First steps and motivation

Zoltán Bicskei was born in 1958 in Kanjiža, Vojvodina. He spent his childhood in this small town, perhaps not outstanding in size but still culturally significant, drawing lifelong inspiration not only from some of the artists who worked in his youth but also from this milieu. It carried both the suffering of the self-consuming, desperate individual, who is actually locked in what Béla Hamvas called the lowland existence [1], and the need for self-expression, which can only be satisfied with the deepest, most essential forms, and for which metaphysical detachment is self-evident. Being interested in film, music, and fine arts, the Bicskei parents passed on this receptivity to values to their children. Family friends included Ottó Tolnai, now a Kossuth Prize-winning poet, and Ferenc Baráth, who became known as a graphic artist, as well as the perhaps less well-known but no less important poet István Koncz (1937–97), who lived in Kanjiža. Zoltán Bicskei’s childhood friend was the choreographer and theatre director Joseph Nadj, who had a distinguished international career.

The future graphic designer and film director has been drawing regularly and passionately since the age of four. As a schoolboy, he was drawn to comic books and cartoons, but he also did free drawing. In the world of drawing, he still considers his masters to be the drawing artist and painter Tihamér Dobó (1937–87), also from Kanjiža, who he knew in person, and Lajos Szalay (1909–95), known for his airy, also oriental-style graphics, who had no ties to the Southland and was actually living in Argentina at the time, so he did not know him in person. Dobó, who led a self-destructive life and ended it with his own hands, once snapped at the then 14-year-old boy rather harshly (and with little pedagogical sense), seeing his drawings, which were then still rigidly drawn. The devastating criticism (and, of course, the fact that the scolded boy also saw the inner freedom and instinctive creative power, not lost in detail, with which Dobó worked) later proved useful: Zoltán Bicskei began to approach drawing with more daring and more freedom. It is his former pupil who cherishes the memory of his mentor, who later made a film about him, published an album of his life’s work, and had a statue of him erected in Kanjiža.

Zoltán Bicskei attended secondary school in Budapest. In 1976, he graduated from Pál Török Street Secondary School of Fine and Applied Arts, specialising in toymaking and graphic design. At that time, he was not attracted to drawing, but to movies. Watching his more skilful classmates (i.e. those who created shapes more easily and more pleasingly), he was unsure of his own graphic skills - not yet knowing that the lightness and beauty of lines were not necessarily related to their expressiveness. It was only after leaving school that he rediscovered his elementary desire to draw. As a schoolboy, he preferred making Super 8 mm amateur films and spent his time in the cinemas of Pest.

In film, he was particularly impressed by the works of French poetic realism and by such film classics as Fellini, Kurosawa, and Tarkovsky, whose styles were very different yet all masters of cinema. He was influenced by several Hungarians, from Károly Makk to Zoltán Huszárik and Sándor Sára, but above all by István Szőts, with whom he later corresponded.

The other great source of inspiration for him is music: jazz, or more precisely, the unique contemporary music inspired by Hungarian folk music, which combines free improvisation and strict compositional structure, and is associated with György Szabados. It was his high-minded attitude, vitality, and freedom, based on organic culture and tradition, yet (in fact, precisely because of this), elementally contemporary art, and his personal example as a friend, mentor, and elder master, that initiated Bicskei into a worldview of life as a sacred process. From this, he drew inspiration, both mental and spiritual, and built his own artistic universe. One of the most original and outstanding Hungarian composers of the millennium, György Szabados, who left behind a significant oeuvre as a composer and theoretician, was—until his death in 2011—a close friend of Zoltán Bicskei, who also made a film about him.

