Forman’s films were all about individual
Milos Forman, the Oscarwinning director who died at 86 on April 13, made only a dozen feature films, but they include the undying classics “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Amadeus” (1984), as well as a string of major and sometimes underappreciated titles such as “Hair” (1979), “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (1996) and “Goya’s Ghosts” (2006).
Forman’s legacy is diverse, with films in a variety of styles and genres. Yet his work has two qualities in common, one visual, one thematic.
In terms of visuals, Forman’s films are full of color and beauty. Forman wasn’t like most directors, who would do just as well in black and white (and some would be better off ). Forman understood color. He wasn’t seduced by it. He wasn’t overwhelmed by it. He just knew how to use it to express a place in time.
Because the times and places of his films varied from film to film, he never used color twice in the same way. In “Amadeus,” the court in 1780s Vienna looks like a painting come to life. It’s deliriously beautiful, but a little forbidding. The turn of the 20th century New York of “Ragtime” was slightly muted, with the suggestion of a recollection. In contrast, the 1970s colors of “The People vs. Larry Flynt” were electric, like some Rod Stewart video come to life. Forman was attracted to period pieces — his last seven films were set in an earlier time — and he made it his task to capture the dream and promise of the past in visual terms.
That past, imposing and
sometimes complacent in its perfect beauty, was the monolith against which Forman’s protagonists often railed and struggled. Which brings us to the thematic characteristic of Forman’s films — his affinity for gifted loners in conflict with hostile, indifferent or misguided authority. That was, in a sense, Forman’s own story.
Forman was born in Czechoslovakia in 1932 to a Protestant mother who, following the Nazi invasion of that country in 1939, was so politically active that she died in Auschwitz. The man Forman assumed to be his father was also killed by the Nazis. (Forman later found out that his real father was a Jewish architect, who survived the Holocaust.) Forman came of age in a Czechoslovakia that was dominated by the Soviet Union, and despite the oppression, he thrived.
His second film, “The Loves of a Blonde” (1965) was a hit on the international festival circuit, and so was his followup, “The Firemen’s Ball” (1967), a comedy that was recognized in its time as a satire of the Communist government and thus banned by the authorities.
Forman had the good fortune to be fundraising in Paris at the time of the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, which ended the ephemeral period of liberalization known as the “Prague Spring.” Eventually, Forman made his way to the United States. His first significant work was his contribution to “Visions of Eight” (1973), an Olympics film featuring shorts from eight filmmakers. Then two years later, he entered history as an American director with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” an adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel, which won five Oscars, including best picture and best director.
It was the ideal meeting of a director and a subject. Who better than the son of anti-Nazi dissidents and who better than an artist whose work had to get past Communist functionaries to tell a story in which sane people are imprisoned and the twisted and the vicious are in authority?
Forman’s next film, “Hair,” seems quintessentially American, and in that Forman joins Frank Capra and Billy Wilder in the class of foreign directors with an affinity for American themes. Like Capra and Wilder, Forman’s films celebrated the American passion for the individual versus the mob, whether that individual was Mozart or Andy Kaufman (“Man on the Moon”) or Goya or Larry Flynt or the young iconoclasts of “Hair.” Notorious, in real life, for a personality that was rough-edged and unsentimental, he was passionate in his art about art itself and the preciousness of individual expression.
Most people haven’t seen “Goya’s Ghosts.” See it, if you want to understand and better appreciate Forman and his films. The movie contrasts two personalities — Goya (Stellan Skarsgard), a humane man at peace with himself and possessed of a clear understanding of the world; and an Inquisition priest (Javier Bardem), who is running from himself, who is dangerous and in power.
In Forman’s view, the people in power are always ridiculous, or clueless, or deluded, or dangerous, and sometimes all of those awful things. It’s the artists that know the truth.
Who better than the son of antiNazi dissidents to tell a story in which sane people are imprisoned and the twisted and the vicious are in authority?
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle