When Milo Forman arrives here on April 12 for his sold-out Regis Dialogue with L.A.-based critic Scott Foundas, the 75-year-old filmmaker deserves to be greeted like a rock star, his fans scrambling for autographs, shouting out requests (“ Rock me, Amadeus!”), and perhaps even flicking their Bics until the Walker’s fire alarm goes off.

I don’t say this because Forman directed a valiantly recovering Courtney Love in 1996′s The People vs. Larry Flynt, or because R.E.M. helped inspire his Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon a few years later, or because in the times-they-are-a-changin’-back days of ’79 he let it all hang out with Hair, or because the Czechoslovakia-born filmmaker’s well-named U.S. debut Taking Off (1970) sports enough pricey tuneage (by Woodstock vets The Incredible String Band and others) to have indefinitely forestalled a commercial video release anywhere in the world. I don’t even say it because the apt title of the Walker’s accompanying retro–“ Cinema of Resistance”–all but begs us to defy the museum’s easy listening vibe (“ Freebird!”), like Forman’s R.P. McMurphy righteously railing against Nurse Ratched’s wretched Muzak in the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Rather, I’m thinking of the classic Minneapolitan rock tale–lovingly told by Jim Walsh in the Pioneer Press and well worth repeating here or any other time–wherein the Revolution-era Prince sits alone at the back of the dearly beloved Southtown Theatre several nights in a row, swinging his high heels to the beat of Forman’s funky Amadeus (screening in its director’s cut edition this Friday, April 4, at the Walker).

That His Royal Badness would just a few months later join the director among 1985′s Oscar-winners (Prince’s gold came for writing the Purple Rain soundtrack, of course) means our reclusive homeboy might already have serenaded Forman for his vision of a flamboyantly costumed control freak whose musical genius was without equal at the time. But I doubt it. So let us be sure to thank Milo Forman for rocking the Kid of Purple Rain–along with kids of all colors, really, to the extent that the “ Resistance” leader has always been a youthquaking revolutionary.

“ I remember seeing Amadeus as a kid and really liking it,” says Foundas by phone from L.A. “ Particularly for a period film, it has a very contemporary feel. So besides the fact that it’s about young people, it’s a movie that a kid could easily access.”

For another budding critic, it was Hair that first flipped his wig, although, relatively speaking, I was still a pup when I saw Forman in the flesh at the Virgin Megastore, of all places, where he was pimping Larry Flynt in workprint form for the New York Film Festival press screening crowd. “I’m not interested in Hustler,” Forman said of Flynt’s rag, “but I am interested in the idea that someone could tell me not to buy it.”

Foundas, who’s excited to be encountering Forman (and Minneapolis) for the first time on April 12, says that as interviewer he hopes to explore, among other things, the relationship between the director’s life and work.

“ His early films,” Foundas says of Black Peter (April 1), Loves of a Blonde (April 8), and The Firemen’s Ball (April 16), all key works of the Czech New Wave, “ clearly reflect the sensibility of someone who grew up under Communism and had an almost Dickensian childhood and adolescence. Given what his life was like, it’s amazing that he became a filmmaker rather than a coalminer.”

At the age of eight, Forman witnessed his mother being taken away from the family home by Nazis; both she and Forman’s father, a teacher, perished in a concentration camp after having been marked for death by a former employee of theirs. Sudden shocks, some matter-of-factly presented, are understandably commonplace in Forman’s work. “ The Germans just cancelled culture,” the director told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross in 1994 by way of explaining that, among influences, his childhood itself factors far more significantly than his childhood experience of movies. Disguising his early social critiques under cover of comedy, Forman became an early master of the fine art of smuggling, although Firemen’s Ball (1967) allegorized Communism clearly enough to inspire some 40,000 Czechoslovakian firemen to threaten picketing the film–which was summarily banned in his homeland. Ball was the first of Forman’s works to screen at the New York Film Festival, which provided a ticket to the U.S. as well as a chance to begin making high-profile American movies–less dissimilar to the scrappy Czech ones than they might appear.

Foundas, who hailed Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts (April 2) as “ irreverent” in LA Weekly, says that comic impiety, along with an outsider’s point of view, can be traced across the entire oeuvre.

“ Goya‘s isn’t a portrait of the artist so much as the portrait of a society that’s constantly reinventing itself as one regime opposes the previous one,” the critic says. “ So you have this absurd cycle of contradictions seen over the course of a lifetime–which is how the world must look to someone like Forman, who has experienced democracy, Nazism, and Communism. Even [Forman's] Czech films are made from an outsider’s perspective, with nonconformist characters rebelling against parents or patriarchal figures. And the [American] biopics are unorthodox as well. Man on the Moon seems to channel the personality of its subject, being both entertaining and enigmatic. It’s a movie about Andy Kaufman where you learn as little about Andy Kaufman as Andy Kaufman would probably want you to learn.”

The Walker, as if to help preserve the mysteries of both Kaufman and Forman, isn’t screening Man on the Moon. Children of the resistance would thus do well to download the bootleg.

