An odious exegesis on the rise of fascism

The Cremator ― Juraj Herz (1968)

Slightly delayed this week, or last. This film was one of those unexpected finds when browsing the BFI Player on an ironically comfortable Sunday afternoon. The director was unknown to me. Fresh eyes! One (Juraj Herz) who has been largely left outside of the accounts of the Czech New Wave. He admits that he too never really felt part of it. To his advantage, I think.

Next week I may write about an actually very recent film. Either way, I hope you enjoy.

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Thus my task was destruction.

― Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel

— The rise of fascism. Banging drums, stiff salutes. The slow, slipping amalgamation of a feeling-toward-terror. Nascent Nazism—of how it corrupted and convinced. In film, Tinto Brass, Volker Schlöndorff, even Pasolini. Why is it that filmmakers so often prefer to explore the seeping pollution of pre-war sensibilities over the thick weeds of full-bore fascism? Perhaps it seems so much meatier to depict the corruption of lazy liberals, oblivious butchers, and ladder-climbing bureaucrats over leather-clad troopers. There is a question. How did this happen? The black-and-whitism of war is replaced by the slow wicking away of Weimar ambivalence. Not the militarised parade but the cymbal that precedes it. Herz’s The Cremator (1968) is no different. The year is indeterminate, but it is the 1930s. Czechoslovakia. Clouds are gathering. The storm is yet to come.

— Fascism is alluded to but largely it lurks. It is veiled and diaphanous. Rumours of trouble in the borderlands, the fear of “automated” armies. Posters without symbology (“join us”). The ear-aching poison of lackeys and ja-men. For Herz, fascism is a ghost. It infiltrates and disorients. There is a brothel whose access depends on membership of “the party”. Its call-girls are blonde (exclusively). “I’ll have to get used to it”, remarks Kopfrikingl to Lakmé - his wary, unspeaking wife.

— Banality, conformity. Of how florists become party members, not out of any specific confluence of motivations but from a desire not to lose face. Bludgeoning and murdering, grocers “go along”. In this reckoning, fascism seems to rise from a squalor of inertia. A transfiguration that happens without being seen. Mr. Kopfrikingl—a bulbous, wetly smiling bourgeois—skitters between wide-mouthed simplicity and ruthless, messianic cruelty. His blood is a question, as are his loyalties. A friend from the Great War (now a Nazi) plants seeds of doubt and sows promises of libidinal excess. Here, we’re firmly on Sontagian territory. Kopfrikingl is our protagonist.

— Extolling dignity and bourgeois respectability to such a tremulous degree that it feels odious and suffocating. Really he (Kopfrikingl) is a fool. He is compliant and self-important. At a picture framer’s, he buys any old decorative tat that will elevate his apartment (a portrait of the president of Nicaragua, a mannerist painting from the 18th c.). With a delicate flourish, he combs the hair of the dead (he’s a cremator); and then combs his own, and that of his wife. All are being propelled and prepared for the realm of the dead. Appearances matter. We are already looking at corpses, at victims and TK. This is why Juraj Herz speaks (in his Kinoeye interview) of his work not as horror per se, but as real-horror. A cinema of grotesque exaggerations rooted in an actually-real reality. Sort of.

— Here I divert. Kopfrikingl is not simply an embodiment of the anxiously class-conscious bourgeoisie. His banality is not particularly banal. No. Deluded, messianic; he is a death worshipper, a cadaverous cultist of cremation. After all, it is his belief—culled from an obsessive reading of Tibetan tourism books—that the transfiguration of bodies into ashes is the only way to circumvent the terror of our worldly suffering. It is his mission, his vision. But it’s also a justification, a gossamer sheen to “justify” his odious schemes. Or is it both? The Criterion Collection call it thus: “one of cinema’s most trenchant and disturbing portraits of the banality of evil”. This is to misread, I think, the ambivalence of Kopfrikingl’s messianic daydreams. Evil is already in his blood, waiting to leak out. There’s nothing “banal” about his boisterous, queasy opportunism. Yes, he is Nazism’s puppet. But Nazism is his own. He is not simply “going along” or “following orders”, but compering his own carnival of violence.

