ReFocus: The Films of Lucian Pintilie

deadline for submissions: 
August 31, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Edinburgh University Press
contact email: 

 

ReFocus: The Films of Lucian Pintilie

Lucian Pintilie (1933-2018) is widely recognized as an influential figure in Romanian cinema, frequently nicknamed the "(god)/(grand)father of the Romanian New Wave" (Pop, 2014; Roddick, 2018; Holdsworth, 2018). Despite the consensus regarding Pintilie’s place in the Romanian film canon and the existence of various articles and chapters in Romanian, English and French on his cinematic oeuvre (Pintilie was also an acclaimed stage director), the English language scholarship on his films is still under-developed, with no volume in English dedicated to the director alone. The proposed edited collection aims to bring together the prevalent strands of scholarship in the Pintilie exegesis as well as new or less trodden directions of research, allowing for the sustained, focused and in-depth critical attention that Pintilie, as both a figure of national significance and as a transnationally mobile auteur, thoroughly deserves.

Pintilie has been discussed as one of the few representatives of a "cinema of contestation" during the communist period (Filimon, 2014) and his films have been used as case studies in books and articles dealing with topics ranging from media reflexivity to the topos of Romania as a periphery of Europe. In the existing scholarship we noted a confounding variety of labels that were often vaguely attached to Pintilie’s films, such as "grotesque", "absurd", "farcical", "burlesque", "surreal", "cynical", "satirical", "carnivalesque". One of the things that we believe is missing in much of the scholarship is a more applied discussion of these critical/aesthetic categories.

Recent scholarship has showcased a strong interest in "historicizing the rise of Romanian auteur cinema" (Popa, 2018, 90) in which Pintilie played a key role. Popescu (2014) has analysed Pintilie’s status as an auteur during the difficult negotiations with the communist censorship apparatus, by examining stenographic transcripts of discussions that took place between Pintilie and film bureaucrats in charge of the production units operated by the state-owned studio RomaniaFilm and Popa (2018) has argued that the Romanian New Wave cinema has a "class problem" which can be traced back to Pintilie’s masterpiece Reconstituirea/The Reenactment (1968). The industrial and institutional context of Pintilie’s cinematic output remains nonetheless under-examined in the English language scholarship and although there are important precedents such as Anne Jäckel’s work on the film policies that enabled the French-Romanian Pintilie co-productions of the early nineties (Jäckel 2000a; Jäckel 2000b), there is scope for analysing more closely Pintilie’s stint as head of the Creation Studio of the Ministry of Culture and the ways in which he navigated the institutional landscape of the Romanian and French film industries.

The proposed volume aims to address these gaps in the scholarship as well as offer novel perspectives on Lucian Pintilie’s films.

Possible topics include the following:

  • Analyses of individual films using various conceptual frameworks
  • Discussions of particular aspects of style in Pintilie’s films
  • Pintilie reworking literature and theatre through film
  • The institutional/industrial context of Pintilie’s films during the communist and/or post-communist period
  • Gender and class representations in Pintilie’s films
  • The international reception of Pintilie’s films
  • Pintilie and his collaborators (the relationship between Pintilie and his French producer Marin Karmitz, the casting in multiple films of actors such as Răzvan Vasilescu or the collaboration between Pintilie, Cristi Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu on Niki and Flo)
  • Pintilie’s legacy in Romanian cinema and his own attempts to construct an authorial persona through his writings
  • Your suggested topic

 

If you have any queries about the project and the suitability of your proposal for inclusion in the volume, please do not hesitate to address them to the editors, Dr. Laura Sava (laura.sava@xjtlu.edu.cn) and Dr. Andrei Gorzo (andrei.gorzo@unatc.ro).

The volume is intended for the Edinburgh University Press ReFocus: International Directors Series (series editors: Robert Singer, Gary D. Rhodes and Stefanie Van de Peer). If you are interested in contributing, an abstract of 300-400 words accompanied by a short author bio of no more than 150 words should be emailed to both editors by the 31st of August, 2024.  A decision will be communicated to the contributors by the 15th of September, 2024. Completed chapters should be between 7000 and 8000 words (including references). A provisional deadline for the chapter submission is 30th of April, 2025 (the deadline may be revised and will be confirmed at a later date, alongside submission guidelines).