Politics & Power Quote by Milos Forman

Forman makes scarcity sound almost casual, which is exactly the point. The line has the offhand rhythm of someone counting cigarettes, not describing a cultural chokehold: “three a year,” “another three, four, five students.” That small arithmetic is doing heavy political work. After 1948, Czechoslovakia’s film industry doesn’t collapse in some dramatic blaze; it shrinks into a quota. The state doesn’t need to ban imagination if it can regulate the pipeline so tightly that ambition has nowhere to go.

The sneaky power here is the contrast between production and training. A film school keeps graduating more young directors, cinematographers, writers - a steady inflow of talent and hunger - while the country produces fewer and fewer features. Forman is sketching a pressure cooker: too many artists, too few outlets, and a gatekeeper with ideological criteria. The subtext is a kind of manufactured futility. You can learn the craft, even excel at it, but the system ensures you’ll be waiting for permission to practice.

His “you know” is also telling. It’s a conversational tick that doubles as an invitation and an accusation: you know how this works, you know what happens when a regime treats culture as infrastructure. In one compact snapshot, Forman explains why Eastern European cinema bred both formal ingenuity and political friction: when opportunity is rationed, every project becomes a negotiation, every aesthetic choice potentially an act of dissent, and every graduate another reminder that the future is being stocked but not allowed to happen.