of it—what we see and what we cannot—as well as the dissonance between the title of the film and its subject—what we expect or desire to see and what the film actually shows us. Finally, the choice of a taboo subject is essential to him.
Sleep #2 draws upon these very tensions in its construction: situated in that interesting no-man’s-land between experimental film, fiction, and documentary, between personal film and surveillance footage, between parody and essay, the film is set in Pittsburgh while taking place in Romania. Shot in one country while taking place in another, full of delicious paradoxes, it looks inward and outward, forward and back; it is profound and minute, poetic and prosaic.
It began as a joke – a pun on Andy Warhol’s notorious 1964 durational film Sleep – but quickly evolved into something stranger, richer, and more resonant. Filmed entirely from a static EarthCam pointed at Warhol’s grave in a Pittsburgh cemetery and recorded from Jude’s own desktop computer in Romania, Sleep #2 is a film of quiet observation and deep implication. It plays with the absurdity of watching nothing happen over the course of a year, yet in doing so reveals the richness of duration, the poetry of the everyday, and the spectral nature of the image itself. What at first seems like a conceptual prank becomes a meditation on death and life, surveillance and authorship, the aesthetics of glitch, and the unexpected comedy of passersby paying tribute to a Pop art icon. Like Warhol, Jude embraces repetition, but he also adds a layer of meta-awareness and seasonal change—haikus, weather, animals, visitors, accidents—marking time with the patience of a philosopher and the humor of a sly cinephile.
Since Jude reappropriated webcam imagery to make Sleep #2, the film fits neatly into the category of found footage filmmaking: the reuse of pre-existing footage for one’s own films in the vein of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade artworks. The practice of found footage, common in experimental film and manifest in a range of iterations, goes back to the beginning of cinema history. A filmmaker working for the Lumière brothers created a montage of discarded clips in 1897, claiming disingenuously that they documented the Dreyfus affair (an example of reappropriation that predates Duchamp by sixteen years!).3
Recycling, reappropriation, and misappropriation (what the Situationists called détournement) have been common strategies in documentary filmmaking since Esfir Shub in the 1920s and in experimental filmmaking since Joseph Cornell in the 1940s. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s many paradigms and strategies developed for integrating previously shot material into new productions, thereby changing the meanings of the original images, and in a larger sense critically investigating or commenting on those images or on the history of image production, distribution and consumption.
The current proliferation of deepfake AI videos seems to have forever shattered the idea of the veracity of the photographic image which had long been one of the medium’s most solid semiotic markers. Today’s filmmakers have a wealth of archive footage at their fingertips, but also many other types of imagery—sources for found footage have expanded beyond the repository of Hollywood films, newsreels, and home movies so frequently used over the past century. As a result, the critical nature of working with pre-existing material is also expanding. In particular, notions of privacy when using surveillance cam footage, the impersonal authorship inherent in bodycam videos, the ethics or legality of scanning the corpus of police footage or even Google Earth, which is fundamentally a database of images, all demonstrate the pernicious omniscience of images and the power structures they create, echoing Foucault’s account of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1975).4
A new, related set of ideas suggested themselves to me while I watched Sleep #2. Here is a film that is itself a study of observation. Clocking in at just over one hour and structured following the seasons of the year, Jude captured the webcam’s images of Warhol’s grave from a distance; he has never been to the United States let alone to Pittsburgh. His relationship with the footage was also distanced in time: the EarthCam is active twenty-four hours a day, and Jude screen-captured material from it when he could, given his busy schedule and the seven-hour time difference, with morning in Bucharest corresponding to the middle of the night in Pittsburgh. Jude allows the traces of his observational behavior to intrude into the filmmaking process, showing his mouse cursor on the screen or capturing sounds in his room; Sleep #2 is a film about observing observation.
