COURAGE

prepájame zbierky

Tibor Philipp (1953–) was a member of the Inconnu group. He participated in and organized many oppositional events in the 1970 and 1980s. His originally worked as a pressman and, later, businessman.

He joined Inconnu in 1982. His friendship and family tie to György Krassó was very significant in the formation of of his mindset and his artistic and political activism. He lived in Krassó’s former flat in Nádor Street, which at the time was named Ferenc Münnich street (Münnich was a prominent Hungarian communist politician who served as the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People’s Republic of Hungary from 1958 to 1961). The flat became a central, legendary site of the oppositional movement and of the performances of Inconnu, including the banned exhibition “A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986,” the works for which were destroyed. This flat was the main base of the hunger strike in 1988, which was organized as an oppositional gesture in response to the arbitrary revocation of passports. The apartment was also the seat of the Hungarian October Party, which was led by Krassó in 1988.

An investigation was launched by Department III of the Ministry of Home Affairs into his activities under the covername “Fraudster.” In addition to being kept under observation, Philipp was also prohibited from traveling to the West and faced difficulties finding employment and, therefore, earning an income. Members of the Inconnu group often had to accept jobs which had nothing to do with their professional qualifications. Philipp worked as a carpenter in Bálint Nagy’s illegal architecture company. Nagy had ties to the samizdat periodical Beszélő.

In an interview held in 2014, Philipp emphasized the central role of 1956 in his mindset. He criticized the commemorations of the revolution which were held in the 2010s because of the lack of genuine content. In his opinion, the way in which 1956 was remembered formed the fault line between artists like those who participated in these commemorations and the circle of Beszélő. The latter group approached the revolution in an ambivalent way. In contrast with these “elite-intellectuals,” the “plebeian” young people from rural areas followed the so-called “pesti srác,” or “Pest boys” attitude, in other words they glorified the image of young men in Pest taking up arms and fighting in the streets, heroically if also hopelessly, against the Soviet forces. The intellectuals wanted to implement reforms from within the system, while Philipp and his fellows wanted to change the system.

Pilav went into exile in 1934, but returned to Yugoslavia, to Foča, in 1937 because of disagreements with the fascists. After the establishment of the Ustasha authority, he was imprisoned as traitor in the concentration camps of Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška in 1941, from which he fled.

From 1942, he lived in Vienna, Austria. Pilav stayed there until 1946 when he was caught and rendered to Yugoslavia where he was sentenced to five years in prison for collaborating with the fascists. After his imprisonment, Pilav escaped from Yugoslavia in 1953.

Since 1954 he was found among Adil Zulfikarpašić's circle of friends, which is how Pilav became one of the initiators of Bosnian Views (Bosanski pogledi), for which he wrote a single text related to the fate of Bosniaks during the Second World War. Pilav led a humanitarian organization, the Muslim Social Service (Muslimischer Sozialdienst), which operated in Vienna.

John I. (Ivan) Pintar was born in Chicago in 1904. As a commercial entrepreneur in 1933, he moved to Zagreb, where he worked as the manager of an American chemical company since 1937. The communist regime in Yugoslavia arrested him in the autumn of 1946 and in early 1947 sentenced him to death in a show trial under charges of being an American spy. Thanks to the mediation of US authorities and the US embassy in Belgrade, his sentence was reduced to 20 years in prison with forced labour. After four years spent in jail in Lepoglava and Srijemska Mitrovica, and after the persistent efforts of the US Department of State and US Ambassador to Belgrade George V. Allen, he was released on December 4, 1950. Upon his return to the United States, he wrote and published a book on the communist regime and his prison experience entitled Four Years in Tito's Hell. He dedicated the book, published in Buenos Aires in 1954, in which he critically spoke about the Communist regime in Yugoslavia, to all victims of communism.

