Since the revolution of Cinema, the genre is something that the audience always looks into. It is something that varies from one to another. But when the audience is confused about the genre, the creator certainly achieved something out of it.
Juraj Herz’s The Cremator (aka Spalovač mrtvol) is often considered as one of the best Czech films ever made. The film, banned in Czechoslovakia upon its release in 1969 for its disturbing themes and character. The horror inside the film terrified the people of that time. While it isn’t a conventional horror film, it is a horror film but coated with surrealism, dark comedy, twisted humor, and an anti-realistic approach. Perhaps that's the reason it is categorized as a landmark from the Czech New Wave.
Shot in black-and-white and set in Prague in the 1930s, The Cremator center around our lead character named Karel Kopfrkingl, played by Czech actor Rudolf Hrusinsky. Kopfrkingl is a calm collected man from outside but utterly complex inside. He is creepy but calm, extremely dominant, and delusional but manipulative. A successful businessman and proud paterfamilias, an unctuous mortician, abstinent yet authoritarian, who lords over his wife and children as well as the impressive crematory that he calls the “temple of death.” He meets an old army friend, Reinke, a German official who recruits Kopfrkingl into his ranks. He places the idea inside Kopfrkingl that he is German pure blood. The opening credit on the zoo, the tiger trapped inside cage foreshadow the fact that Kopfrkingl sees himself as predator traps inside the rules and limitation made by humans.
Kopfrkingl is more than anything a bourgeois monster. He considerers himself romantic and he believes his view on certain things is classier than others. The creative or may someone say delusional mind always suggest to him that, He doesn't belong to this normal place, His existence is somewhere more holy/upper place. His interest is also limited, perhaps he doesn't like anything more than cremation. It gives him calm and peaceful feelings. He is certain that death helps people from suffering.
He is also a self-pride father and husband. He believes that whatever he does is good for a family. His decision will make the family happier. And his knowledge is enough to help them create their reputation. While he is nowhere near being holy. He visits the brothel every 1st Tuesday of the month. He regularly gives his doctor blood samples to know if he catching any diseases. It shows the hypocrisy inside him.
One of the major themes from the film was Kopfrkingl's idea of Buddhism. He believes that cremation is his mission or main goal in life. His belief in reincarnation is that when you cremation the body, the soul stays alive and it reincarnates as something else may be pure blood. The film conveys how little misguide on religious view or self-delusional religious view can turn you into pure evil. Our protagonist Kopfrkingl was also caught into that trap and turned into a god complex figure. His family, human, life everything starting to lose place inside his heart. He started to believe that only he can cure humans and turn them into pureblood, he even devotes himself to a point where he doesn't shy away from harm anyone since in his view he is purifying the world. When he was asked to choose between blondes and brunette, He chooses brunette. I am not certain why that was his answer. But it has to do with the black-haired woman who has been following him throughout the film but his Buddhist version saves him. Perhaps it was the embodiment of death but the anti-climactic settings declare him as the winner of the story.
The Cremator is far from a film which makes you not enjoy the film but the context and visuals are more disturbing once you start to relive the scenes. Visually sometimes the Cremator could be more violent than it looks. The horror house sequence was one of the best examples. When Kopfrkingl was taking his family to a fairground, his family was happy to see rides but he suggested that it was too lame. Where they visit a Chamber of Horrors: dolls re-enact notorious murders for the amusement of the gaping audience, except that the dolls are visibly human actors with paint on their wax-covered faces. Only they’re not quite: when one human doll is being ritually stabbed to death, a close-up shows the groove in her robot-like back, as a dagger is plunged in mechanically. But the surrealist approach made it more appreciative. When it was clear that they are dolls not real human or dead bodies. One of the audience touched a wax doll but it turned out to be a real human. Juraj Herz completely left it to the audience that it was real or fiction.
It will be criminally injustice if someone praises the film without mentioning groundbreaking editing and background score. While the soundtrack of the film gave a spooky vibe. The editing of this film made the surrealism, absurdness, and weirdness clearer. While the characters keep talking and doing an action in a certain place, the camera slowly zooms to a particular thing than when the camera zoom out, we see the character in a new place while in the same position. One moment he was in Brothel telling his sex partner about employees in his cremation house in the next scene we see there is no prostitute but he is telling this to his wife. Does that mean he is telling this to both of them? I don't know about that but it certainly pointed that He is aware of this. He is like a buddha figure who exists outside of time and concept. He sees things non-linear way, He knows what is truth and what happens. He also believes he is the only truth.
The Cremator ends with the protagonist achieved his destiny, reaching his goal. Though the character, his goal, his actions call out The Cremator as a horror show, The treatment never confirmed that. It partially mixes with dark comedic satire but then again political and psychological messages indicate it otherwise. From starting to the ending film warn us about a big incident, something horrific and extremely chaotic is coming though it was never shown and we know Juraj Herz is a Holocaust Survivor. So, the is incident could be The Holocaust and that makes the film a Holocaust horrific dark Comedy, now that's a pretty good description for a great film.
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