[Commlist] Call for Chapters: ReFocus: The Films of Lucian Pintilie

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 /at/ xjtlu.edu.cn)) and Dr. 
Andrei Gorzo ((andrei.gorzo /at/ 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).

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