Lucian Pintilie (1933–2018) was a Romanian theatre and cinema director and screenplay writer. He was born on 9 November 1933 in Taruntino, now part of Ukraine. In 1940 his family felt Taruntino and thus, the young Pintilie finished his primary and secondary education in Romania. In 1951 he enrolled in the theatre directing department of the Ion Luca Caragiale Institute of Theatre and Film in Bucharest,. During his first year as a student, the Securitate contacted Pintilie and out of a “spirit of adventure” he agreed to become its “unqualified informer.” When Pintilie realised that he could not perform the assigned task of informer, he started to write reports containing “ridiculous denunciations” and complaints about “administrative shortcomings” in the student dormitories. In the same year of 1952 his father was arrested for eight months for political reasons (his membership of the Iron Guard). After his father’s release from prison, Pintilie put an end to his collaboration with the Securitate by courageously stating in his last meeting with the Securitate officer that: “I am a great director and never again I will dealt with such activities that can distract me from my creative work” (Pintilie 2003, 365–366). Following graduation Lucian Pintilie worked for a short period of time as a director at the Army Theatre and at TVR (Romanian acronym for Romanian National Television). Due to his rebellious spirit and frequent conflicts with the management, he lost his position at the Army Theatre. In November 1959 he also got fired from TVR as he refused to direct a show dedicated to the celebration of the October Revolution. Lucian Pintlie’s career was saved by Liviu Ciulei, another well-known Romanian director, who invited him to work as a director at Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre. Here he directed a series of productions, such as Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun (Copiii soarelui, 1961), Teodor Mazilu‘s Proști sub clar de lună (Fools by moonlight, 1962), George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (Cezar și Cleopatra, 1963), Max Frisch’s The Arsonists (Biederman și incendiatorii, 1964), William Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands (Inima mea este pe înălțimi, 1964), I. L. Caragiale’s D’ale carnavalului (Carnival scenes, 1966), and A. Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Livada cu vișini, 1967). At the same time, Liviu Ciulei included Pintilie in his shooting team for the film Valurile Dunării (The waves of the Danube) and he also worked as principal assistant of another great director, Victor Ilie, in two of his film projects. In 1965 Pintilie was given a UNESCO scholarship for film directing in France and Italy and this opportunity opened the way for his career as a film director. His first movie Duminică la șase (Sunday at six, 1965) was received with mixed reactions as Pintilie intentionally downplayed the communist underground resistance movement during World War II in favour of the a love story between the two protagonists of the film (Caranfil 2013, 195; Nasta 2013, 86–87). The series of his banned artistic works began with the film Reconstituirea (Reenactment, 1969) and continued with his adaptation of Gogol’s play The Inspector General (Revizorul) in 1971 at the Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Theatre. Because he constantly refused any compromise with the communist censorship, Lucian Pintilie was forced from 1973 to work abroad as a film and theatre director. At the same time, he enjoyed a privileged status as he could travel freely to Europe and United States and return to Romania whenever he wanted. Due to his international success the communist authorities lured him with a new film project after an adaptation of Ioan Luca Caragiale’s play D’ale Carnavalului (Carnival scenes), which he had previously staged successfully for the Bulandra Theatre. The film De ce trag clopotele, Mitică? (Why are the bells ringing, Mitică?) was not passed for screening and it was shelved until August 1990, when it had its premiere. After the banning of his film, Pintilie continued to work abroad, returning frequently to Romania to collect information about Romanian dissident intellectuals, such as Dorin Tudoran, which he passed on to the Romanian desk of Radio Free Europe. After the fall of the communist regime, Lucian Pintilie became the head of the Film Studio subordinated to the Ministry of Culture and focused his carrier on film directing. As a result, between 1992 and 2002 he shot a film every two or three years with the help of Marin Karmitz, a Romanian-born emigrant producer/distributor from France. His successful film productions included Balanța (The oak) in 1992, O vară de neuitat (An unforgettable summer) in 1994, Prea târziu (Too late) in 1996, Terminus Paradis (Next stop paradise) in 1998, După amiaza unui torționar (The afternoon of a torturer) in 2001, Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezervă (Niki and Flo) in 2003 and Tertium non datur in 2006. A highly awarded film director, Lucian Pintilie supported his younger colleagues in Romanian New Wave Cinema, such as Stere Gulea, Nae Caranfil, Mircea Danieluc, Nicolae Mărgineanu and Cristi Puiu (Nasta 98–120; Rîpeanu 2013, 440–441). He passed away in 2018 at the age of 84.