Sleep, death, and anti-film: Radu Jude, Andy Warhol, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Casas, and Yuri Ancarani
This text is part of a series of invitations initiated by The Film Gallery to young writers to reflect on Radu Jude’s ‘Sleep #2’ (2024), presented as a video installation in Paris from September 22 to October 4. The exhibition marks Jude’s entry into the field of gallery-based work and runs alongside a full retrospective of his films at mk2 Bibliothèque × Centre Pompidou (23 September – 11 October). A second exhibition by Radu Jude, ‘The Exit of the Trains’, developed with Adrian Cioflâncă in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, will open on October 9 at The Film Gallery.
“Sleep and film are twin realities,” says Apichatpong Weerasethakul as he re-examines the cinematic experience through his carefully crafted visual numbness. Though long considered, his idea stirs something timeless: much like dreams or stasis, films suspend the linear progression of time, distort spatial perception, and construct alternate realities. Their ability to transport viewers into a trance-like state has often been compared to symbolic death, and from there, has been only a small step to exploring self-referentiality and the fluid nature of perception in experimental cinema. Building on this idea, Radu Jude’s Sleep #2 (2024) stages the subtle boundary between sleep and death in Andy Warhol’s artistic practice – and life, if we think that the pop artist, the master of collapsing opposites (the spectacular and the mundane, the living and the dead), passed away in his sleep. In his purely observational documentation of Warhol’s grave, Jude creates an anachronistic dialogue with the “Pope of Pop” and his seminal anti-film Sleep (1964), while inscribing his own experiment within the trajectory of other video-based artists who have explored the proximity death-sleep and the space of cemetery not only as a place of aesthetic fascination, but also as a “zone” and a limbo: Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendour, 2012), Yuri Ancarani (Baron Samedi, 2015), Carlos Casas (Cemetery, 2019), to name but a few.
At the time Andy Warhol filmed poet John Giorno taking a nap – for what became the 5-hour, 21-minute experimental film called Sleep – he was working in parallel on an iconic series titled Death and Disaster, which included images of car crashes, suicides, electric chairs, and race riots. Obsessed about how death is mediated and consumed by the public, Warhol repeatedly screen-printed newspaper clippings that “glorified” death, reducing them to anodyne facts – and artifacts – through their sheer multiplicity. In his view, the more present, material, and reproducible an idea becomes, the more flattened it turns. We lose our emotional connection to it. And just as death is exorcised through repetition, the intimate act of sleeping is desensitized by the voyeuristic gaze of his camera. The sleepy Giorno, Warhol’s lover at the time, is not depicted in the film as a vulnerable body but as an epitome of stillness and temporality. Much like his silkscreens – Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times, Electric Chair, and Tunafish Disaster – that had the primal goal to tame death by multiplying its images ad infinitum, his anti-film spectacularized the act of sleeping through techniques such as looped footage, long static takes, close-ups, and the scrutiny of the body’s surface to the point of abstraction.
It was in this spirit of “la société du spectacle” – a concept that shaped much of Warhol’s work – that in 2013, five decades after the release of Sleep, the Andy Warhol Museum launched a project called Figment: a live camera streaming 24/7 Warhol’s grave at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Sensitive to the durational and experimental potential of this EarthCam, Radu Jude decided to make a film out of it. Between January 2022 and February 2023, he extracted footage from Figment to craft his own anti-film about sleep – this time Warhol’s eternal sleep.
Set against the ambient sounds of a resting place that is anything but still – birds, deer, rabbits, dogs, squirrels, grave gardeners, visitors, and groupies animate, nomadically, the fauna of his tomb – Sleep #2 explores themes that resonate with Warhol’s conceptual toolkit: voyeurism and identity, stillness and repetition, media saturation and tautology, commodification and aestheticization, emotional detachment. But no matter how much one might indulge in this conceptual horizon, Radu Jude finds a way to carve out space for visual quietude and mental stillness. Divided into four chapters, his desktop film is punctuated by haikus – one for each season. Ethereal in nature and form, they counterbalance the constant presence of an iconic prop, which happens to be pop par excellence: the Campbell’s Soup Cans left by the visitors on Warhol’s grave. Sometimes two, sometimes five, sometimes more, this spontaneous installation stays with the viewer as the film’s punctum, as if Warhol himself, an invisible trickster, had staged his afterlife through a continuum of appearances and disappearances. While Jude’s desktop montage can be read as a meditation on Warhol’s death, the lack of scripted characters or narratives marks a notable detachment from his own aesthetics. It must be refreshing for Jude to have a moment of “respiro” and craft something which is not only purely cinematic, but also purely conceptual: 61 well-orchestrated minutes of “anti-filmic” matter.
