Bibó Breviárium

István Bibó was born in 1911. Jurist and philosopher, he remains one of Hungary’s great 20th century political thinkers. Arrested in October 1944 by the radical fascist organization Arrow Cross, then released, he went into hiding until the end of the siege of Budapest. In 1949, he was suspended from his post as university professor. A minister in 1956, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, then granted an amnesty in 1963. This 13th episode of Péter Forgács’s « Private Hungary » is a fragmentary, obsessional work which draws on found visual archives and interweaves footage on the daily life of the peasants, the bourgeois elite and the life of István Bibó. Poetic in its use of image and soundtrack and its repetition of re-framed, slowed-down, inverted images, it plays with film to relate the reality of the Hungarian nation and the heroism of a man who never renounced his faith in liberty. This story is underscored by Tibor Szemzö’s sad, crystalline music, and by a non-stop voice-over narration relating the human and political crises of the Hungarian nation, in counterpoint with the apparently serene images of gymnastics, somersaults in the grass, and even the splendor of a soap bubble letting off vapors. But a sudden shot of legs dangling in the void creates a sense of dizziness….