Miloš Forman has died on Friday, April 14th, 2018. He was a Czech native filmmaker, with a career spanning over half a century, and his mark on the history of cinema is one that will never be forgotten. He was an artist who never repeated himself, yet his sly, but sophisticated touch was always recognizable. They were works that are simultaneously righteous, rebellious, and rousing. Apologies for the alliteration.
I don’t want to give you a whole history lesson here, you can find various interviews and retrospectives that will probably go far deeper than I ever could. I like this one particular interview he did with NPR back in 2008, and I’m sure there will be more to come in the next couple days and weeks. He is a very fascinating man who led a very interesting life, even outside of his work in film, and I encourage you to read more about him. Instead, I just want to talk about my experiences with his work, and how they’ve affected me.
I vividly remember my first time watching Amadeus. I was coming back from elementary school, and since the store my parents owned at the time also rented out movies, it was basically my after school tradition to pick a random movie off the shelf, and watch it in the back room. I remember having my eye on the Amadeus VHS tape for a while because the cover design was striking, and it somehow made me think it was an animated film(?), so one day I took that and put it in the player. Of course, after realizing it was a costume drama, I immediately contemplated turning it off. I liked lots of different kinds of movies, but even my younger self was susceptible to the ridiculous notion that older costume dramas were somehow dry and dull. However, Amadeus was different than anything I’d seen by that point. It was full of life, it was vibrant, it was colorful, it had gravitas, and it had a wicked sense of humor. It wasn’t too long after that I began to look into who this Forman guy is and what else he had done.
Within the next month, I watched all the films of his that we had. Ragtime, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Hair, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, but not Valmont, we never had that one in stock. I’ve since caught up with most of his work, except for some of his early Czech films, pre-70s. There’s yet to be a film of his that I don’t find astonishing, and I’ll even go to bat for Man on the Moon, which has been considered to be among his lesser work. Though, none of them have been able to match the near-religious experience I had with Amadeus, not that it’s some kind of competition or anything. It just captured a singular impact that was probably not going to happen to another one of his films, now that I realized what kind of talent I was dealing with.
And man, what a talent. It’s shocking to me that he wasn’t talked about more. And it’s probably due to the fact that he’s one of those directors who was always challenging himself, trying different things, telling different stories, and as a result, he has a filmography that is incredibly diverse. Versatility has somehow become the most underappreciated aspect of storytelling in modern film discourse, with many of us fawning over recognizing the repetitious themes, ideas, and images from countless “auteurs,” and Forman’s versatility as a filmmaker is something I’ve always admired. He was always able to tap into the core of any story he was telling, and brought it to life in ways that were daring, complex, and soulful. There was always a radical bent to his films, but never at the expense of empathy.
I tend to reserve the term “genius,” but that definitely applies to Miloš Forman. He may have not have fully became a household name like some directors, but the films speak for themselves, and they will last for a long, long time. I’m going to keep this short because the only thing better than talking about how great Miloš Forman was, is seeing him in practice. Sit down and watch a film of his, any film, and see a master at work.