Jude’s engagement with time and space triggers an experience of stillness – almost ritualistic – that aligns him with fellow artists experimenting with video and the interplay between sleep and death. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the sleepwalker of contemporary cinema, has transformed his drifting storytelling into both a philosophy and a lullaby – literally. In 2018, he premiered in Rotterdam SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL: a hybrid of video installation and overnight hotel, where guests could check in and fall asleep to moving images. This experiment echoed, on a lighter note, the mysterious narrative of his earlier film, Cemetery of Splendour, where Hypnos and Thanatos meet again on Thai soil. In an anonymous village, a strange plague afflicts soldiers with an unusual sleeping syndrome. Housed in a former school turned improvised clinic, they remain in a near-comatose state, with no clear cause or treatment. Though never explicitly stated, political undercurrents related to Thailand’s history and military climate rise to the surface. Nevertheless, they do not pierce through. Memory sleeps. A signature of Weerasethakul’s cinema, the ghosts of the forgotten never materialize. They remain shrouded in clouds of amnesia, so much so that the struggle to remember is often more powerful – or at least more haunting – than remembering itself. In his anti-prototype of video activism, marked by slow-paced storytelling, the sleep of reason watches over the soldiers as much as it does over a dormant nation.
Persisting in a kindred visual experience, marked by multiple transitions into the hypnotic, Carlos Casas’ Cemetery is a poetic manifesto centered on the myth of the elephant graveyard. Rooted in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, where it is described as a liminal state between death and rebirth – a bardo – the legendary cemetery is hidden in the heart of the jungle. Punctuated by textured soundscapes, the film unfolds in four chapters. Soon after a devastating earthquake in Sri Lanka, Nga, a venerable elephant, senses his death and the approaching end of the world. Guided by his mahout, Sanra, Nga embarks on a final journey toward the “bardo”. Haunted by the seen (poachers) and the unseen (echoes from the other side), their march is accompanied by natural sounds and monologues about death, mourning, and reincarnation, highlighting the deep connection between animals and humans. Casas’s extensive research into elephants’ infrasonic communication immerses the audience in a post-human rite of passage. As the film advances, it slips into a sequence of abstract images and black screens, signaling the arrival at the mythical site. At dawn – matching the film’s conclusion – we find ourselves drifting on the edge, suspended between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary: a “zone” in the most Lacanian sense. Is it an end or a beginning?
Placing his aesthetics on the same cusp of unconsciousness, Yuri Ancarani’s nine-minute film Baron Samedi reveals the unseen world contained within the microcosm of a cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Premiering as a dual-screen installation at the Triennale di Milano in 2015, in an exhibition curated by Vincenzo De Bellis, the film takes its title from one of the central figures of the Haitian Vodou pantheon: Baron Samedi, the loa of death, disruption, and resurrection. Yet it is through absence that the Baron is most vividly invoked. His rarefied presence is distilled in the image of wild goats –animals traditionally sacrificed in his honor – roaming ferally through the graveyard like a gang of stray zombies. Their improvised choreography emphasizes a sense of disorientation and spiritual unrest. The spectacle and the sacredness juxtapose in this cemetery in decay, mirroring with an allegorical force a nation besieged by trauma, violence, and loss. Haunted by lingering presence and suppressed memory, Baron Samedi does not feel the need to be explanatory as long as it is profoundly experiential.
In shared affinity for sensory ethnography and poetic narratives, Radu Jude, Andy Warhol, Yuri Ancarani, Carlos Casas, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul each shape a distinct form of hypnotic cinema through works that navigate the boundaries of life and death as fluidly as they blur the line between film and anti-film. They lead us back – drawn by fear and fascination – to the origins of the moving image, to that moment of stillness, both an ending and a beginning, that Laura Mulvey famously called “death 24 times a second.”
This text is part of a series of invitations initiated by The Film Gallery to young writers to reflect on Radu Jude’s Sleep #2, presented as a film installation in Paris (September 22-October 4), and published in partnership with Films in Frame.
This project is co-financed by the Romanian Cultural Institute through the Cantemir Programme – a funding framework for cultural projects intended for the international environment.
Larisa Oancea
Larisa Oancea is an art historian and researcher working between Southern France and Venice, Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Theory from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where her thesis explored the influence of Renaissance art on European cinema, focusing on directors such as Serghei Eisenstein, Peter Greenaway, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. With a background in both art history and anthropology, her work examines the intersection of the visual arts with other disciplines, emphasizing the role of “montage” in interdisciplinary practices.
Larisa Oancea
[:ro]Larisa Oancea este istoric de artă și cercetător independent. Lucrează între Veneția și sudul Franței. Este doctor în istoria și teoria artei (Universitatea Națională de Arte din București) cu o teză despre influențele artei renascentiste asupra cinematografiei europene, de la Serghei Eisenstein la Peter Greenaway. Formată atât ca istoric de artă, cât și ca antropolog, cercetările sale investighează intersecția artelor vizuale cu alte discipline și importanța noțiunii de montaj în practicile interdisciplinare.[:en]Larisa Oancea is an art historian and researcher working between Southern France and Venice, Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Theory from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where her thesis explored the influence of Renaissance art on European cinema, focusing on directors such as Serghei Eisenstein, Peter Greenaway, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. With a background in both art history and anthropology, her work examines the intersection of the visual arts with other disciplines, emphasizing the role of “montage” in interdisciplinary practices.[:]