In her recent rave review of Paranoid Park, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis invokes Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Dargis’ connection is no accident, as Van Sant himself credits Tarr’s work in helping shape his own vision in making his last four films: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park(screening this Wednesday at the Walker). Last November the Walker was lucky enough to host a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective with auteur Tarr, whose mesmerizing, languid films are rarely shown in the U.S. Tarr was certainly a bit more tight-lipped about his thought process as a filmmaker than Van Sant, but analyzing the connections between the two is interesting nonetheless. I love how both Tarr and Van Sant’s work have so many similarities in terms of their sublime cinematography of long takes, shot with a slow-moving camera–and yet each is so rooted in their particular location: Tarr with his vast Hungarian wastelands, Van Sant with his Pacific Northwest ethos.

For a MOMA retrospective on Tarr, Van Sant wrote an essay about Tarr’s films, which I’ve reproduced below. When so many current filmmakers seem to eschew the past, I admire Van Sant for having the capacity to learn from a true master of cinema–and can’t wait to see Tarr’s influence manifest itself in Van Sant’s new work.

The Camera is a Machine

I have been influenced by Béla Tarr’s films and after reviewing the last three works Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies, I find myself attempting to rethink film grammar and the effect industry has had on it. This is the way I see it. Cinema started as simple single-shot full-length proscenium compositions resembling theater, the only thing that it could find to reference to commercialize itself. By the next twenty years there was a new vocabulary. The close up, montage, and parallel storytelling fragmented the continuity of the previous proscenium-encased static-frame full-figure images. Separate fragments were now placed together to form meaning, the director could play with time and cinematic space. It was exciting. Was this an absolute inevitable direction or just one road cinema chose to take?

I believe these cinematic innovations complimented industry and created an Industrial Vocabulary. The director could tell you how to think about scenes by the way he played with separate pieces. He could control his characters, he could control time and story, and he could control you. Left behind were the proscenium and the static take, which were old-fashioned.

Things were modern, things were easier, like doing your laundry, there was a washing machine now that would do it for you. The modern cinema was an invention that could think for you, you didn’t have to do in anymore, like in the theater.

The Cinema of Industry has progressed into mega-industry and mega-cinema but remaining ideally the same? The cinematic vocabulary of a 2001 television show like Ally McBeal is virtually the same as Birth of a Nation’s. It is no surprise that Citizen Kane has been considered the greatest film of all time, a film about selling oneself down the river along with the copper, coal and timber while nostalgically longing for a lost Victorian era, and film vocabulary’s original beginnings, a Rosebud, that has been left behind in another century.

Béla’s stuff seems to be a successful and authentic departure, a wholly other cinema beginning over again. A cinema that needed to come from outside our Western Culture, a lost Rosebud, one of the many directions cinema might have before we sold ourselves down the river.

Béla’s creations use static full figure landscapes, as if referencing the 1800′s steam engine pulling into a station that would force audience members standing in the gallery to run for the exit so they wouldn’t get hit by the train. Somehow Béla has gotten himself back there psychically and learned things all over again as if modern cinema had never happened. An angry crowd marches down a street to burn down the hospital in Werckmeister Harmonies, a shot that lasts about five minutes. When asked after a screening why the shot of the crowd lasted for so long, Béla answered, “ because it was a long way.” The question was an honest one, why would the audience weaned on post modern industrial cinema sit and watch an angry mob for so long when they have been used to a shot that lasts only a couple of seconds, even a shot ten or fifteen seconds would be too long. But the answer, although funny, is also an honest one, it was a long enough way that to show it for five minutes it affects the way we think about the event, the mob, the march, the hospital. Not shorthanded, not as clipped as in Industrial Vocabulary, but played out lyrically and poetically, letting us in on the thoughts rather than just saying one thing like, the mob walked, rather; the mob walked, and grimaced and raised their torches, and walked in synchronized and unsynchronized steps, advanced, fell back, and when they arrived it had been a long way.

Hitchcock said in response to a question by Franois Truffaut that major stylistic film changes could happen through character, perhaps, but here is a very major change through ideas.

Béla’s works are organic and contemplative in their intentions rather than shortened and contemporary. They find themselves contemplating life in a way that is almost impossible watching an ordinary modern film. They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.

–Gus Van Sant, MoMA Bela Tarr Retrospective Catalogue, 2001.

We’ve been following the career of Gus Van Sant for some time now. He was here in 2003 when for a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective. We premiered his film Gerry at that time, and that film marked the beginning of a departure from the style of filmmaking of his previous work. Longer takes and improvisation became a part of his filmmaking. Gerry might be my personal favorite, but Elephant really blew me away as well. I’ve been looking forward to Paranoid Park since hearing about its premiere at Cannes last year. It’s taken a while for it to make it’s way to the theaters, and it should be a spectacle on the screen here at the Walker. With Cinematography by long-time Wong Kar Wai collaborator Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li, and a newly completed sound sytem upgrade (more on this soon) in our Cinema, this should prove to be a great show.

We will be presenting a FREE screening of Paranoid Park On Wednesday, March 19.

Take a look at the trailer to get a sense of the film. (and a taste of the super 8 skateboarding footage.)

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=YOjqfOXOYNU[/youtube]