Original title: Spalovac mrtvol

Juraj Herz trained initially trained as a puppeteer and theatre director at the Department of Dramatic Theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he met and befriended Jan Švankmajer. Some of the dark surrealism that Švankmajer would later bring to his distinctive films is discernible here in The Cremator (those rapid cuts to close-ups of everyday objects that take on a sinister new meaning for example), one of the most highly regarded of the films associated with the Czech New Wave.

Set in the 1930s against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism, the bulk of the film is carried by Rudolf Hrušínský as the very talkative Karel Kopfrkingl, a Prague crematorium worker who is inordinately proud of his “temple of death.” He takes on a new assistant, Strauss (Jirí Lír) – references to music and composers is rife throughout; a later assistant is named Dvorak (Jirí Menzel) – who he invites to a gathering of mainly elderly people and those interested in funeral preparations where he delivers a speech that exposes his beliefs that in cremating the dead, he is liberating their souls, quoting from a book of Tibetan mysticism. At the gathering, Kopfrkingl meets Walter Reinke (Ilja Prachar), a former army colleague, now working as both a chemical engineer and a recruiter for the Nazi party. Although initially uncertain, as he has been raised Czech, Kopfrkingl eventually warms to the Nazi philosophy. At a carnival, he and his wife Lakmé (Vlasta Chramostová) and children become increasingly detached from one another culminating in a Christmas Eve dinner where Kopfrkingl declares his respect for the Third Reich. He’s soon recruited to spy on a Jewish ceremony and make reports on a Nazi-owned casino and is warned that his wife might herself be Jewish. Already highly unstable, Kopfrkingl loses grip on reality altogether, begins imagining a woman with long dark hair, who may be a personification of Death (Helena Anýzová, who turns up in several minor roles, possibly all of them representing Death), following him and starts to murder his family, hanging Lakmé, having visions of himself as the next Dalai Lama, bludgeoning his son Mili (Miloš Vognic) to death with an iron bar, attempts to mete out the same fate to dis daughter Zina (Jana Stehnová) and becomes elated with the prospect of operating the crematoriaat the newly built Nazi death camps…

The Cremator is often spoken of as one of the crown jewels of the Czech New Wave, a loose movement that counted among its practitioners Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec and Jaromil Jireš among many others. It doesn’t sit particularly easily alongside the other Czech New Wave films – he told Kinoeye that “I wasn’t in the group of “New Wave” directors simply because they didn’t accept me among them” and with its emphasis on surrealism and “tricksy” cinematic effects, the film has its own feel that separates it from many of its contemporaries – Jireš’s outstanding Valerie a týden divu/Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) might be its most natural bedfellow. The “tricks” that Herz deploys are often breathtaking, allowing scenes to not simply cut one to the other but to overlap (while showing off his collection of urns of ashes to Dvorak, Kopfrkingl rolls up his shirt sleeves and is suddenly having a blood test at his doctor’s surgery), bleeding one into the other to often disorientating effect. Actors play multiple roles (as well Lakmé, Chramostová also plays a prostitute that the supposedly abstinent and morally upright Kopfrkingl frequents) and Czech viewers familiar with Hrušínský, a hugely popular actor on home soil, will have been startled by his very atypical turn as a man falling slowly under the twin – but linked – spells of fascism and his own madness.

Hrušínský carries most of the film, engaging in long, rambling monologues as he gradually alters his appearance until he begins to look ever-more like a stodgy Adolf Hitler. Hrušínský is extraordinary throughout, a far cry from his comedic and “everyman” roles that had made his name. Kopfrkingl rarely shuts up, maintaining his confident, self-indulgent, often pretentious and frequently wildly misinformed monologue throughout the entire film and Hrušínský takes it all in his stride, remaining utterly compelling from the first scene to the chilling climax (“I’ll save them all,” he muses as he drives off to take up his new career at the death camps, literally leaving a pursuing Death in his wake, “the whole world…”) It’s an outstanding performance that at times channels a bit of Charles Laughton and a smidge of Peter Lorre but which remains uniquely powerful all the same.

At heart, The Cremator is about “the banality of evil,” Kopfrkingl being an eccentric but upstanding member of his community, a seemingly devoted family man, one with deep if very odd spiritual beliefs, yet prone to the “glamour” of fascism. The film – and the 1967 Ladislav Fuks novel on which it’s based – has frequently been read as a critique of the tendency among some German-descended Czechs to side with the Nazis during World War II, though in the film they are never mentioned by name, simply as “the party”, a move calculated to raise the suspicions of the newly-installed Soviet-backed regime that took over Czechoslovakia following the 1968 invasion of the country by Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968, which briefly halted work on The Cremator. Although it was unlikely that Herz was taking explicit aim at the Communist regime, it slowly became uncertain about what the film was trying to say and in 1969, the original ending – an epilogue which showed Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague – was removed by a nervous studio director and it was quietly withdrawn from circulation altogether in 1973, remining hard to see outside arthouse or festival screenings until the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s.

The reasoning behind that now lost ending was that conformity is ever-present, no matter which regime is trying to enforce it. The dangers of conformity is one of the film’s key themes, and the ease which extremist regimes can exploit it to their own ends is central to the film’s philosophy. In some respects, it anticipates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) which also features appalling acts of degradation and violence committed by little men seduced by fascism, finding a capacity for cruelty that they mete out almost dispassionately and with little thought, secure in the power of their twisted beliefs.

The Cremator is certainly a horror film, but it’s not your standard genre film. It has a suitably eerie score from Zdeněk Liška that mixes ambient drones with ethereal opera, and moody black and white photography courtesy of Stanislav Milota (Herz had wanted to shoot in colour), but it’s very different from any other horror film being made at the time. It’s a troubling and disturbing film, never more so than in its final moments, full of macabre bits of business like the trip to the carnival where the family visit a waxwork where the automata representing infamous killers are played by actors (their killings anticipate Kopfrkingl’s own murders later in the film). Herz was said to have been a fan of genre films as they allowed him the freedom to do and say things that more naturalistic drama wouldn’t, and although The Cremator remains his finest work – and one of the best films ever to come out of Czechoslovakia – he frequently returned to horror and fantasy with films like the Gothic drama Morgiana (1972), Panna a netvor (1978), a unique take on the Beauty and the Beast story, the dark fantasy Deváté srdce/The Ninth Heart (1979) and Upír z Feratu/Ferat Vampire (1982), about a vampire car that feeds on the blood of its owners.