Today, talking about freedom is more important than ever before and Forman vs. Forman does exactly that. In her latest biographical documentary, Helena Třeštíková portraits the late film director Miloš Forman as one of the leading voices of freedom in the 20th Century. Talking about freedom, she also shows why it is important to do so – even if today, freedom seems to be far less important than it was when Forman was alive.
An unnecessary luxury
«There’s no place where you can be free,» explains – towards the end of the film – this legendary film director who grew up in communism but directed some of the most iconic Hollywood films of all time. «There is always some pressure. In all those people’s democratic cinematographies there was an ideological pressure, but not a commercial one. In the US it’s the other way round. When it comes to ideological pressure you’re at the mercy of some idiot, while here in the US I am at the mercy of a filmgoer. And that’s what I prefer». Not many would agree with Miloš Forman today, but today freedom is a rare topic anyway. Filmmakers strive for funding and ordinary citizens are absorbed by their fight for survival. Freedom seems an unnecessary luxury for both. On a personal level, we have come to believe that on social media we can all be free to a certain degree: the ideological and commercial pressures have long merged into one. On a global level, the belief that capitalism needs freedom and democracy is long obsolete: capitalism is blossoming the most were human rights are respected the least, and in former communist countries, the nostalgia for the economic advantages has overgrown the memories of the human rights’ violations. No one cares to talk about freedom anymore. Yet, as Miloš Forman reminds us, «only where you can say, publicly and loudly, ‘there is no freedom here’, you are free».
I find completely fascinating the calm kindness with which Třeštíková portrays the people in her films, and how she presents their frail humanity without interfering with their intimacy. With Forman, this must have been a difficult task, not only because a public image of Miloš Forman was already created by previous biographies, but also because his personal path overlapped with key historic events of the last 100 years of the Global North. She nevertheless managed to knit a portrait of a frail human being in the midst of historic turmoil: the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazis took away his parents, both dying in concentration camps. The liberation of Prague by the Soviet Army and consequent seizure of the power in Czechoslovakia by the Communists in 1949 – the same year Forman entered film school – forced the best intellectuals to take refuge as teachers at the school, today known as the legendary FAMU. When Khrushchev deplored Stalin and the ideological grip softened, space had been created for the new Czechoslovak film called New Wave and Forman’s Audition (Konkurs, 1964) was praised as its very first voice. As the liberal Alexander Dubček came to power in the Prague Spring, Forman’s satire The Firemen’s Ball (1967) was selected for screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Out of solidarity with striking students in Paris in 1968, he withdrew his film from the competition along with his French colleagues, so the festival ended exactly when his film should have been screened. And after – on the night from August 20 to August 21 – when the Soviet Army entered Prague and brutally suppressed the Prague Spring, his friends Claud Berry and Jean-Pierre Rassam borrowed François Truffaut’s new car and went to Prague to bring his family to Paris.
The fragility of the moment
You will see plenty of precious archive material in this film, from the legendary Amos Vogel praising the Czech New Wave, to the directors Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard demanding the Cannes festival to be canceled in 1968. But the truly fascinating thing is how the images and voices are subtly intertwined, as in the moment when Forman’s recollection of how his marriage lost its romantic sparks mixes with the closeup shots of a metallic structure resembling carefully knit laces, only the following shot revealing they are part of the Eiffel Tower. Or, in the simply sublime moment when Forman, standing in front of the camera on a terrace of a Cannes restaurant, dressed only in swimming slips, is trying to explain the political liberalisation in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, «I think it’s giving more freedom…maybe too much… because sometimes certain pressure on you is very good because you know where to go, you know against what to fight, and sometimes freedom makes you lazy.» His naked torso expresses the fragility of the moment better than any words would do.
Freedom seems an unnecessary luxury today.
Forman vs. Forman shows there is a part of Miloš Forman in each of his films. He is among the men fighting the system in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). In Amadeus (1984) he is Salieri, and in People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), he is the lawyer, defending the free speech of a person he does not agree with. In Man on the Moon (1999), there is more of him than in any other of his films. Forman wanted to make it ever since he personally met Andy Kaufman. He announced the 21st Century with it: pursuing publicity for the sake of it, irony, fake news. With its’ title reminiscent of the REM’s lyrics quoting Kaufman, «If you believed they put a man on the moon (…) then nothing is cool», he indicated that the problems of today started deep in the previous century. We can ignore them but this will not solve them. Forman vs Forman doesn’t mention Man on the Moon, but it doesn’t need to: as a film about a man who is working in show business and continuously questions what he is doing, it is there all along.
