“Shall I hang you, my dear?”
The corpse incinerator is a work well known among older Czech audiences and quoted countless times. Despite the high ratings on film portals such as ČSFD (89% and the 8th best domestic film ever) and foreign IMDb (8/10 and one of the best rated horror films ever), I can’t get rid of the feeling of being half-forgotten like, for example, Marketa Lazarová, whose existence few know about the Czech viewer remembers and even fewer of them have actually seen it. At the same time, in both cases, these are seminal works so timeless in their concept and tone that literally the whole world can envy them.
One of the main reasons, without which The Corpse Incinerator would certainly not be a great film, is the novella by author Ladislav Fuks, which is still recommended as compulsory reading for high school graduates. However, not everyone finds the morbid topic friendly, and I’ll admit right away that I haven’t read the book yet either, and hopefully I’ll fix that soon.
This time, fortunately, it is not as much of a handicap as with other films that deviate from the original in many ways, and I can appreciate The Incinerators even as an independent film work. Fuks himself actively participated in the script together with the director Juraj Herz, and therefore the result differs from the novel only in minor details, without losing the idea and the heavy atmosphere of the environment separating life from death.
“Death frees man from pain and suffering.”
While the book format generally relies on the reader’s imagination, supporting it with extensive descriptions of characters, inner thoughts and environments, film is a visual medium that is primarily meant to tell through images. It sounds obvious, but many authors often forget this basic rule, and their films end up suffering from sweeping exposition, overabundance of characters, plot twists, and little visual play.
Films also rarely manage to successfully and engagingly transfer the hero’s inner thoughts to the screen, and often, out of necessity for virtue, resort to the ordinary voiceover of narrators describing what we often see ourselves on the screen or should properly see. I like to use Svěrák’s legendary message for this: “You wipers and washers, you don’t have to report it, I can see it.” And although we all hear it, we still learn that “the horn blows”.
The film The Incinerator succeeds in visually depicting the life of crematorium employee Karel Kopfrkingl, who is so obsessed with his profession that it evokes strong, unrelenting, manic images of turning a person into dust and separating the human soul from the impure body. His positive qualities are principles, professionalism and virtue, thanks to which we can easily sympathize with his character. This is a typical anti-hero.
At the same time, Kopfrkingl loves his wife and two children above all else, but he never puts them above his mission. Instead of peaceful conversations, the family has to constantly listen to extensive explanations about the afterlife, purification and reincarnation, which Kopfrkingl draws from Buddhism, and selfishly does not give them space to express themselves. After all, about 60% of all the text comes from the mouth of the famous Rudolf Hrušínský senior, who from now on I will look at differently in all other films.
“Will you wear a casket or a wreath?”
For example, talking about cremation in front of future members of the NSDAP is not as morbid as at a family Christmas dinner. In short, Mr. Koprfkingl is unable or unwilling to separate his professional life from his private life, which drives him to brutal actions and opinions, in which the story beautifully progresses. With Jaromír Janáček’s skillful and unobtrusive editing, which has no parallels in Czechoslovak filmography, and Stanislav Milota’s camera tricks, these scenes intertwine for us to confuse the viewer before he figures out where he is and who he is with.
However, the right filmmaker also knows that in order for a scene to evoke the right feelings, it is essential to film it thoroughly. That is why the use of a hand-held 16 millimeter Arriflex camera with a special wide-angle lens called a fisheye, combining a claustrophobically distorted field of view with a close-up of Mr. Kopfrkingle, as for example in the rooms of the Strašnické crematorium, is performed by the newcomer, played by Jiří Menzel.
“The only thing certain in life is death.”
Mr. Kopfrkingl is a full-fledged and memorable character, whose story keeps us interested from the beginning to even, regardless of what he leads, with his actions gradating functionally. Where we root for genuine heroes wading through one quagmire after another to achieve the desired catharsis and liberation, we wish anti-heroes the exact opposite and be punished for their actions.
However, unlike fairy tales and romantic stories with a premise of a happy ending, anti-heroes have wider options for ending their story. As we know from the real world, sometimes evil wins and there is nothing we can do about it. Contrary to the book model, Mr. Kopfrkingl goes towards his life’s mission – to help construct one of the biggest crimes against humanity – and reach the top. The corpse incinerator ends very bitterly in both cases, but the film adaptation raises the bitterness to a higher level.
Personally, I always appreciate a similar level of controversy in films, because if someone is to tell us the truth about who we are and what we are capable of, then it is always better if they are artists in their works, and not frustrated individuals in real deeds. And every time we can breathe a sigh of relief that it was only a movie/book.
Not only in the case of The Corpse Incinerator, among other things, there is an aftertaste in the form of the long-term closure of the film in the infamous film vault. Without wanting to defend the censors of the time, Spalovač is really a work of a controversial nature, for which society may not have been sufficiently prepared at the time. But if someone perceives only the anti-hero’s sympathy with a forbidden ideology and does not read between the lines, then he lowers himself to the level of characters from the story, with whom the viewer is not supposed to sympathize.
“Bad people are bad only because nobody ever gave them a little love.”
Unfortunately, political correctness is again (in)conspicuously creeping into contemporary cinematography and robbing artists of the opportunity to experiment. However, historically they are always those artists who were not afraid to go against the flow, constructively criticize and pass on wisdom wrapped in engaging stories for future generations.
Didn’t the books War and Peace, Peace on the Western Front, The Stories of Soldier Švejk go against the trend of the time? Thanks to this and the precise processing, they are almost immortal compared to the “collaborative mode” works, which today cannot be read/watched or cannot be laughed at.
Films, books and other art are meant to either purely entertain the viewer and allow them to escape from the woes of the current world, or convey an idea and allow them to criticize us all. However, rarely can these factors be combined together. And if so, the exception proves the rule.
Recently, I lamented the fact that the Czech audience cannot appreciate quality films, so in recent years we tend to go for easily digestible films rather than true art. Personal taste and genre preferences are up to each of us, and I don’t find anything particularly wrong with the reasons for wanting to have fun, other than watching criticism of contemporary life.
But what is too much is too much. And I think I won’t be the only one who would appreciate some socially prickly spectacle like The Incinerator far more often than once a Hungarian year, from which I firmly believe that my favorite director Quentin Tarantino would be as happy as I am. At least we can console ourselves that in our archives, for us demanding viewers, there is still something to choose from.
2023-11-07 16:18:25
#corpse #incinerator #progressive #Czechoslovak #film #time #Seznam #Médium
