ET Watch Home, a monthly movie essay

For January, Ivan Passer's Intimate Lighting

Paid subscribers get two extra issues a month. One of those is ET Watch Home, a monthly movie essay. This year, each of the movies is a Czech (or, if you prefer, Czechoslovak) New Wave staple. First up, we have Ivan’s Passer’s Intimate Lighting (1965).

In a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Czech New Wave director Ivan Passer told a story about his friend, the late director Milos Forman. The two were living in New York, having left Czechoslovakia together after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of the country. They had been childhood friends. Both lost their parents to the Nazis in World War II. They met at boarding school, where they formed a lifelong bond. And so when he realized, in New York, that Forman was depressed but refused to go to a psychiatrist, Passer went—as Forman. He got the necessary pills and gave them to Forman. And when Forman asked him how he knew what he, Forman, would say, he replied, “Milos, we’ve known each other a few Fridays.”