Now I can’t say for certain, having no experience in the matter, but I’m betting living in a Soviet satellite nation was pretty rough. Standing in line for bread, the systematic erasure of your own native culture, the persistent looming threat of secret police stealing you away in the night so you can work in a prison camp, you’ve heard it all before. Even if those kinds of things didn’t happen as often as we might think it did, and considering the vendetta America had against all things red it wouldn’t all that surprising, the fact that it did happen to any degree was still a miserable thing to have to live with. Living from day to day, listening to Piknik records on cassette cape, wondering if this was the time that your government was going to go Saturday morning cartoon villain on your ass, it couldn’t have been an easy life.
The film world did get a bunch of good movies out of it though. Hell, in some ways the art of filmmaking was a much easier experience than it was in the Free West, with the whole desperate search for investors, the subjugation of your creative vision to corporate interests, etc. Sure, if you wanted to make a movie in Poland you couldn’t include a scene where the protagonist farted on Kruschev’s borscht, but if you wanted to make a movie all you really had to do was send off a proposal to the local arts office. And they would just send you money to make a movie, just like that. Better yet, if you wanted to make a movie criticizing an oppressive and hateful government without getting censored by said oppressive and hateful government, all you had to do was set the movie during World War II, back when most of eastern Europe was under control of Hitler’s Germany at the time. I mean, who doesn’t hate Nazis?
#insertTrumphere
Case in point: The Cremator, a Czech film directed by Juraj Herz in 1969. Set in Czechoslovakia in the months leading up to the Nazi occupation of the country (and the onset of World War II), the film centers around a man named Karl Kopfrkingl, who works at the local crematorium in an unnamed (as far as I remember) Czech town. Karl is a simple man, if rather long-winded and opinionated about how great cremation is, with a loving family and the respect of his friends and employers. However, as the German army marches on Prague and the Nazi idea becomes more pervasive, Karl finds himself taken in by the empty pleasures and the philosophy of hatred and misguided superiority that the Nazi Party provides. Soon what began as a mere love for cremation becomes an obsession, and Karl craves more and more power to more easily shape the world according to his desires. And he’s damn sure something like his wife’s Jewish blood keep him from his dreams. Even if he has to get a little… serious.
Unfortunately, The Cremator never lets you forget that this guy is big on cremation. Karl is constantly going on about death and how much he loves cremation, and by ‘constantly’ I mean it’s about 90% of his dialogue and that he talks almost nonstop throughout the film. I get that it’s a good way to show how up his own ass he is about cremation, but it also kind of marks how the plot will work itself out before you ever get into it. I mean, it’s movie set at the beginning of World War II and your protagonist is a guy who slips into the Nazi kool aid like a duck through water and thinks that it would be totally great if people burned alive (he says almost exactly that in the film), and apparently his family are too stupid to realize their dad talking about burning corpses during dinner is fucking creepy. The way you see Karl’s character slowly degrade is rather well done, but there’s also little doubt where things are heading. Hell, you might as well give him a mask and have him fight Batman. He’s already got the name for it.
On a more positive note, I really like the way Herz sets up his shots in this film. The bath scene with Karl and his wife, the walk through the cemetery, the final scene, I really like how those scenes play out. Most of that has to do with Karl, I think, who keeps this neutral expression and hushed voice almost throughout the entire film, whether he’s listening to his housekeeper crushing carp heads or ratting out his friends and family to the brownshirts. That he manages to remain so disconnected with the vile things he does really helps to enhance his ever-expanding megalomania, and the fact that he really the only one of his family to really talk at all (which might be another example of his fixation on himself and his own importance) really helps the film nosedive into surreality by the end. I still think his constant talking distracts you from getting into the world proper, you end up feeling like you’re waiting for things to happen sometimes, but the end of the journey still manages to entertain.
If you were a fan of Malle’s and Fellini’s section in Spirits of the Dead, or if you’re a 50s/60s experimental film fan looking for something a little chilling, then The Cremator should be right up your alley. If you’re not something who tends to dig too deep when it comes to movies, tending to stick to modern styles of movie making, then you might find this a bit unpalatable. Either way, it just goes to show you that sometimes, the scariest movie monster of them all isn’t vampires or werewolves or pasty Japanese kids in wells. It’s man.
Specifically men who are Nazis.
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