The Cremator

The Cremator (1969) is a horror film with political implications produced just before the Soviet tanks rumbled into St. Wencelaus Square.  From the time of Hapsburgs through Kafka, the macabre and grotesque has always exerted a powerful influence on the Bohemian imagination and The Cremator exemplifies this sensibility.  The film's eccentric style seems a refracted version of the French New Wave, although much more jarring in its impact:  the stylistic innovations that characterize the Nouvelle Vague are overlaid on a strongly Gallic classical tradition -- French films are eminently rational, even when they chronicle the irrational -- even, surrealism in Parisian hands embodies a kind of doctrine complete with creed and hierarchies.  Czech films are generally more Gothic and contain disquieting images coupled with ghastly behavior.  The Cremator features jarring close-ups, very quick cutting that scatters the images into prismatic arrays of clinical close-ups:  a cat licking her whiskers, the wrinkles in a man's forehead, a mouth shot in enormous close-up devouring  pastry.  The mise-en-scene includes jarring jump cuts, eerie music, and bizarre locations that are veritable Wunderkabinette.  There are alcoves full of odd artifacts -- the crematorium features rooms filled with urns and other macabre knick-knacks and there are bottles of pickled fetuses as well as waxworks depicting all sorts of horrors.  These locations didn't need to be created for the film; they were just there in Prague, waiting to be featured in the movie.  The ornate crematorium with mourning life-size stucco angels flanking its portico and heavy squarish pillars a bit like those you might imagine in a Hindu temple is actually a real place somewhere near Prague -- it's now protected as a national cultural treasure.  The interior of the chapel is a polychrome fantasia with a balcony palisade of sleek organ pipes and a trap-door on which caskets can be lowered down to the inferno below.  This remarkable place, called in the film "The Temple of Death" sits in a funereal park at the center of a great, sinister plaza. 

The film's story concerns the encroaching madness of the Assistant Director of the film's crematorium.  This man is called Kopfrkingl.  He has a very straitlaced wife, who is half Jewish, and two rather grotesque children -- one of them is bland-faced blonde boy with big ears and round spectacles; Kopfrkingl's daughter is a mute Kore figure, beautiful but inscrutable.  Cremator begins with the Germans on the border of Czechoslovakia.  The characters are unsure what this means -- some even intend to welcome the Germans.  Kopfkingl is obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism and preaches a nihilistic gospel of death -- he sees cremation as a practice that frees souls from suffering and facilitates their reincarnation.  Accordingly, we see him preaching that cremation is the way to escape suffering and secure a favorable re-birth.  He has a book on Tibet showing on its cover the Potala Gun, that is, the Dalai Lama's palace, and, sometimes, when he looks out the window, the misty Potala is visible floating over the Czech countryside.  

The Germans arrive and Kopfrkingl, an unctuous conformist, is recruited to join the Nazi party.  There's only one problem: his wife is half-Jewish which makes his children so-called Mischlings (mixed blood part-Jews).  Kopfkingl's obsession with cremation recommends him to the Germans who will soon have a need for his services.  He's called to a meeting with Nazi party officials in which he pontificates in front of a huge reproduction of one of Bosch's hellscapes.  His enthusiasm for burning bodies even alarms the Nazis.  By this time, Kopfrkingl has gone mad -- he is schizophrenic and has split into a Buddhist monk and his acolyte, Rinpoche.  It's clear that Kopfrkingl now thinks that  he is the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.  When a Nazi fellow-traveler tells him that he will be barred from the Party since his wife is half-Jewish and his children Mischling, Kopfrkingl decides to eliminate them.  He hangs his wife and burns her body.  His son, a weakling, has become obsessed with boxing and, as a patriot, wants to see the Nazis beat up by strong Czech warriors.  This is obviously unacceptable to Kopfrkingl and so he beats the boy to death with a metal rod, puts the body in a closed casket with another corpse to be cremated, and, then, plans to exterminate his daughter.  The girl escapes and the Nazis arrive to take Kopfrkingl away, assuring him that they "will deal with the girl."  It's not certain that Kopfrkingl is  being taken to a concentration camp to supervise corpse disposal or an insane asylum.  In the end it doesn't matter -- the Potala hovers over the rainy landscape and the world has gone as insane as the film's protagonist.  

