“When I look back at my first movies, it seems that the only thing that mattered was a careful observation”, Miloš Forman wrote in his autobiography.
Passed away on the 13th April 2018, a director and scriptwriter with an exceptional ability to observe the world, which became evident already in the 60s, when he created such movies as ”Black Peter”, “Loves of a Blonde” and “The Firemen’s Ball”. While seemingly ordinary, these stories become the exact images of socialistic reality in Forman’s films, funny and cruel at the same time. Forman didn’t work with professional actors, but with amateurs. Instead of writing exact dialogues, he provoked them to act. The naturalness entailed truth, and this was the secret to his great success. The invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops during the Prague Spring in 1968 made Forman leave Czechoslovakia and move to the US. Once there, he made “Taking Off”, which won the Jury Prize in Cannes, but failed commercially. Forman quickly found a topic which was bound to both satisfy him as an artist and make money. His “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was the second in history to win the five most important Academy Awards. When asked about the reasons for filming the novel about the American asylum, he responded: ‘[…] to me it was not just literature but real life, the life I lived in Czechoslovakia from my birth in 1932 until 1968. The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched, telling me what I could and could not do; what I was or was not allowed to say.’
Grayżyna Torbicka
Art Director, Two Riversides Film and Art Festival
Transl. BT DIUNA
Black Peter
reż|dir Miloš Forman | CZ | 1964 | 85 min more...
Firemen’s Ball, The
reż|dir Miloš Forman | CZ, IT | 1967 | 73 min more...
Loves of a Blonde, The
reż|dir Miloš Forman | CZ | 1965 | 90 min more...
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