Ghostly.(The Talk of the Town)(Goya's Ghosts)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 23-JUL-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

When Milos Forman was a student in Prague, more than fifty years ago, he read a book about the Spanish Inquisition that gave him an idea for a film. Great idea, just one teensy problem: the Inquisition part. "In Czechoslovakia the same things were happening," Forman said one day recently. "People were being arrested and then confessing to crimes they hadn't committed. But if I had even mentioned to anyone, 'I want to make a film of the Inquisition'--I would have been branded an enemy of the state." Thirty years later, in Madrid, he visited the Prado and saw paintings by Francisco Goya, whose life coincided with the final chapters of the Inquisition. "In one room," Forman recalled, "you see Goya's depictions of desperation and...

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