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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Tensions and expression in Milos Forman’s American films

subject

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Milos Forman’s American films require a plural outlook. The director has always been drawn to stories of conflicts that are essential, according to him, to study human passion. This tension, thematic as well as esthetic, allows him to show the smallest mechanisms that lead to oppression in European and American stories, providing the viewer with a lesson of anatomy that pinpoints the most invisible magnetic forces leading to power. This course is accompanied by a journey to individualism, through forces involved in the identification with attractive though realistic characters, through the rediscovery of individual freedom within primitive or regressive worlds, insisting on the necessity of dreams to force open all the collective shackles in place. But it’s only within this insistence on all the human dimensions that Forman can remind the viewer of the importance of temperance in a way that remains profoundly realistic. This notion can only be properly understood when it’s been compared to repressions: going as far from politically correct behaviors as possible, he still insists on the necessity of responsibility in collective living. This difficult balance is also to be found in the way he deals with reality since human truth is only palpable through multiple forces revolving around tension. Relating to the world involves relating to images, and knowing how to observe remains both an intimate and an interactive act. Therefore, his films are not so much the study of America as a way to work on constantly moving images, as he remains influenced by a nation that has left its mark upon the history of cinema and which continues to be fundamentally protean.