Sleep #2: Radu Jude visits Andy Warhol’s grave for a meditative study of posthumous celebrity

• Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film Festival

Andy Warhol’s debut film Sleep (1963) captured his lover John Giorno slumbering for more than five hours. Now from Radu Jude comes Sleep #2, which is considerably shorter, but culled from a year’s worth of webcam footage of Warhol’s grave – here the subject also sleeps, according to a more finite, poetical definition.

It’s a desktop film, as the digital artefacting and wandering watermark attest, but also an observational piece. Comparisons may be made to Warhol’s Empire (1965) as this film too captures a static subject on a fixed camera – though it occasionally zooms or pans abruptly, and is rocked by a thunderstorm. Like Empire, this is a drama of light and climate, as we observe the grave in snippets taken day and night, through such episodes as lightning strikes, a blazing sepia dusk and an obliterating snowstorm.

But this is not a static subject. Warhol’s plaque, dwarfed by his parents’ headstone with Warhola engraved in capitals, provides a changing landscape. Devotees have decorated it with flowers, flags, and Campbell’s soup cans, in homage to the artist’s famous canvases. Jude underlined the link between this film and Warhol’s commercial subjects by premiering Sleep #2 alongside his advertising montage Eight Postcards From Utopia at Locarno Film Festival. 

The spirit of The Factory endures in a Pittsburgh cemetery – Warhol’s grave is a home to many visitors. A family of deer prance over the plot, while humans hang out, pay their respects with nodded heads, scribble in journals, pose for photographs and take the inevitable selfies. A recurring character waters the flowers and removes the presumably expired soup tins – at Christmas he lays a wreath on both Warhol’s grave and that of his parents, suggesting he is a relative rather than a pop art zealot.

We can assume, though, that most are drawn by the artist’s fame. Warhol did much to describe our understanding of stardom, and aptly Sleep #2 is also a study of posthumous celebrity and its self-aware adherents, including one man in a blond wig and striped T-shirt. Many travellers are clearly aware of the webcam, and capture a slice of their allotted 15 minutes by giving it a jolly wave. One cheeky pilgrim wriggles out of his trousers to briefly moon the camera – an act that is less subversive than respectful as it winks at Warhol’s film Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964). In the absence of any more salacious acts caught on camera, it’s likely Warhol would approve. One hopes he would also enjoy this captivating film, which offers concrete evidence of a celebrity-artist’s cultural immortality.