— Let’s speak of cameras and cuts. Expressionistic (there’s more than a little Pabst and Murnau to this). It’s like Herz is wearing the ominous cloak of the Weimar aesthetics that preceded Nazism proper. Tilting angles, distorting fish-eye lenses. Pompously Kubrickian, doused in chiaroscuro. Painting and portraiture provide persistently ominous backdrops. Blake’s Urizen. Bosch’s Garden. Further evidence of history’s long love-affair with evil and its machineries. With increasingly stuttering steps, he walks his victims (his son, his daughter) through an overgrown cemetery, his disgust roused only by a couple kissing on a tombstone. They (he remarks) are despoiling death’s sacred garden.

— Fascism as banality. This telling loses something in the repetition. It is framed as something that can be slid into despite having no obvious point of origin. The patients of the lunatic asylum who lead an embarrassment of doctors and janitors on a diaphanous dance macabre. The mechanics of collective hypnosis seem to emerge from nowhere exactly; a kind of extra-terrestrial nowhereness. Evil’s “banality”. The “normalisation” of cruelty. I rather feel that these accounts, recited and reiterated, are the mental residue of the asylum’s physician who quite forgot where he worked.

— The Cremator refuses to strip this 1930s fascism from its death cultism, its boiling blood lust. There is nothing “normal” or banal about those who articulate and execute its nightmares and visions. Victims and perpetrators. Nobody is gullible or misled. Kopfrkingl is a lunatic whose depravity is always-already decided, tethering his visions of murder to the yoked oxen cart of Nazism. Those who seek to escape (there are many), do so through the trajectory of oblivion and death. They hang themselves, run screaming from rooms. Others clamp their mouths shut, refusing to talk (wives, colleagues, spectators). Again, Herz doesn’t focus on the corporeal spectacle of Nazism (i.e., parades and uniforms), but on other varieties of public encounter. Boxing bouts, parties in brothels, fish lunches on the eve of Christmas. They all seem to revel in flesh, secretions and blood.

— Yes, and in this way Juraj Herz’s Nazis remain disquietingly disembodied. Swastikas, machines, military parades: these things—the collective corporeal togetherness of mass slaughter—exist elsewhere. A gathering blight at the edge of the frame. The closest we come are in the grounds of the temple of death. A car arrives, and from its doors spill a bevvy of suited, fedora-wearing men. They offer quickly raised arms, like a snake’s slipping tongue. Kopfrikingl—mesmerized—turns and watches them advance. Only then does he raise his arm, half-charmed by its peculiarity. The novelty of belonging.

— There are few protagonists as corporeally carnal as Mr. Karl Kopfrkingl. Despite his desperate ambition to transform others into dust, he is shackled by the awkward anthropology of his own living corpse. Of hair that must be neatened, oiled. He plucks food, glasses of drink and cigarettes from the mouths of guests and visitors. Obsessed with the ‘purity’ of his own blood, he has his neighbour (a doctor) draw and test it for syphilis and rot. Despite his desire to reject or deny the body (he neither drinks or smokes), he fleshly devours a brace of fried carp (clubbed to death in his bathtub) and satisfies himself at a local brothel. Trapped, then, between body and soul - rocking this way and that. Herz’s camera mimes this motion, slipping between gapingly wide angles and intimately uneasy close-ups. We have formally compositional arrangements (Kopfrikingl, centred, seated squarely beneath a Boschian canvas) alongside disorienting leaps and lunges (his wet face pressed, fish-eyed, against the slanted window of a car). Shot by Stanislav Milota, the framing and arrangement of space seems to slop and seep; between total coherence and its opposite, chaos.

