COURAGE

connecting collections

Report "The status of counter-intelligence work of the State Security to unveil and suppress the subversive activities of the enemy among the artistic intelligentsia and measures for its improvement", Sofia, April 20, 1973.

The report presents the state security's vision of how "the enemy" tries to win over wavering members of the artistic intelligentsia (whose majority is said to support and promote the party line). It is reported that among the intelligentsia groups of friends are formed in so called ‘microstructures’ opposing the policies of the party. Typical examples of this are said to be the writers Hristo Ganev, Valeri Petrov, Marko Ganchev, Gotcho Gotchev and Blagoy Dimitrov. The report is a good example for the assessment of the political attitudes of the intelligentsia by the state in the early 1970s, and also of the way how such assessments were rhetorically framed.

The Reformatory School in Aszód has undergone many changes since its foundation in 1884, and a lot has happened between its walls. The institution is still in operation today, having survived two world wars, the communist dictatorship, and even a tragic homicide. In 1973, Tamás Urbán took around 500 touching, shocking, and honest pictures about the lives of the residents of the reformatory school as his graduation project.

He was able to take photographs in the institution because he was working together with Youth Magazine (Ifjúsági Magazin), and he did not have face any particular challenges or have to deal with unusual complications while working on the project, though he visited the institution several times a week for two or three months. As Urbán sees it, this was because of his discrete style, especially when he did reports. He consciously avoided splurge, he brought only the most necessary equipment with him, and he did not force anything. As he recalled in 2015, “Suddenly I was in the community and everything came naturally.” He spent days among the residents, closely observing their everyday lives, including how they worked, played, and took drugs. Urbán maintained contact with a number of the residents of the institution even after he had finished the project. These letters, however, had to be smuggled out.

In 1975, Urbán’s first exhibition was held at the Reformatory School, and it featured the pictures he had taken there. The event was opened by Éva Keleti, one of Urbán’s teachers, but the plan to exhibit the pictures to a larger audience could not be realized: the authorities did not allow the photos to be taken from the institution because of their content. A representative of the ministry who was present for the opening ceremony made this decision clear. The pictures were impounded and the remained at the Reformatory School. While Éva Keleti and others tried to prevail on the authorities to change their decision – (even going as far as György Aczél in the process), they were not successful. Nevertheless, in 1978, Urbán brought this photo series to the first display of the Studio of Young Photographers. Despite the prohibitions, the photos brought him success, both from the audiences and in the profession. As Urbán recalls, because of this photo report, he was accepted into the Association of Hungarian Journalists. The photos taken at the Reformatory School are also the direct antecedents to his major topics of the 1980s: the photo series about prisoners and people on the margins of society, such as drug users.

The photos were recently found again under a broken piano in the Reformatory School by the educators at the institution. After more than forty years, on November 23, 2017, Tamás Urbán’s photo report was again exhibited in Aszód, this time with photos taken by his son, Ádám Urbán. The exhibition, which was entitled “Then and Now,” was opened by Éva Keleti, but this time the photos were not kept under the control of the state, and soon they will be exhibited outside the institution so larger audiences can also see them. While many things have changed since the transition, Urbán’s photographs have not lost their significance.

The card contains five cut and glued press clippings containing reports on court trials against Dušan Makavejev, the director and producer of the film “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism”, against Lazar Stojanović, the director and producer of the film “Plastic Jesus”, and against Kosta Čavoški, then an assistant professor at Faculty of Law in Belgrade, sentenced to five months in prison with a two-year suspended sentence, on charges of criticism of the 1971 Yugoslav constitutional amendments.    

The film “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism” from 1971 was banned in the SFRY for 15 years, although it won many awards abroad (Interfilm, international criticism in Berlin, Luis Buñuel Award in Cannes). As further described in the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography's film lexicon, Makavejev among other things ironically thematized the rigidity of the communist regime, i.e. the conservatism of supposedly advanced socialist societies. The main character Milena, a young Yugoslav communist, also represents feminist attitudes in relation to psychoanalysis and Marxism, while the film’s structure in general relies mostly on the experience of the so-called historical, especially the Soviet, avant-garde.

The film “Plastic Jesus”, directed by Lazar Stojanović, was made in that same year. The film was banned, locked away, and first shown in 1990. Its author was sentenced to prison. Besides its erotic content, the film was banned primarily because of its open criticism of Tito's cult of personality and the Yugoslav regime. This film led to  Stojanović’s as inclusion among the directors of the so-called Black Wave, a Yugoslav film movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was characterized by criticism of contemporary socialist society, ideology and government and their public presentation, and by realism in the presentation of everyday life versus the official socialist cultural statism which represented reality through the prism of the overall progress and prosperity of Yugoslav socialist society.     

Besides those described above, the collection also includes approximately fifty press clippings from the period 1972-1974 that are thematically linked to the crimes of enemy propaganda in artistic production, the crime of production and distribution of pornography, and the crime of impugning the reputation of the state, the highest state officials and institutions. The documents are available for research and copying.   

The main sections of this novel contain a plethora of autobiographical elements from Kustić's personal life. For instance, it deals specifically with his marriage to an Orthodox woman, Marica Radenković, and also with his transition from Roman Catholicism to the Greek Catholic Church. This book was Kustić's first and only novel he wrote in his life, which in a wider context examined the life of Catholic believers in a socialist and atheistic society. Kustić demonstrated a religious world which managed to survive within a society that had undergone a socialist revolution.

He pointed out the military and educational system as specific places in which believers had to engage in a struggle against atheism, so the stories from this novel particularly refer to the collision between the religious and atheistic worldview in these social institutions of socialist Yugoslavia. Through his characters, he expresses optimism that the socialist project of society without religion had to fail. That is why one of Kustić's characters says: "I have long been convinced that this entire conflict between religion and atheism, Christianity and Marxism on our soil is pure historical confusion. There are fellow educators who do not see it, who even enjoy this conflict, who are ready to torture, as they do. They know, in fact, that the Church is indestructible, remembering all that we have learned de mortibus persecutorum" (Kustić 1973: 138).