Can a webcam be considered surveillance when it has been placed there openly and visibly, to provide broader access to a public monument and as a vehicle for entertainment, where people who visit the grave pose for selfies? Some extroverted tourists even seem to be posing for the “Warhol Cam,” using his tombstone as a stage to reach a global audience and their “fifteen minutes of fame.”5 Yet that is what Jude is capitalizing on: he surveilled the site, unbeknownst to the participants who ended up as actors in his film. Day and night, the omniscient eye was and is upon them. As the graveyard visitors attend to Warhol in his eternal rest, we the viewers can attend to those eternal visitors.
Sleep #2 is deceptively simple. And yet the film reveals a complex network of reflections on the filmmaking process, the internet, the nature of the digital image, surveillance, and the passing of time. Even the naïve “#2” in the title evokes meanings on many levels: the idea of Jude’s film as a sequel to Warhol’s movie, as in a Hollywood franchise, and also of Warhol himself, who is “sleeping” there under the ground. Death is a second form of sleep. And just as Radu wrote about Blow Job, the sleep in the title is something that we cannot see because it happens below the bottom edge of the frame. The image foils our expectation that the true subject of the film will be what its title suggests. There is also a hidden layer of reappropriation: although there is no Warhol footage in Jude’s film, we watch Sleep #2 through the lens of Sleep #1.
On the other hand, Warhol’s Sleep is a very complex film whose image and title finally signify simply, only, and exactly what it shows: John Giorno sleeping. Warhol shot three hours of footage but used only twenty-seven minutes of it, which he reprinted and looped to make a film that is five hours and twenty minutes long. Sleep is an intricate montage of different shots, angles, and repetitions—Warhol flips some of the shots left-right and slows the projector down to sixteen frames per second from its standard twenty-four. He shot the film at different times and places and edited it for months with the help of an assistant, asking her to select the footage where Giorno was not moving.6 Radu finds deeper meanings in this editing choice: “it has this relation with death from the beginning… the death obsession of Warhol.”7
Warhol’s Sleep features flashes at the ends of the shots where the camera slowed down, or from the ends of the reels where the film got fogged. Likewise, in Jude’s Sleep #2 there are moments where we see lightning or other flashes of light on the webcam, when it snows or when the camera slips into night mode. These visible traces of the medium in both films distance us from the observation of the subject while reinforcing our awareness of being spectators. They bring to mind the physicality of the image as well as its fragility. The flashes are also ghostlike and spiritual, like the white light seen during a near-death experience.
Unlike Warhol’s film of a live person, Jude’s film of a dead person is full of movement: plants, flowers, animals and birds, the visitors and the transformation of nature from one season to the next. Where Warhol’s film is like a memorial about death, Jude’s film is about life, or more literally, life after death.8 There is a certain irony in a “live cam” showing a graveyard. Is it placed there so that we can see a ghost? The history of cinema is phantomatic; every time we fire up the projector we are bringing ghosts back from the grave. “Ghosts!” Ken Jacobs would exclaim about the people in his found footage films, captured a hundred years ago.9 The flickering film image does raise the dead in a ghostlike way; in French, a film screening is called a séance.
Another interesting parallel between the two Sleep films is the impassive nature of the camera. Warhol had a practice of filming Screen Tests by putting people in front of the running camera, sometimes even walking away. The author relinquishes his authorship to the camera. While Giorno was sleeping, Warhol was observing and filming him, operating a bit like a surveillance camera. Warhol claimed that he was shy about filming people, self-conscious to be seen with a camera. This was not the case when he shot Sleep—nobody was around except for the star, whose eyes were closed.10 Giorno knew he was being filmed (at least until he was literally unconscious). Warhol had to be active: the Bolex camera’s spring-wound motor can only shoot for thirty seconds before needing to be rewound by hand. The one-hundred-foot rolls need to be changed after shooting three minutes of film. Filmed at a very close range to a very close subject (Warhol and Giorno were lovers), Warhol’s Sleep tries to remain cold and impassive, to remove the trace of Warhol the observer. Filmed at a great distance, across oceans and sixty years after the first Sleep film, the gaze in Radu’s work is comparatively personal and present.
