As part of Infermental 6, Antonio Muntadas and Hank Bull initiated the Cross-Cultural Television project. In this framework they asked artists from around the world to record materials from local television programs and submit them for compilation with other project materials.

Miklós Peternák, together with László Beke and Gyula Száva, decided to make a Hungarian submission. On 22 November 1986, they used a Betamax recorder (a format since obsolete), provided by Gyula Száva, to record their contribution.

They sat in front of the television all day, waiting for some part of the programing that they liked, and then recorded it. A little more than three hours fit on the Betamax tape. However, it turned out that they had missed the deadline for posting contributions to Vancouver.

Miklós Peternák did not want to waste the work they had invested in the recording, so with the help of a friend in a video studio he edited a shorter, “watchable” version of the tape: they ran the material through a mixer in real time while adding special effects.

The resulting material reflects not only the Hungarian television programming of the time, but also the contemporary technical circumstances characterizing television receivers and video technology. The record—which contains black and white fragments of the program, often ghostly, poppy images, and sometimes even stripes (the image “runs”)—treats these mistakes as esthetical features.

Years later, this idea led to a project called Medium analysis (Watching Television), at the Intermedia department of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. Initially, it was held every other year, then stopped, but rather recently students themselves restarted the series. Today it is a festival-like event throughout the building, with several parallel programs.

The document reproduces the report drawn up by two representatives of the communist Militia following the search carried out on 3 December 1986 for the purpose of investigating the possible illegal basis of the collection of art stored in Brad at the home of Dr Sorin Costina. Under Law 18/1968 regarding the control of the provenance of goods not acquired through legal means, the possessions of any physical person could be checked if there were “data or indications,” basically meaning information collected through informers, pointing to “an evident disproportion” between the estimated value of a person’s possessions and the income legally obtained by that person. The text of this minute, drawn up in the wooden language of the communist authorities, does not identify in its conclusions any illegality that might have been found as a result of the search. However it is highly relevant with regard to the manner in which the communist authorities penetrated the private lives of citizens. The document mentions that the search lasted approximately three hours and provides in ten hand-written pages a detailed inventory of all the items found in the Costina family home. It was drawn up in three copies, one of which, in the original, is now in the Costina family archive.

In January 1986, Katalizátor Iroda published this novel, which was classified as a “prohibited book” at the time. It was produced with the stencil machine of Beszélő, It then became the first book published by Katalizátor Iroda. It was translated by Zsuzsa Hetényi.

The Marian Zulean personal collection is an illustration of the fact that any act of cultural opposition is dependent on the societal context that generates it. It implicitly highlights the fundamental difference between Romania and other communist states in the last years of the period 1980–1989. The more than 400 newspapers, magazines, brochures and books, originating especially from the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev period, epitomise a reformist political discourse that had become relatively official in the rest of the Soviet bloc, but was considered dangerous by the Romanian Securitate.

Ante Kesić responded to Krsto Papić's "Lies and deceptions" (see the featured item in the "Ivan Aralica Collection") in the text "Lies and deceptions plus insults and slander,” in which he provided counter-arguments to Papić’s statements. Kesić accorded particular attention to accusations on “fabrications” related to his reading of Papić's and Aralica's screenplay for the prospective movie. Kesić criticised the representation of the teacher-training school in Dalmatia and the education of that time. He argued: “They turned the humane school of the new society into a place for venting one’s base instincts and torture. This place was controlled by some hypocrites, careerists, ambitious female students/lovers, who as under-aged girls reign over the school from their fornicatory beds .” Furthermore, he stressed that although the Party was never mentioned, it is nevertheless indirectly represented as a source of evil because the four people who ruled over the school could not position themselves above it, i.e., it is clear that they featured as the Party leadership in disguise. “Could the Party be abrogated by two screenwriters and removed from the historical scene, where it bore all social power? Or to bury it somewhere deep behind the scenes and transform it into an accomplice in crime ?”

Furthermore, Kesić quoted the book A History of the League of the Communists of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Izdavački centar Komunist, 1985, p. 374) to underscore the positive role of the Party in education during the years of the Cominform crisis (28 June 1948): “In the midst of the conflict with the Cominform … the Communist Party increasingly stressed the importance of a freely developed creative personality. […] the new teaching personnel had to be created by fighting for free ideological development under the conditions of socialist democracy, by expanding the battleground of thought and taking the initiative…” Kesić’s “defence” of the party stressed its democratic qualities in making one’s views known, and that the method of showdowns with those with different views by “lynching” – which is vividly represented in the film – could not be imputed to the Party.

Among other things, Kesić stressed that the Presidency of SUBNOR approved of his assessment “because of the personality of the screenplay writer [referring to Ivan Aralica], who is already politically known to SUBNOR, but now rests in the gentle shadow of literary sunshine.” Thereby he again pointed out the importance of political suitability for literary producers in a socialist society, in which there was no room for its abnegators and in which art and politics operated hand-in-hand in the advanced socialist phase as well.