The movie success resides in the performance by the actor playing Kopfrkingl.  This actor, Rudolf Hrusinski, was apparently the scion of a famous family of theater people in Prague and, when he was young, he was handsome and a rebel on the order of James Dean or Marlon Brando.  He was 48 when Cremator was made and hadn't aged well -- in the movie he looks like a nightmare fusion between Adolf Menjou and Peter Lorre.  He has bulging eyes like an amphibian and speaks in an obsequious (quite literally) incantatory flood of euphemisms -- everything is "blessed".  He tells the whores that he frequents (he goes to a brothel every Thursday) about his "blessed" and  happy marriage and his fine children.  In the funniest scene in the film, he tells the Nazi party leader how his wife has cooked a wonderful dish of carp "after the European style" -- he is, of course, referring to something like gefilte Fische, a characteristically Jewish speciality, although he seems blissfully unaware that he is implicating himself.  Kopfrkingl is obsessed with blood disease and, after his weekly bouts with the whores, patronizes a Jewish physician for reassurance that his blood has not been tainted.  "Do I have German blood?" he asked Bettelheim.  Wearily, Bettleheim tells him that all blood is the same.  "Just like ashes," Kopfrkingl notes:  "All the same."  Hrusinski's performance is truly horrific.  He has the habit of combing the hair of cadavers about to be burned and, then, drawing the comb through his own hair that seems lacquered onto his head.  

The movie has several surrealist devices:  the cemetery contains a monument showing Kopfrkingl's children in effigy form; on several occasions, we see a flyer with the same patriotic figure admonishing that you are needed --either for the Nazi party or a testimonial dinner or to attend the boxing match or to join the cremation association.  (The flyers are like circulars with Uncle Sam glaring at you and demanding that you join the army or buy war bondes).  A sepulchral woman in a black veil haunts the proceedings.  People walk through a door in one location to appear somewhere else in the next shot.  Kopfkingl has a display of taxonomically-identified fruit flies -- we see him seeming to put up this display case on the wall of the brothel but then the camera pulls back to show that we are in the over-decorated living room at his home.  

The film is shot with fish-eye lenses to create distortion effects (and, also, for the practical reason that many of the locations were very small and had to be filmed in a way to make them looking larger.)  The ghostly woman who haunts the background of several scenes looks like Miss Thanatogenes  in Tony Richardson's The Loved One (1965) and many of the shots in Cremator seems modeled on the stark, grotesque black and white in the American film -- I wonder if the director was aware of that picture and had seen it or whether the peculiar "look" of Cremator is simply an independent application of many of the effects in the Richardson movie.

This sort of pitch-black humor can be a bit cloying and inauthentic.  But the director, Juraj Herz, came by his nihilism honestly -- he survived the German concentration camps and was one of the few members of his family to make it out of the Holocaust alive.  Sixty other family members were murdered in the camps.  The picture is flamboyant and very disturbing.  The references to Tibetan Buddhism are effective and the mirage of the massive man-made mountain of the Potala Gun is impressive -- but Tibetan Buddhists didn't usually cremate their dead:  they exposed the hacked-up corpses for sky-burial in the bellies of vultures, condors and buzzards.  Herz wanted to film a coda in which the camera focuses on the "You are needed" poster, this time encouraging membership in the Communist Party.  The camera would pick out Kopfkingl walking on a busy modern street filmed in technicolor -- then, the view would broaden to show the presence of Soviet tanks on the road.  Although this ending was filmed, it was not used -- stills exist but the footage has been lost or destroyed.   It didn't matter.  After a few weeks of tremendous box-office in Prague, the movie was suppressed and not shown again until 2003.  Every year you can attend a special screening in the actual Temple of Death.