"We were approached about that, the young architects wanted it when it was being released in '88 or whenever it was, and well, I put a picture in there, blank, white, and there was an arrow and it said Gone. And Sonny Halas had the most beautiful action there that I know of. He carried an ordinary wooden chair up the hill on the Pálava, and he's photographed sitting on that hill looking out into that free country, into Austria. And the next day the boys, the architects, told me that the rector was there and that Palla and Sonny had to leave immediately. And that Palla was calling for emigration, by leaving, that was some love or something I experienced at that time, and that Sonny with that chair was looking into Austria and that it had to go."
"And Jožka says, 'I'll find out,' and a week later I come to his class and he says, 'Marian, nothing, don't appeal, be glad it's just going through. Because they're watching you, your studio,' he had all this through these friends in Brno, that there was something going on there, that people were coming there, that there were lectures there, so I'm banned from Prague. I wouldn't even know that I was being followed there."
"The mayor of Luhačovice completely screwed up, because when the Russians came, a group of Romanians also came there. That was interesting, everybody in Luhačovice liked the Romanians because they were posh, they spoke French, they were polite. And when there were celebrations - my mother told me all this, like at the end of the liberation, he invited only the Romanians. And the Russians, who everybody was afraid of in Luhačovice, that they would be robbed of their watches, raped, nothing. So, just as soon as the commies came to power, he was done. And for other reasons too, right?"
Marian Palla was born on 30 July 1953 in Košice to an architect and a doctor. Because of her background, her mother could study medicine only after working as a crane operator for a year and only in Košice. The family soon moved to Brno. Marian was admitted to the Brno Conservatory before graduating from high school, where he studied double bass. For fifteen years he played in the orchestra of the Janáček Opera, and as a self-taught artist he began to devote himself to visual arts - drawing, painting, ceramics, concept, multimedia. During the period of harsh political normalization, he organized lectures and housing seminars and participated in events and exhibitions in unofficial spaces. In 1994, Dalibor Chatrný invited Marian Palla as a teacher, assistant, to the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology, where he taught for two decades and after several years of study also received the title of associate professor. Marian Palla has exhibited at home and in foreign galleries, and has published thirteen prose titles, poetry and children‘s books. At the time of filming he lived and worked in Střelice near Brno.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
