The Cremator

Cinematheque by Steven Jay Schneider

A creepily brilliant blend of black comedy and horror, The Cremator is by the Gothic director Juraj Herz, an ethnic Slovak whose films of the time were principally Czech and noted for their fantastical, Felliniesque visual and narrative excess. The Cremator is set in the late 1930s, as Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland is being handed over to Germany under the notorious Munich agreement. The great Czech actor Rudolf Hrusínsky shines as Kopfrkingl, a mild-mannered family man and crematorium operator who becomes unhinged by ambition, the corrupting influence of National Socialist ideology, and a delusional vision of a better future through more efficient crematoria. Hoping to establish that he has German blood, he learns instead that his wife is part Jewish - a discovery with diabolical consequences for his entire family. Herz uses extreme close-ups, disorienting tracking shots, and distorting fish-eye lenses to re-create his protagonist’s deranged perspective. Striking pre-credit and credit sequences help set the nightmarish mood.


Channel 4 Film Guide

An enjoyably strange, undoubtedly original and occasionally terrifying film (9 1/2 out of 10)

On one level The Cremator can be enjoyed simply as something truly strange and different. Although it is live action, the film has much of the oddness and Gothic trappings of Czech animation. Director Juraj Herz actually studied puppetry rather than film, and is a friend of the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. This is a film full of strange angles and odd ways of looking at the world. At its heart is Karl Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský) the cremator of the title. Though he loves his job dearly, his strangeness is emphasised in one of the film's key early passages, a trip to a fair during which he s perked up by a visit to an exhibition of gruesome waxworks.

But while you might expect a film this eccentric to be otherworldly, The Cremator is actually grounded in politics. In what isn't a terribly surprising twist given the late 30s setting, Kopfrkingl's interest in the purifying power of the oven chimes in with the rise of Nazism. But the clunky premise - that there is a fine line between rigid middle class conservatism and being a fascist - is less important than the extraordinary atmosphere the film creates, and Hrušínský's portrayal of the increasingly deranged Kopfrkingl.


Senses of Cinema

The other Liska score in this program was for Juraj Herz's The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol), (1968), an elegiac tone poem with a funereal chorus, recalling Liska's earlier soundtrack for Elmar Klos and Ján Kádar's The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze) (1964). Herz's film is a cheerfully morbid exposition of the most brutally misapplied forms of “waste management” and ergonomic efficiency, the narrative proceeding on increasingly precipitous inversions of rational logic as the eponymous cremator extemporises his murderous reveries. There's a formally inventive nightmare texture here which is still striking almost four decades later; the way the gestures of the lead carry the action across edits from one shot to the next, the use of flash frames (something Svankmajer has used since, to fine effect), and the abundance of distorting lenses (an effect which becomes distracting in Herz's later Morgiana [1971]). The Cremator is the most accomplished of Herz's many literary adaptations of the time; I've been fortunate enough to view the ACMI Access Collection's 35mm print of his Sweet Games of Last Summer (Sladké hry minulého léta) (1969) (after Maupassant's The Fly), a static, stagey work much closer to Morgiana than this, his finest work.




Contents
Disc Info

The Cremator Boxshot

Czech Republic / 1968
Main Feature: 95 minutes
Special Feature: 13 minutes
Certificate: 15
Black & White
1.66:1 16x9 Enhanced
Language: Czech
Subtitles: English On/Off
PAL
Region 0
RRP: £12.99
Release Date: 10th April 2006

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