The webcam in the Pittsburgh cemetery is basically a surveillance device. Any number of people around the world can spy through this eye at any time of day or night to watch Warhol sleeping. Jude observes Warhol’s grave in imitation of Warhol’s own film, making his act of watching visible: he does not hide the mouse cursor or volume controls on his computer and sometimes mumbles to himself, keeping his subjectivity present on screen. “It’s a film about the act of watching. So it’s this camera just watching. And me from Romania, I’m watching that camera. So it’s a bit of a meta level that adds to that.”11 To impress the point, many of the tourists in the film line up in front of the grave to take their own pictures or selfies. They arrange Campbell’s Soup cans on the grave, perform small art actions, take pictures or make drawings, and leave objects behind. A trash collector comes. A gardener. Rather than Sleep, the film starts to resemble Warhol’s Screen Tests, a series of portrait films in which there is no cameraman and each person is free to perform themselves.
Other recent films that may or may not be considered found footage films also make use of the cameraman-less camera: Bill Morrison’s 2023 film Incident, a film using surveillance and bodycam footage that plays and replays a police shooting.12 And Radu remembers a film called Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020) documenting capsized migrants trying not to drown while the protagonist filmmaker, one of the migrants, allows her cell phone to record the experience impassively. “We are more and more in presence of these images with no author, with no conscience. Nobody decides how to frame or what to shoot exactly. It’s just captured impersonally.”13
Although there are occasional changes in the framing, zooming or panning, Jude had no control over this camera, which automatically zoomed every half hour (except in the winter when it got stuck and only showed wide shots). He also did no special retouching or color grading. In the spirit of Warhol, he let the footage create itself. At night, animals come, birds, squirrels, deer, rabbits who lick the soup cans, the found slapstick of silent cinema’s gestural clarity. The irreverent humor of Jude’s fiction films seeps in, as do the funny, broken, lo-fi aspects of the image, the algorithmic zooms and snowy silence. Time slows down. Through enforced observation we ourselves become visitors to this grave. If we get antsy, we remember Warhol’s famous embrace of boredom, admonishing us to relax and enjoy the film’s deceptive simplicity, its quiet richness, its metaphysical comedy and its meditation on watching, memory, time, and the seasons: a haiku.
Radu Jude, “Relancez Les Films de Warhol,” Trafic, Almanach de cinéma 2023, December 2022, p. 17.
Jude, “Relancez Les Films de Warhol,” p. 18.
“The Dreyfus affair was still a source of great interest in those days, and out of it I worked up a little film-story which made me quite a bit of money. Piecing together a shot of some soldiers, one of a battleship, one of the Palais de Justice, and one of a tall gray-haired man, I called it L’Affaire Dreyfus. People actually believed that this was a filming of the famous case, but one time after a showing a little old man came backstage and inquired of me whether it was an authentic filming of the case. I assured him that it was. The little old man then pointed out that the case had taken place in 1894, just one year before cameras were available. I then confessed my deception, and told him I had shown the pictures because business had been poor and we needed the money. Suffice to say, I never showed L’Affaire Dreyfus again.” Francis Doublier, “Reminiscences of an Early Motion-Picture Operator” in Marhsall Deutelbaum (ed.), ‘Image’ on the Art and Evolution of Film (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), 23–25.
Michel Foucault, “Le panoptisme” in Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 228–64.
A quote famously misappropriated to Warhol.
Bruce Jenkins, “1963.10 Sleep, 1963” in John G. Hanhardt, ed., The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne: 1963–1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021), p. 43.
In conversation with the filmmaker, August 11, 2024.
A double death: since Giorno and Warhol are both now deceased, the 1964 Sleep takes on a new reality as documentary.
For example, Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969/71), The Guests (1999/2013), and others.
Op cit 6, p. 42.
Op it 7.
In the case of Incident, the cameras are worn and activated by police offers but are not actively operated or monitored. See: Pip Chodorov, “Bill Morrison’s Reality Show” in Millenium Film Journal #81, Spring 2025, pp. 58-63.
Op cit 7.
