‘Formative Films’ offers up a feast of Milos Forman

By Milan Paurich

For full appreciation, check out several of the Czech migr master’s works.

Although Milos Forman’s Hollywood career remains a subject of sometimes heated debate (I personally prefer underloved Forman masterpieces like “Hair” and “Ragtime” to overpraised turnips like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus”), few serious film buffs would dispute the fact that Forman’s pre-Oscar r sum is studded with gems.

The problem in recent years (decades?) is that it hasn’t been particularly easy to see Forman’s early Czech-language classics like “Loves of a Blonde” and “The Fireman’s Ball,” or even 1971’s “Taking Off,” the first movie he shot in America. (A tussle over music rights has kept the latter from being released on home video.)

To help remedy the situation, a traveling miniretrospective of Forman’s earliest work has started making its way across the United States. The series was launched in February at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Beginning Friday and continuing through April 27, the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque will play host to “Formative Films” by the Czech migr master. If the only Forman movies you know are “Cuckoo’s Nest” or “Amadeus,” prepare to be blown away. And if you haven’t seen any of his rare, early titles in awhile (really, who has?), expect to be dazzled anew.

Someone once said that if Jean Renoir had been born in Czechoslovakia instead of France — and a generation earlier — he could have been Milos Forman. Certainly the characters in Forman’s films subscribe to the same basic philosophy that has always guided Renoir’s protagonists (“The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has their reasons”). However misguided or even foolish their rationalizations may appear at times, it’s the inescapable humanity of trainee supermarket detective Peter in “Black Peter” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.) or shoe factory worker Brejchova in “Loves of a Blonde” (Friday at 9:15 p.m. and Saturday at 5:30 p.m.) that stirs the soul.

And tickles the funny bone as well; Forman has always been at his best when he’s seriously funny. “Taking Off” (April 24 at 7 p.m. and April 27 at 8:40 p.m.), Forman’s affectionately satirical, clear-eyed look at America’s early ’70s counter-culture movement and youth culture, remains one of his greatest, if most unassuming works.

Forman’s unvarnished humanism is a recurring trademark of his work. His early Czech films, including 1963’s wonderful documentary-fiction hybrid “Competition” (April 27 at 7 p.m.), were intended as a rebuke against the vapid, propagandistic movies being made by Prague’s state-run film studio. “Everything was so artificial, so far-fetched, so unreal and untrue that we only wanted to see some reality, some real people on the screen,” Forman explained in a recent New York Times interview. The loosely structured, semi-improvised results helped launch the Czech New Wave, a direct offshoot of Italy’s Neo-realist and France’s Nouvelle Vague movements.

1967’s brilliant social comedy “The Fireman’s Ball” (screening with “Decathlon,” Forman’s 10-minute segment from “Visions of Eight,” a documentary about the 1972 Munich Olympics, on April 24 at 8:55 p.m. and April 27 at 4:30 p.m.) was the last feature that Forman would make in his homeland until returning to shoot “Amadeus” in 1983.

As fate would have it, the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred while Forman was scouting film projects in Paris. After an extended stay in France, he moved to New York in 1969 with fellow New Wave director Ivan (“Intimate Lighting,” “Cutter’s Way”) Passer.

Forman has been a naturalized American citizen since 1975.