Graphic arts oeuvre

Soon after high school, Bicskei found a job and a vocation in Novi Sad—although the two were not the same then or later. He worked as a subtitler at Novi Sad Television, a technician’s job. His graphic design career developed not alongside, but at the same time. The work in television and, from 2000 onwards, as a cultural and public organiser provided the financial independence for uncompromising work as a visual artist. The initially instinctive but radical separation between earning money and artistic activity later became a conscious principle of life for him. Equally conscious is his reticence about the so-called public art scene. He had only one exhibition, in 1980, in Novi Sad—portraits of jazz musicians—and it was very well received: “The jazz musicians and singers of Bicske are the equivalent of Bacon’s howling popes and Veličković’s scenes (L’ieu), ‘scaffolds’. Here we witness maximum effort, brutal dynamics, and a fight to the death, with the difference that here it is not fear, not horror, not visible or invisible killers, but something—perhaps beyond?!—happiness... Thus, Bicskei is one of the first who, by preserving and eliminating the brutality, the howling, the blackness of modern art, can turn it into something positive, into song and music”, wrote Ottó Tolnai. János Sziveri goes even deeper. “At first glance, the material in Bicskei’s exhibition seems anachronistic. It is not only his drawing tools (charcoal, pencil, and paper) that make him an anachronism, but also his romantic approach. He wants to glorify emotions and the simple purity of the soul in an age, like the last quarter of the 20th century, when alienation and mechanisation have reached a hitherto unknown level. The age of absurd and irony. It is therefore easy to conclude that we are dealing with a fanatic, a modern-day Don Quixote. (...) Bicskei is enthusiastic as a child, but systematic as a poet. His poetic approach is even more pronounced in his pencil drawings of fairy-tale landscapes than in his jazz drawings. He does not design with a guttural rationalism or operate with intellectual clichés.” [2]

Perhaps the only person who was not enthusiastic about the clear success was Zoltán Bicskei. He perceived his own exhibition as crowded and excessively commercial. His own juxtaposed paintings seemed alien in this environment, and they awakened new insights in Ottó Tolnai (“I didn’t believe in the possibility of white, European jazz. [...] And now these drawings testify to an authentic jazz experience, they can offer an authentic jazz experience.”). Bicskei therefore renounced once and for all his involvement in what he saw as a commercial communication of art. He believes that art (as opposed to the purely commercial gallery institution) can only be presented in personal spaces—in homes or community homes (church, community centre, library, school, etc.) can fulfil the task, the purpose, and the mission that art must fulfil: to place the viewer, the human being, as an object of meditation with an evocative power, back where they should never have left, “at the centre of the world”. As he points out, the great painters—Leonardo, Rembrandt, the icon painters—were not familiar with the 19th-century concept of the “art gallery”, which was essentially a sales pitch. Needless to say, Bicskei therefore prefers to donate his paintings rather than sell them, and does not mind if, for example, a mural fades or disappears due to the condition of the wall, even encouraging the owner to paint it if necessary [3]. He is attracted to the Chinese concept that one or more paintings in a house do not hang on the wall but are rolled up and kept ready to be taken out on special occasions, to be viewed and, when they have had their fill, put away again.

In addition to these compositions for personal spaces, he has created several book illustrations (e.g. for Ferenc Kalapáti, János Sziveri, Ottó Tolnai, István Beszédes, Zoltán Danyi, and István Domonkos), posters for Josef Nadj’s dance performances, and album covers for musical works (György Szabados and others, e.g. Mihály Dresch, Szilárd Mezei, András Berecz, Ákos Szelevényi, and Anthony Braxton). As a contributor to the renowned journal Új Symposion, edited by Magdolna Danyi and later János Sziveri, he published music and film reviews as well as graphics. In terms of its orientation and history, the Új Symposion, which can perhaps be compared with the Mozgó Világ published in Budapest, was one of the most important, most unified, and free organs not only of Vojvodina but of the entire Hungarian literature of the time, not only during the 1960s but also later on, until the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Its editorial staff was removed for political reasons in 1983. More specifically, after the dismissal of the editor-in-chief János Sziveri [4], the other members of the editorial board, including Zoltán Bicskei, also left [5].