— The “banality of evil” is a comfortingly liberal illusion. It presumes that odious intentions are the fruit of stupidity or fear more than they are of wilful transgression. It suggests that evil can be reasoned with, should the appropriate arguments be made—a little of column A, a little of column B. It fears the real idea that evil might be illogical; irreducible to cohesion. What Herz presents is a far more troubling and ambivalent interpretation. Kopfrkingl is neither dupe nor duper. He is sanctimoniously both. Early on, Herz deploys cooly analytical cuts to create associative rhythms between Kopfrkingl (the paterfamilias) and the animals of the zoo through which he and his family walk. Wrath and wilderness. His children (the shallow shot implies they themselves are caged) growl like beasts. We witness these rhythms again when Kopfrkingl and his family stroll through a ghastly wax museum of mutilations and murders. The mannequins are played by real human actors. He is pouty and bored, speaking instead of how much he prefers his own sacrosanct bathroom. Zoom close. We cut in a single, fluid movement, transporting Kopfrkingl through time and space; between murderous basement and hygienic, white-tiled domesticity. He’s next to his toilet and bath. This is where his own grotesquery will take place. To whit: nucleic domesticity is never far from bloodshed and brutality. Evil folds them like so many towels and handkerchiefs.

— Herz speaks of his efforts to impart a uniquely Czechoslovakian humour around this willing societal compliance (think The Good Soldier Svejk). The proximity of cages, teeth, and distorting lenses should be sufficient to intimate the variety of queasy discomfort that we’re about to experience. Writing in Senses of Cinema, Adam Schofield describes The Cremator’s more Aesopian intent: its barely concealed messages speaking quietly to the tragedies of the Prague Spring. The humour jostles alongside the horror. They feed on each other, it seems.

— Herz achieves this effect, this distorting drama, through the wilful derangement of form and function. Edited like an exquisite corpse, there are multiple moments where Kopfrkingl appears—through a dilation of the lens—to fold through time and space. Rearing before the camera in close-up, the camera’s reversed gape reveals that he is now in a different room altogether. From crematorium to store, from brothel to bathroom. These relativistic folds serve to weave together the spaces through which Kopfrkingl’s fascism flows. Every point of his world becomes tainted by those that are adjacent to it. The camera is like a surgeon’s needle, plucking and sewing—with a poisoned tip—the spaces through which Kopfrkingl greases and disturbs. This is claustrophobia, a collapsing star. Everything is significant, every surface despoiled.

— Wide angled, the death temple is almost always shot with an engulfing hugeness. Faces and bodies find themselves compressed and tightened. The lens shuttles back and forth between distance and proximity. We witness every drop of sweat, every crinkle at the corner of a mouth. Bodies are blasted toward us, and then dragged violently away. Mr. Dv, a newcomer to the crematorium, shields his weary face from the belching flames of the building’s incinerators. We flinch with him.

— Doubling. He sees himself dressed in monk-like robes. He beseeches himself to ascend the throne of Lhasa, the palatial seat of the Dalai Lama. With time, his bulbous, sweating face becomes more powdered and ghastly. He pats the sweat from his forehead. He crawls beneath a brothel’s table to witness a Nazi activist get sweatily blown by a Teutonic escort. His body lurches from high to low, occupying both the carnally queasy and the loftily serene. It does not take much for Kopfrkingl to convince himself that he must fully penetrate this odiously ambivalent order. Quips and remarks from Nazi activists get beneath his skin. His wife and children are a “problem” (her mother is Jewish). He prepares her (unknowingly) for death, a heart-breaking hanging in his “beautiful” bathroom. Earlier, he describes this as his favourite room in the world. This makes sense. After all, the bathroom is a place where dirt is secreted and destroyed; an ambivalent folding together of soap and shit. This is Kopfrkingl’s kingdom, and the toilet is his throne.

— In the service of what, exactly? Herz achieves—with eeriness and formal gymnastics—one of film’s better considerations of fascism and what propelled it. Not reducible to banality. Not explicable merely through sociological inquiry and lenses. Kopfrkingl—the Nazi “everyman”—becomes something like a toothy smile floating above a pair of trousers, simultaneously messianic and measly. It’s a discomforting analysis of fascism and its lackeys because it boils away the stranglehold of “logic” or—its reverse—hypnosis. Kopfrkingl is a social climber, but he is also a high priest of perversity, a figure fully complicit (and enthusiastic) in his ascent toward the coming machineries of slaughter.

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