Review: The Cremator (1969)

A short time before German occupation in Prague, Czechoslovakia, family man Karl Kopfrkingl is looking to attract new customers to his Crematorium, a business he manages. He sees his work as spiritual, believing that by burning bodies he can free the souls of the dead from suffering, and enable their reincarnation.

At a promotional event for his ‘Temple of Death’ as he labels it, Karl is reacquainted with old war compatriot, Walter. Walter is a successful bureaucrat and German sympathiser, who seems keen to bring Karl round to his way of thinking.

That’s all the essential information you need to know, and it’s packed tightly into the first few scenes, through an almost constant monologue, which is quite difficult to follow if you’re constantly glancing down towards the subtitles. More difficult still, because the visual style is extremely distinctive.

Director Juraj Herz bulldozes through as many cinematic conventions as possible, and comes back again to kick them in the teeth. The story is essentially about Mr. Kopfrkingl’s spiral into madness and fascist radicalisation. He’s extremely menacing and controlling, but impressionable and child-like. With chubby cheeks and paunch like a wrinkled cherub, he handles his food with his hands, he touches people’s faces like John Travolta in Face-Off and combs his perfectly slicked hair with delicacy. For a fan of the Dalai Lama he’s pretty material, with a tenderness for music, animals and a fixation on naked women. All his mannerisms grotesquely indulge in sensory pleasure and assert control.

He’s creepy, and brilliantly played by Rudolf Hrusínský. A threat to everyone around him, not because he’s a psychopath with a grand plan, but because he’s deluded, morally fragile and a man of respectability. At the beginning of the film I might describe him as someone who perhaps enjoys his job too much, but all it takes a friendly fascist and a few treats for him to adopt a completely new ‘higher moral code’. His selfishness and obsession with death sweep aside any principles he apparently had for his country his family, or human life.

Karl’s empathy may have died in the Great War in which he fought. To see so many people die might have corrupted his conception of the boundary between living and dead. So that he doesn’t recognise its significance.

If the film is only meant to be about Karl’s corruption then i think The Cremator has a similar minor issue as The Shining, where Jack Torrence comes across as a complete nutcase from the opening minute. Yes, Karl’s deep monotonous drawl is unmistakably evil. Karl’s family are also the most passive and oblivious bunch of people, it’s hard to suspend your disbelief sometimes, the direction and script give the whole film an alternative kind of logic, but they should have resisted more.

We see the whole film through his eyes or through the madness of his immediate surroundings. We slip through time, from scene to scene with the matter-of-fact-ness of a dream, we are never completely sure of where we are or who’s eyes we gaze through. Sounds like it could get exhausting or repetitive but through the expert and exact application multiple cinematic techniques, Juraj Herz definitely make film goo.d

(bokeh)

Herz exploits our assumptions from cinematic language about the geography of the scene, montage, the position of the camera, character’s eye-lines and dialogue to transport us through the film like a dream. He repeatedly uses zooms to reveal or obscure information. For example when a character is framed in tight close up with heavy bokeh, Director Juraj Herz knows that we’re not aware of what’s in the background specifically, so although dialogue continues in the scene as normal, Herz may have taken us to a dfferent time and location. By contrast, when Herz chooses to zoom out on a character, he will intentionally reveal information about the scene that adds new context.

In the middle of the film, there is a stunning sequence where we slip from a Jewish musical ceremony, to Karl’s dining room, to a brothel, in the space of about two minutes. To transport us, Herz allows a character to physically whisper into Karl’s ear from another scene, and then spins us clockwise without a visible cut, into Karl’s Dining room. We then cut to an over the shoulder of Walter, then a Close up reaction with bokeh which transitions to yet another location.

Once he’s in the brothel, Karl starts to give away information about who among his employees are against the German Reich, this seems a little out of character at this stage, until Herz zooms out to reveal that Karl has been receiving drinks all night long.

Sometimes Herz will also disguise a POV shot to further disrupt reality. Here we have a wide angle shot of Karl leaving the bathroom, followed by a mid of another Karl in a different costume. Following this, Karl has a conversation with his clone. (very weird)

Herz gets away with it because the film is edited rapidly, with an almost constant stream of dialogue from Karl and music to bridge us over the cuts. If I spoke Czech, it would be a breeze to sit through, but the subtitles can make it hard to follow at times.

The framing is also very distinctive and consistent if you categorise them. The wides can take on a fish-eye quality and are geometrically arranged, the close ups are zoomed right in and the face dominates the frame, uniformally taking up about 3/4 of the space. Herz isn’t afraid to let characters stare down the barrel and also act naturally within this frame. It can sometimes feel like documentary photography. The mids are often tilted up from just above the waist, so faces are slightly high. Mids feel the most fragile because they are most often used to transition to more psychedelic feeling shots and sequences.

