*CFP* "GEORGE A. ROMERO: A CANNIBALIZED BODY OF WORK?", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

International Conference

George A. Romero: A Cannibalized Body of Work?

November 24-25, 2022, Montpellier, France

 

Dug up in 2019, The Amusement Park (1973), and released in theaters in June 2021, commissioned by the Lutherian Church, stands as a reminder that George Andrew Romero (1940-2017) was not just the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and creator of the modern zombie. By focusing on an old man abandoned in a theme park where he will be subjected to all sorts of humiliation and abuse, the Pittsburgh director once again fires away at US-American society and remains faithful to an aesthetics whereby the figures of Gothic horror are portrayed in a raw realist mode.

Prompted by this posthumous release, and considering the continued relevance of Romero’s stories of contamination, zombified lives, and deserted stores and streets in the light of a global pandemic, this two-day international conference aims to decenter the habitual views cast on a body of work that has been cannibalized by the living dead. From 1968 to 2009, ten out of the sixteen feature films directed by Romero have ignored the creature to focus on witches in Jack’s Wife/Season of the Witch (1972), vampires in Martin (1977), killer monkeys in Monkey Shines (1988) and faceless yuppies in Bruiser (2000).

The conference aims to engage with this less familiar facet of Romero’s cinema, which goes well beyond horror and the Fantastic (Romero’s second feature film, the 1971 There’s Always Vanilla, is essentially a romcom), and to approach his work from perspectives other than the usual ideological approaches that emphasise Romero’s critique of contemporary patriarchal capitalism. Novel political approaches (ecological, intersectional, queer approaches, etc.) are warmly encouraged.

The conference also ambitions to uncover other original features and practices of the director, screenwriter and editor, whose formal talent has drawn less attention than that of his peers (John Carpenter and David Cronenberg). It also aims to inscribe Romero’s oeuvre within its production context, and notably with the growing popularity of the horror genre that has spilled out of the less savory waters of exploitation into the mainstream. The cohesion of Romero’s films, whether formal (screenwriting, directing, editing, his use of sound banks) or thematic (utopia, the couple, the community, religion, contamination, etc.), will be studied beyond the figure of the zombie. Attention can also be paid to his work’s relationship to other media, including television and the newsreel, comics (Creepshow [1982]), literature (adaptations like The Dark Half [1993]) and, more broadly, his debt to literary genres and traditions (the Gothic, of course, but also the Arthurian myth in Knightriders [1981]).

Anchored in the city of Pittsburgh until the director moved to Toronto in 2004, Romero’s output also proposes a cinematic topography and geography that questions the place of the human in a modern urban world (Martin, the director’s favorite film of his own probably offers the most striking example). To what extent do Romero’s spaces, whether urban or rural, provide the material for an aesthetics (relying on nostalgia, parody, realism or poetry) or a personal politics? Can they also be seen as characteristic of certain tendencies in North American cinema and culture of the time?

Finally, can Romero’s body of work be understood in relation to various understandings of classical, modernist and postmodern cinema? How does the director appropriate and possibly rewrite classical genres such as the Gothic, horror, the Fantastic, the road movie, the Western (Martin and Knightriders again comes to mind)? Though case studies of the living-dead movies are by no means excluded, special attention will be given to the “minor” or “unknown” films and their place in contemporary North American cinema and genres. Studies of the reception of these films are particularly welcome.

A maverick director who ultimately came to enjoy a cult status among horror fans and even auteur status in France, Romero systematically found himself working with low budgets, which largely conditioned the writing and production of his films, and which came with their lot of freedom and constraints. To what extent are these production conditions responsible for the director’s self-declared mode of “guerilla filmmaking”? How did they affect his reliance on homemade special effects (his long-term collaboration with Tom Savini can be explored in this respect), his editing technique and casting decisions (with professional actors working alongside ordinary Pittsburgh residents such as John Amplas)? Romero’s body of work largely relies on a group of faithful collaborators and friends (producer Richard P. Rubinstein, writer Stephen King, makeup artistic/actor Tom Savini, director Dario Argento), who often deliberately sought to enhance the Romerian aesthetics and politics (in the case of King and Savini) but occasionally defamiliarized and perhaps even perverted it (in the case of Argento). Speakers are encouraged to explore how such collaborations contributed to nourish and sustain Romero’s films.

This international conference thus aims to shed light on the dark half of the Romerian moon, which has consistently been obscured by the cannibal figure of the zombie, and to call on theoretical and methodological concepts and approaches that have not been utilized to study the director’s work. 

Proposals can focus on the following points:

• Analyses of Romero’s non-living dead films 
• New political approaches to Romero's work (e.g. ecological, intersectional, queer approaches) 
• Production contexts 
• Formal and thematic coherences beyond the figure of the zombie 
• Romero's work and other media (e.g. literature, television, comics) 
• Romero's collaborators 
• "Guerilla" filmmaking methods 
• Reception studies 
• Romero's work as classical/modernist/postmodern cinema

 

Proposals can be in English or in French and must include a 200-300 words abstract, a short bibliography and blurb: they should be sent by January 31 2022 to: (romeroreturns22@gmail.com)

This conference is part of the “Films and Series: Politics of Audiovisual Forms,” a research program of the RiRRa21, and is organized in collaboration with the Université de Bourgogne-Franche Comté (CRIT) and the Université de Grenoble Alpes (Litt&Arts).