In addition to his technical activities, Bicskei was the cultural organiser of Ifjúsági Tribün [7] and Zenekedvelő Ifjúság in Novi Sad. He organised the Telepi Esték events, an important series of cultural events for Hungarians living in the suburbs of Novi Sad. The latter were community events based on self-organisation, not requiring state or city budget funds, and thus separate from these organisations and not subordinate to them: concerts, exhibitions, debates, etc., a truly vibrant cultural life—which was interrupted by the Yugoslav Wars that broke out in 1991, which affected the Hungarians of Vojvodina even more than other nationalities [8]. Zoltán Bicskei was the co-organiser of the prestigious Újvidéki Jazz Napok (lit. Novi Sad Jazz Days). In 1992, he moved back to his hometown, Kanjiža. Soon after his return, in 1995, he organised the Jazz, improvizatív zene... (lit. Jazz, improvised music...) festival for 18 years. This festival features not only jazz, but also folk music and contemporary music. By 2012, the financial support for the event had dwindled, and Zoltán Bicskei decided to close it down rather than make it irrelevant. Currently, he is the one-man director of the Regionális Kreatív Műhely (lit. Regional Creative Workshop) in Kanjiža, which was established to support the artistic endeavours of Josef Nadj, who is returning home. Here, too, the focus is on the traditionalist contemporary art that Zoltán Bicskei has always pursued (defined in opposition to modernism, which is seen as speculative and rootless).

Films

Zoltán Bicskei’s films—etudes, film essays, a completed feature film and a feature film in the making /*completed to date/—are as much meditative objects as his airy graphics, which can evoke a very intense state of being from a few essential lines, formulating a single, very powerful statement (their source of inspiration is the same: the emptiness of the Bačka landscape, akin to the Asian steppes—emptiness that is not empted, but a sacral space that demands a concentration of attention and presence, encouraging an inward looking). Each of his film essays is the essential setting for a human encounter with the author. His feature films are rituals.

He rejects cinematic trends and styles, refuses to please audiences with popular storytelling schemes, and the cinematography he records demands attunement. His view of contemporary cinema is devastating: “Cinema is dead today. It has been killed by all the money invested in film. All those who, as creators, patrons, festival organisers, critics and, not least, spectators, have betrayed the spirit of cinema, have bowed to the money aspect, giving way to the omnipotent domination of money in cinema. There is no film in circulation in the cinemas of the world today, on any subject, in any country, that does not more or less convey the same spiritless, empty vision,” he writes in his 2002 pamphlet Miként élesszük újra a filmet? (lit. How to relive cinema). He proposes a very different approach, quite different from that of a world lost in a superficial flood of visual information. “The first thing is to open eyes. Let the cosmic world soak into us. Allow our children to be guided by the breath of nature and not by the bellows of a machine; by the plasticity of natural matter and not by the touch of insensitive plastic. And to guide the opening soul, let parents begin with stories, slide shows, or, for example, by setting up still-life-size pictures of puppets, toys, and flowers in a small playroom in a hut. Not the picture, the child’s attention should be moved. [...] parents must also protect their children’s eyes and minds from today’s flood of image pollution. The fewer moving images the preschooler or schoolchild sees, the better. The moving image, with its reality-based view and its final shaping of the image, kills the deeper vision and the imagination that create images in the developing child’s soul [...] What is needed is simplicity, seriousness, and clarity. A panning of the clear, introspective eye. A faithful vision. According to the cosmic forces that pervade the world, not according to human arbitrariness.” This radicalism, very unusual for a film director, is in fact a coherent set of principles that goes beyond “professionalism” or even aesthetics, and is very much in line with the views of the film directors, philosophers, and authoritative thinkers whose texts Bicskei has compiled in a book entitled A mesterek szava (lit. The Word of the Masters) [9]. The excerpts offer teachings worth considering in theatre and film. With his own texts, Bicskei merely introduces the mature thoughts of Fellini, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Artaud, György Szabados, or Baudrillard, leading to the final conclusions [10].

On the other hand, in his own films, Zoltán Bicskei communicates precisely that contemplative openness, that presence that observes nature, that sets in motion not the image but the imagination, the loss of which he has expressed his disappointment and anger.