Given that the film was made in the late 1960s, a generation on from the second world war in a Czechoslovakia behind the iron curtain, the film takes on a much darker subtext. With a high presence of Jewish actors and non-actors who would have lived through the ghettos and the camps, and who’s parents would have been about the same age at the same time when the film is set in the early 1930s. There is an obvious analogue between cremation and the death camps, Karl’s logic and escalation is similar to how Nazis justified their actions, seeing Jews as subhuman would infer their genocide as a mercy. Karl is running a business which must become scalable and more efficient. In a particularly powerful moment, he describes an ultra-efficient crematorium, capable of blasting 500 people, with souls that would “Gush” from its chimneys.

The Nazis used bureaucratic language to dehumanise the people they slaughtered, so the use of organic/natural/indulgent language to describe something mechanical is quite a clever reversal. Ironically Karl’s unabashed evil contrasts with the Nazi’s relatively innocent lust for power. But under close scrutiny, the Nazis will happily exploit fanatics like Karl.

I don’t know how much wholesome, fibrous historical drama there is in The Cremator, it’s really a genre film, a Psychological Horror with a lot to say about the past and the present it exists in. If you’re generally into Psychological Horror, (shout out to Derren Arenofsky’s ‘Pi’) then check it out, it’s remarkable, don’t let the subject matter put you off.

Images From: Shallow Grave (1994)

Danny Boyle’s first feature film knotty thriller with a quick wit, like Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but there’s more emphasis on dismemberment.

Set up to be selfish and un-empathetic, each one enables the other with their worst qualities.

I love films in which domestic spaces are deconstructed. David Stephens (Christopher Eccleston) drills holes through the ceiling so, through fear and desire, he can spy on his flatmates David and Juliet. Danny Boyle films from a birds eye perspective. 

Delivery is a bit overdone at times – especially in Act 2 where David and Juliet are enjoying their spoils.

Classic Boyle POV shots.

I really love how brutal violence is in this film, Boyle didn’t hold back, it feels physical. Although he averts our eyes away from actual gore, the film is less about cringe value, more about the psychological toll it takes on David,

 

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

\This is not the sort of film you read a review for. You watch it. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINU1ngwtQc

Great.

I haven’t come across a film this intelligent in a good while, maybe ever. It’s a family drama that breaths life in every aspect of it’s presentation. Mabel Longhetti, played by Gena Rowland is a woman, a mother of three with what looks like bipolar disorder, though that is never mentioned specifically. She’s complicated, spontaneous, erratic, emotional, but also warm and affectionate. Her husband Nick is a typical blue collar worker, sunburned and careworn. A miner with a large family and an even larger circle of friends. Italian American. He’s got a bit of an anger issue but he’s equally a strong figure who protects his family over anything else.

The story is about Mabel’s distress and descent into madness, and how her departure to a mental health facility effects the family and Nick. Nick was the one who made the call for Mabel to be sent away to a facility, but he’s conflicted by the experience and accidentally causes an injury to an old friend of his. Mabel comes back after 6 months and the family struggles to communicate in a meaningful way, once they are together again, all is well, but how long will it be until another outburst?

The film is edited to some extent like we are inside Mabel’s restless mind, often we disregard important information which might be included in a different film to jump forward in time or to another place, between movements or cutting off sentences, disrupting our geography of the scene. We cover a period of just over 6 months in the film, but Cassavetes writes very few scenes, he allows them to play out with actors as they might do naturally, but never without a goal.

Often scenes feel fittingly like acts in a play. A single setting can host a wide range of characters and tones with an organic flow helped by long camera takes and great performances. Even on my second watch at points I forgot I was watching a film with a crew and people to feed, this a situation as real as real. Feeling a lot like Scorcese film, Cassavetes directs his actors with an intentionally loose hand, encouraging the large ensemble to improvise with the situation.

Cassavetes was an early progenitor of this whole Cinema Verite thing we’re so used to, from all the way back in the mid 1950s he ran a method acting workshop which is around when he met his wife Gena Rowlands, who plays the main character in this film. By 1974, if we count ‘Shadows’ (1958) as his first project, he had been making films in this same spirit for 16 years, which is astounding to me. I say that because apart from the pudding bowl haircuts and the fact that everything’s brown, A Woman Under the Influence doesn’t feel like a film made in 1974. Its style is easily fresh and innovative by today’s standards, and I can say the same with even more confidence if you want to talk about Cassavetes follow-up humanist thriller, The ‘Killing of a Chinese Bookie’ (1976).

Cassavetes shoots for coverage but with a fantastically deft and subtle hand guides us towards subjectivity. When there’s a reason to do it, he actively seeks a shallow depth of field and handheld movements for very intimate close-ups. In wide shots the camera is unobtrusive, with a long lens, never directly crossing the actors’ eyelines. As the film ramps up the tension we graduate from low to high angles, accentuating the feeling of claustrophobia and lack of control. A lack of control Mabel feels for her own life, control of her family, her husband, of taking care of her kids.

