The Cremator: “No One Will Suffer”

Running deeper than these sexual vices is Kopfrkingl’s fascination with death, although this, too, has an erotic, necrophiliac aspect. Herz visualizes this preoccupation to particularly clammy and fearsome effect in a macabre carnival sequence that comes a third of the way into the film. Kopfrkingl’s children’s faces light up at the innocent open-air amusements, but he is unimpressed and takes them inside a claustrophobic chamber of horrors. Here, gruesome deaths from history are acted out by mechanical dummies, though the “dummies” are obviously real actors in zombielike makeup. As well as revealing Kopfrkingl’s titillation at such grisly fare, this scene suggests that the world of the dead, the inanimate, is just as vivid, as “alive,” for him as that of the living, perhaps more so. In a similar vein, Kopfrkingl lovingly tends to the corpses in his crematorium, using his own comb to adjust their hair. Even the attentions he bestows on the living are at times more befitting of inanimate things. In one chilling touch of foreshadowing, he “affectionately” tells his wife that he would like to hang her from the family Christmas tree amid the beautiful decorations. It is as though life for him is merely an imperfect forerunner to the composed beauty of the corpse.

The film resembles an essay on the uncanny given vivid cinematic flesh, blurring distinctions between life and death, person and object, even human and animal, and abounding with tenuously held identities and doppelgängers (Kopfrkingl’s wife, Lakmé, and the prostitute Dagmar are both played by Vlasta Chramostová, while Kopfrkingl, in his delirium, finally acquires a double in the guise of a Tibetan monk). Bodies break into fragments, as in the collage-style credit sequence or the close-up montages highlighting details of faces. Minor characters, like the meek prospective agent Mr. Strauss or the timid new employee Mr. Dvořák (the dual composer names a deliberate, bizarre touch), seem hardly less passive than dolls. As critic Jonathan Romney has observed, even Kopfrkingl himself—with his neat appearance, smooth, round face, and plastered-down hair—resembles a ventriloquist’s doll, spouting secondhand wisdom and idées fixes. Such a confused, imperiled state of human identity again reflects the distortions of Kopfrkingl’s vision, though it also expresses a surrealist sensibility, close in spirit and technique to the contemporaneous films of Jan Švankmajer (who had studied puppetry alongside Herz and remained a friend and sporadic collaborator). Of course, given the film’s setting in the late thirties, the uncanny imagery has additional associations of totalitarian violence and dehumanization.

Kopfrkingl’s warped perspective ties together neatly with the theme of Nazism. The cremator is inexorably drawn into collaboration by his old army friend Reinke, compelled into joining the party, spying on and denouncing others, and finally disposing of his partly Jewish family members. His complicity is secured by the enticement of a Nazi-patronized brothel and by the prospect of professional advancement but also, crucially, by the Nazi project’s seeming compatibility with his own preoccupations and perceptions. His obsession with cleanliness and preventing infection dovetails with the no less pathological ideology of racial hygiene, and the murders he ultimately commits are grotesque images of genocidally pursued “purity”: he hangs his wife in his beloved, pristine white bathroom, and hoses away his son’s blood—presumably “impure”—after killing him in the crematorium’s white, tiled basement. Kopfrkingl’s embrace of systematic mass murder in the belief that it is actually a liberation of suffering souls is an evocation of totalitarian hubris and delusion. Herz’s target here is as much Stalinism, with its humanist rhetoric and purported emancipatory aims, as Nazism. The director noted that a leaflet seen several times (promoting Kopfrkingl’s crematorium, a Nazi-sanctioned sports club, and the Nazi Party itself) was modeled on a Soviet Communist recruitment poster.

Fuks’s novel concludes with Kopfrkingl being institutionalized and then, in a pointed coda set after the war, sitting aboard a sanitary train and heralding the rise of a “new order.” The film abandons this for an ending in which Kopfrkingl is appointed technical supervisor for the “gas furnaces of the future,” his crematorial expertise now put in the service of the Holocaust. Much more climactic and outrageous than the novel’s ending, this finale also grows more organically from the story, offering a twinned crescendo of personal and political mania in which the core motif of cremation fuses naturally with the backdrop of Nazi terror. By the final scenes, Kopfrkingl’s rhapsodic speechifying has turned openly demented, with Hrušínský masterfully modulating his performance between its habitual soft-spokenness and a harsh, fevered, near-Hitlerian pitch. Believing himself a universal savior, deliverer of all the world’s souls from anguish, not to mention the next Dalai Lama—“No one will suffer,” he declares; “I shall save them all”—Kopfrkingl now personifies extreme totalitarian pathology, his saintly self-image at absolute odds with his evil actions.

The Cremator moves toward its crescendo with an insidious smoothness. Crucial to the film’s deceptively even textures is its tactic of blending one scene into another via trick shots that appear to belong to one scene but actually mark the opening of the next. This device, a testament to the precision of cinematographer Stanislav Milota and editor Jaromír Janáček, offers a cinematic equivalent to the seamless flow of Fuks’s novel, in which clear scene-setting is often absent, and imitates the creeping stealth with which oppressive power often installs itself. Contrasting with this smoothness is the blatant shock of the fast montages and the alarming, globular fish-eye shots. Fish-eye lenses were virtually unknown in Czechoslovakia at the time, and Herz later recalled having one imported, at great expense, from France. He eventually came to feel that these shots were “simplistic” and excessive, though they are used discriminatingly, tied chiefly to Kopfrkingl’s ripest moments of madness, and consistent with the extreme tenor of Milota’s monochrome visuals, all high contrasts, skewed angles, and lurching, stalking, first-person camera moves. Finally, the film’s impact is inseparable from the ethereal chill of Zdeněk Liška’s score, whose female vocals float above the action with what film scholar Peter Hames has called a “ghostly” innocence, evocative of the beautiful, spectral woman who forever haunts the edges of Kopfrkingl’s vision. The Cremator is hardly a subtle film, but it is superbly coordinated and controlled in its excesses.

The Cremator premiered in March 1969 and was well-received domestically and internationally, winning two awards from the Czechoslovak Film and Television Union and three (including best film) at the Sitges International Film Festival in Spain. However, as Czechoslovakia’s political tide turned, the film joined the ranks of officially condemned titles: according to critic Jan Lukeš, a 1970 assessment from Barrandov even accused it of suggesting that the Nazi ovens were the invention of a “Czech collaborator.” The film was withdrawn from circulation in 1973, and not seen again domestically until 1990, when it received a second theatrical run.

With The Cremator, Herz emb­arked on a bold new path of surreal, absurdist grotesquerie from which political circumstances largely diverted him. Soon afterward, he was forced to shelve an adaptation of the French writer Alfred Jarry’s absurd erotic novel The Supermale (1902) and two more Fuks adaptations. Against the odds, he succeeded in smuggling The Cremator’s excesses into his later films, notably the poisoned melodrama Morgiana (1972), the macabre fairy tales Beauty and the Beast (1978) and The Ninth Heart (1979), and the bloody satire Ferat Vampire (1982). Those inclined to shun outdoor attractions for the chamber of horrors should certainly seek these works out. But The Cremator remains Herz’s prize exhibit, unsurpassed in its stylistic assurance, satirical insight, and twisted audacity.