The Shootings of May Third 1808, 1814, Francisco Goya

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) has been called “the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns.”

A court painter most of his life, Goya managed to chronicle in his work the dark side of an era in which wars were incessant and the corruption of the Catholic church reached terrifying levels of depravity and cruelty. The life and mind of Goya, his work, and his chronicling through art of the period in which he lived are all compellingly conveyed in a recent film called Goya’s Ghosts (2oo6), directed by Milos Forman.

Forman is justly celebrated for the films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, but the Goya film met with hostile reviews when it was released in theatres.

Many of the same reviewers who found Amadeus cartoonish and cavalier with historical truth leveled the same criticisms at Goya’s Ghosts. To my mind these reviewers have missed the point.

The great achievement of Amadeus was that it brought Mozart’s music to a wider audience and also managed to make the artistic process – remember the scene in which Salieri reads through the manuscript of the Requiem – understandable and thrilling, something never before done on the big screen.

Forman achieves something similar in Goya’s Ghosts, in making the art of painting part of real life and more than that, in revealing its power to affect the course of events. To be sure, Forman takes liberties with historical fact – the shocking prints known as “The Disasters of War”, for example, were not published until thirty-five years after Goya’s death – but to bring Goya’s life and time to the screen so vividly, one could argue, justifies such license.

Several of the performances in Goya’s Ghosts are simply beyond praise and should have been recognized in all the usual places when awards were handed out: Javier Bardem as Brother Lorenzo and Natalie Portman as both Ines and her daughter Alicia. Forman is a great film-maker and he has a special gift for capturing the essence of the creative process.

Incidentally, for the curious, Goya in Bordeaux (1999), directed by Carlos Saura, is another excellent film about this extraordinary artist. The story told is quite different but equally true to the spirit of Goya and the terrible turbulence of his time.

Paul E. Robinson

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