At the time of the launch of the commercial channels, the glittering, digital invasion of the country, Szikfilm was made on an expired 16 mm film negative offered by Hungarian Television, more precisely by István Peták [11]. The film etude, which lasts only 13 minutes and can be considered ars poetics, essentially sums up everything Bicskei thinks about film, and even more about seeing and perceiving - although there is nothing ideological or manifesto-like about it. On the contrary, this little masterpiece, reminiscent of the early films of Zoltán Huszárik and Sándor Sára, impresses with its infinite simplicity—a shirtless adolescent boy wandering in the wilderness, seemingly without purpose—and with the fact that this simplicity represents nothing less than the infinite complexity of the world around man, and man’s role and place in it—for this aimless wandering would be life itself, ready to embrace the universe. “An improbably vast sky, a dry plain, sparse of trees, with its telescopes and faded patches of salt. Fields, cornfields. The half-ruined walls of a concrete building. Accompanying music: none. Lyrics: none. Not a single word is spoken in the film. Only the sounds of nature, creatures, and elements: the rustle of the wind, the hum of the bongos, the chirp of birds. Lark in the sky. Down below: the dry clods and the crunch of the chewed, worn-out grass stem under the little boy’s worn-out sandals. The thud of footsteps, the slip of footsteps, the rustle of leaves on the black poplar trees”—describes Ferenc Buda the experience. The boy then juxtaposes a few nuggets, pebbles, corncobs, thorns: he makes a mark. Here I am, says the act. I am alive. I share in the blessing. Few have expressed more essentially what life is, and what art is. “As a child kneels on the ground—like an Egyptian statue in sandals and clogs,” concludes the essay. Nothing more to add.

The same landscape returns in the film essay “...hanem az a hatalmas égbolt” (lit. “...but that vast sky”). Good friend, mentor, master, not only one of the most important contemporary composers of Hungarian music, but also one of its intellectual centres, György Szabados is the subject rather than the object of this unusual portrait film. He is not someone who is filmed by the filmmaker and then, after editing the footage, “presented”, “portrayed”, or even “contextualised”, as it were, but a co-creator of equal status. The director Bicskei is also in the film—he sits alone with Szabados, rarely asks questions, but rather listens, is present, and Szabados, who shares his thoughts, also makes up the film, which is built out of a shared togetherness. In this sense, their relationship is one of equals, while the composer remains the Master, who offers initiation with every word, but does not insist on following or agreeing. Here he is, he speaks, a life of consciousness, a creative attitude that contemplates the spiritual aspects of existence and translates them into sound streams and music, with the calm wisdom of a creative attitude. The infinitely simple imagery of the film - first sitting on a high plateau in the Danube bend dominated by a full moon, then under the blazing sun of the seemingly endless Bačka wasteland, with no movement, no great changes, just moon and sun, darkness and burning light - also expresses the need for purification that Szabados expresses in this way: “ There was a moment in the course of making music together, when we were trying to develop improvisational music-making together, that several people left this circle with the interesting explanation that they did not wish to give up their personalities. And how interesting: indeed, the way life works—and art is a communication about life, a tale about this existence—is that it can’t be otherwise unless we give up our personality. Just as every being gives up its personality. The whole of life is but a slow process of this surrender of personality as a sacrifice. Then, when we have fulfilled this destiny-thing, it is over for a while. That thing is over.” We are past the 20th minute of the hour-long film when we first see the speaker face-to-face. It’s as if the film is trying to say: none of this is important. That’s not what’s important.

And the fact that in the second half of the film—in which there is only Szabados and his musicians and the actors of a Josef Nadj performance, and there is music, above all music—there are also some unfortunate sequences, the clumsiness of which is obviously not the result of a deliberate decision, but a forced solution, since only one VHS copy preserves the important piece of music on film (it is about the opera entitled A kormányzó halála [lit. The Governor’s Death]).

Bicskei continues the same line of thought in Alföldi opus (lit. Great Plain Opus), a film essay co-written with Attila Iván. This is a mini-portrait of Josef Nadj, lasting 13 minutes. We are in the same wilderness, reflecting on which Szabados formulated his essential statements. Josef Nadj, as a movement theatre artist, prefers to express himself through movement and gesture. His actors and himself appear as enigmatic props under the open sky, as sign-like sets: the plain becomes a theatrical space. The creator of the performances speaks little and concisely. We see him also on stage—the directors use filmic devices in a more traditional way. But all this is enough to give us a sense of the director-choreographer’s peculiar world, which throughout his work has been thematised on the fall, abandonment, and the search for a way out of life.

Not only the wilderness, but also the banks of the Tisza are prominently featured in the film dedicated to the memory of Tihamér Dobó, Bicskei’s childhood master [12]. Also, Kanjiža itself, in frosty, deserted, winter images. We see a constricted living space in which every movement reinforces a sense of immobility, and in which spaciousness does not liberate but constricts. The environment in which the sadly fated painter spent his time on earth, who, even in the cathartic experience of a distant journey, did not experience freedom, the freedom he was eternally deprived of; rather, he experienced his own smallness, his own helplessness. He expressed this abandonment and desolation in images and experienced it as a fate for me. The orphaned child raised on the streets, however, does not lament himself: he contemplates and expresses the strangeness of the world with an objective melancholy. In the first third of the film, which is also triptych-like in its structure, we hear the painter talk about his life with a bitterness that is free of self-pity. All the while, we see the Kanjiža landscape, the plain, the waterfront, and the “civilisation” that makes its presence felt in muddy streets, in football gates without nets, in dim pub interiors. In the middle section, we wonder what this puddled desolation has become in Tihamér Dobó’s paintings and prints. There is no speech here, only music. Finally, in the third part, there is no music, only the hum of the tape recorder. A few photos of the tragic fate of the master, a shot of the hermit-like, fallen, sullen man drawing at a pub table, shocking even with its few seconds, and then the funeral on Super 8 mm pictures. Gypsy band, pulling a funeral march. That’s it. There was a man who became a painter, not out of ambition, but because he couldn’t not be a painter. He lived what people like him, fallible and failing because of their fallibility, live because they cannot not live. And he died because there cannot be sufficient intoxication and intoxication for a man capable of comprehending the collapse of existence.

Once again, Bicskei’s film impresses with its simplicity and the power inherent in such simplicity. The portrait film is chronologically ahead of the György Szabados and Josef Nadj films. In its thematic, however, it is more directly related to Bicskei’s only feature film to date (until 2016), Nagyapáti Kukac Péter mennybemenetele (lit. Péter Kukac from Nagyapát is going to heaven), whose hero is actually a fictional character - carrying the character traits not only of the title character, but also of Tihamér Dobó, the allegorical formulation of the Hungarian artist himself, who started out with great talent and great will, who could express himself in significant works of art that were able to capture the essential issues of life, but who failed for lack of a receptive medium and a genuine cultural context. The scorned poet, the angel who sticks to the mud.

Speaking about his film, Zoltán Bicskei said, “Vojvodina is a crossroads of cultures, and this can make you productive. Vojvodina is a place where cultures can create cultures, and this can produce fruitfulness. We try to show the artist’s intellectual maturation and his rise and fall in the film. Universal concerns, timeless struggles, small but tragic responses. The life of an artist is, of course, dominated by the visual.” [13]

The real painter Péter Nagyapáti (1908-44) is one of the many self-destructive talents from the Southland (South Hungarian? Hungarian!) who started from a very low place (the derogatory name Kukac, meaning “earth-digger”, stigmatised him at birth). Even today, the artist, who has been swept up into the somewhat pejorative category of “naive painter”, has struggled throughout his life with incomprehension, belittlement, and contempt, so that his genius was “only” sufficient to create exceptionally suggestive works of art and not to lead a consciously structured, existentially successful life. Zoltán Bicskei has made a curious, balladic film about him and his life and art, as well as about the life and art of Tihamér Dobó, in a strange, unusual language. The filmic setting is as strongly symbolic as the gestural and cinematic language used. The majority of events in the Bačka farmland take place in the wilderness, among the wooden shelters built in the wasteland, and to a lesser extent in realistic spaces (houses, courtyards, pubs). The word “happening” is also used in strong quotation marks. It is more a question of presenting individual stages of life rather than in the traditional sense, forming events into compact scenes. It is no coincidence that this is reminiscent of Josef Nadj’s movement theatre, since it is mostly his JEL Theatre artists who play the roles. Including Josef Nadj himself, who lends his presence directly to Kukac’s youthful self. This highly stylised sequence of events is further analysed by Bicskei as a visual artist through his exciting use of light and shadow, his setting of the natural spaces of the Bačka landscape within strict geometry, and his language, which is both poetic and local (spoken in Bačka dialect throughout). The work’s acoustic world is very important. Not least the direct effect achieved by the use of contemporary jazz and folk music and the conscious use of poems sung by the poet István Domokos in his own performance to accompany the “scenes”. It is the almost imperceptible sound carpet that the artist lays out: the constant presence of nests, rustles, infiltrating noises, birdsong and wind, the wilderness, the landscape, courtyards, rooms, human voices, sighs, breaths and prayers woven into music. Moreover, Bicskei’s perhaps most important expectation of the moving image is fully realised, as he put it: “Vision itself, and thus visual thinking, is adapted to the speed of walking; at a faster pace, no visual thoughts are formed, and thoughts that arise from vision are only superficial fragments of impressions.”

Kukac is a portrait of the lives of the people (Hungarians, Serbs, and those who still inhabit the Southland, which has become Vojvodina) at the end of the world, who are constantly trying to adapt to new and new rulers, who put survival before everything else and are dying in the struggle for this survival, people who are despised and exploited by all higher powers. He does not go to hell, for hell is all around him.

It’s hard to find analogies if you want to compare Bicskei’s film to something else. Perhaps the films of Parajanov, perhaps some of Pasolini’s works (Medea or Oedipus Rex), perhaps some of contemporary Iranian cinema (above all, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh) can be mentioned in the same breath as Kukac. But without the decorativeness of Parajanov, the drama of Pasolini, and the fabulousness of Makhmalbaf. Bicskei offers a kind of meditative perspective. An introversion, a presence without judgement. Perhaps that is why the film is difficult—because it is, in fact, very difficult—to absorb.

Apart from a 2 a.m. screening on Duna TV, the film was not officially distributed; thus, Péter Kukac from Nagyapáti Goes to Heaven was shown in Budapest only once [14], or the filmmaker literally took it under his arm to screen it in the Hungarian-inhabited areas of Vojvodina. It was very well received there, if only because, with the exception of Szabolcs Tolnai’s (unseen in cinemas) graduation film Nyári mozi (lit. Summer Cinema), no Hungarian-language film had been made in the Southland for at least ten years before that.

His new feature film, Álom hava (The Month of Dreams), is set in the 17th century, after the region’s liberation from the Turks. It takes place in the so-called “ruined church” of Vranjevo, which has indeed been ruined during the Turkish occupation. It is a symbol of a part of the country left as a deserted wasteland by the invaders who drove the population out or took them away as slaves, where people who survived oppression and persecution with their minds and souls in tatters are trying to find something worth living for. The ruined church provides a kind of “end-of-the-world” setting for a highly symbolic story, a spiritual-historical journey, approaching the possibilities of a new beginning from a metaphysical perspective, in which the Hun ruler Attila appears—as a vision—as much as King Matthias or King (Saint) Ladislaus. The Month of Dreams, 10 years in the making, premiered in spring 2017.

Since the Kukac, Zoltán Bicskei has been a screenwriter for several films, but has not made a feature film of his own for more than ten years. His recent works commissioned by the Hungarian Academy of Arts—portrait films about Győző Somogyi and László Kunkovács—prove that he still has a perfect command of the art of attunement and sensitive portrayal—even on film. His more recent works are much more traditional than the Dobó or Szabados portraits, but he has not compromised on commercialism.

Instead of a summary, here are Zoltán Bicskei’s own lines. In his book A mesterek szava (lit. Word of Masters), he introduces the chapter A látó gyermek (lit. The Seeing Child), based on thoughts of Ingmar Bergman: “Every artist feels that they are lying if they cannot express their essence in their work, and they lie even more if they do not reveal their innermost being. Therefore, the truth of every work is seen in the signature of its creator, which contains his innermost essence. Nowadays, however, it is rare for a film to have any signature at all. Today’s man has given up his creative essence, throwing away the child in him. Although the divinity of the childlike being is universally acknowledged, we do not know or want to understand it.”

[2016]

[1] Béla Hamvas: Az öt géniusz (lit. The Five Geniuses)

[2] A megrajzolt zene – Rövid jegyzet B. Z. rajzaihoz (lit. The drawn music – A short note on B. Z.’s drawings) (published in Ex Symposion 1999/28-29, dedicated to Sziveri)

[3] Bicskei deeply agreed with the painting of jazz portraits when the change of ownership and image of a pub that had previously been a jazz venue made the works he had made there alien to the new environment, when the spirit that had previously animated Bicskei’s work had now disappeared from this communal space.

[4] The poet, who died in 1990 at the age of 35, is not only known for his works, but the journal he edited, which had been playing a significant role for decades, became an inescapable point of reference for the entire Hungarian literary life during his period of activity (1980–83).

[5] He, like the other members of the editorial board, would have had the opportunity to continue working for the paper if he had conducted “self-criticism” (i.e. publicly denied his principles). But neither he nor any other member of the editorial board was willing to do so.

[6] Later, his writings were published in Magyar Szemle, Jazz Studium (published in Győr), and Műhely.

[7] Similar to the Egyetemi Színpad (lit. University Stage) in Budapest, it is an open playground, mainly visited by local youth.

[8] Significantly more Hungarians were conscripted into the Yugoslav army than their proportion of the population would suggest. As a result, an estimated 50,000 left for Hungary, further depleting the Hungarian minority in Serbia. At the same time, a significant part of the Serb-Croat clashes took place in Croatian areas inhabited by Hungarians (the names of Laslovo and Korođ were daily in the news all over the world), where more than once the absurd situation arose where Hungarian soldiers on both sides shot at each other in the fighting in villages inhabited by Hungarians. It is not an insignificant difference that the Croatian units fighting the Patriotic War were Hungarian volunteers from Croatia, while on the Serbian side, ethnic soldiers who were intended to be victims were sent to “fight” without live ammunition.

[9] Published in Senta by the Hungarian Cultural Institute of Vojvodina in 2010.

[10] Let me just quote the latter: “Film, like other arts, seems to have irredeemably lost its visual magic (...) I feel that film has become a prisoner of resentment towards its own culture and history, and has become a performance art that borders on mockery. The film no longer believes in itself, even though it has almost limitless technical and aesthetic possibilities—perhaps that is why it has lost its credibility.” All this is the opening of a chapter titled A film árulása (lit. The Betrayal of Film) by Bicskei.

[11] Then, in 1993, he was the director of the regional and minority programmes, and later, in 1996–98, he was the president of the institution.

[12] The Dobó Tihamér vonásai (lit. Strokes of Tihamér Dobó) received a special prize at Mediavawe 1993.

[13] Fellini után – szabadon, Az ezredforduló magyar filmarcai (lit. To paraphrase Fellini, Hungarian filmmakers at the turn of the millennium) (Magyar Nemzet, 2000. II. 5.)

[14] For example, at the Uránia cinema, where in 2000, the only positive copy in Hungary, provided by the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute, was simply forgotten. Fortunately, the water that recently flooded the basement did not reach the shelf where the reel had been gathering dust. The other existing copy is in a safer place: at Zoltán Bicskei’s in Kanjiža.

Zoltán Bicskei

Selection of works