She creates teeth-grindingly awkward situations for people around her. She is absolutely oblivious of social conventions and is terrible at hiding it. She struggles to mediate her emotions, retain her memory, and falls toward the drink easily. However, throughout the entire film, she never comes close to harming anybody apart from herself. Nick, by contrast, berates her and physically assaults her on multiple occasions, out of an anger he makes no effort to control, in fact he sees his actions as justified. He’s  the man of the house,  keeping his wife in check, maintaining order, hosting a party, and society accepts him for that.

In the street looking anxious and disheveled, Mabel paces across the path of people passing by to ask the time, they brush her off. Nick by contrast, is permitted by virtue of sex and status, to be belligerent, violent, indecisive and emotionally illiterate in public as well as private. This isn’t a film that nails down a single issue, there is nuance in every pore. But the prevailing comment of this film in my opinion, is the devastating effect toxic masculinity can have on a family scale.

For the characters in this movie, this issue couldn’t be further down their list of worries, or at least the things they would dare declare publicly. The motto of subjugation is ‘Onwards and Upwards’, ‘Forgive and Forget’, and all the focus is on Mabel’s failure to meet the code of conduct, or literally to perform, in her case. It is painful to watch because people’s best intentions of tolerance and acceptance buckle so easily under group pressure. And you empathise with them because you know that a fist-fight is more comfortable to sit through, than the dinner scene in A Woman Under the Influence. We like to be accepted, it’s a human thing, we’d do practically anything for it.

In fact I think delivery of this message is much more powerful precisely because it is told so naturally and so subtly. We are occupying after all, a socially active, upstanding Christian family household, there’s nothing wrong with that on the surface. But the surface is exactly where the most hideous transgressions hide. Mabel’s father refuses to support her, delegating that duty to his wife. Nick and Mabel’s mother defer to Nick on family matters and ignore Mabel’s wishes. Nick and Mabel’s friends all politely ignore Nick’s temper to preserve the all-important social normalcy. And Nick’s unforgivable act is forgotten without a second thought. This power structure preserved even by women, even Mabel, this is the most tragic form of self destruction.

Even more tragic because after all that, the film ends positively. It isn’t just about big social injustice, it’s also a romantic film about two people who deeply love each other. From the 3/4 mark the film gradually condenses itself down from the group to the family to the couple, from least to most important. Something pure can transmogrify into something ugly.

In an unjust society, nobody is the villain and everybody is the villain, unless they step out of line. But take a look at what happens if you do that.

Cassavetes you clever you.

Shout out to Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk for giving such amazing performances, the reason I haven’t written about them is because they do not feel like performances.

Criticisms:

• Lack of info about how Mabel processes the world, hard to fully sympathise with her.
• Slow pacing in the middle.
• The beginning is not as effective as the rest of the film.
• Kid actors man

Many thanks to Miguel for recommending this.

Review: The Endless (2017)

Two brothers who grew up in a cult decide to drive back, and discover there’s more to their beliefs than they previously assumed. The citizens are eccentric and hard to read but we have less to fear from any religion or rituals they practice, than a peculiar presence in the land itself.

Do you ever feel like you’re just living the same day over and over again?

Two film-makers setting out to make a two hour long, VFX heavy film with a large cast about God sounds like a recipe for disaster, and/or bankruptcy. But The Endless, a film which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 was a lucky feature picked up for distribution. And I’ll tell you why. It’s an extremely well structured, inventive and ambitious bit of writing made to a pretty outstanding standard considering their resources.

But that’s beside the point, the point is this film has a lot of great ideas. Ideas which I think mostly centre around ‘God’ as a breathing concept. In this case, an entity with no clear motive other than to control or consume. How do people deal with the knowledge of it’s existence? Its power, and their own lack of understanding about the deeper meaning of their lives despite that? Something The Endless points out is that it depends on your personality. Even though there’s something out there on a scale you could never imagine, you might still choose to reject it, or you might want to accept the world under it’s conditions, and spend your life trying to look back at the eyes that watch you.

In this world you can choose which God you worship, controlling and dependable, or unknown and unverifiable. I don’t know which one I’d pick.

It’s not that deep though. The Endless is remarkable because of how approachable it makes these lofty themes and ideas. People speak like human beings (or at least like the unfiltered voice of the writer). There are very few Art-House-y tropes you normally find in cosmic horror, like experimentation with unreliable images or states of mind. It’s all visually literate and competent. There’s always a straightforward conflict, obstacle, objective, a problem to be solved. It plays out part-Horror, part-Adventure, more like a multi-part Doctor Who story than a hidden gem of the Indie film scene. 

Our protagonists aren’t wrestling with a huge amount of inner turmoil either. I actually feel much more pull towards the supporting characters, their situations are more dire, and their relationships feel more human.

Which is a fundamental problem with this film, the protagonists feel like tourists.

The written dialogue and the performances give this whole production an amateur vibe which it really doesn’t deserve. The ideas alone are spellbinding, they really are inspirational, however, the way dialogue plays out can be forced, and under-calibered because most lines are delivered by non-full-time actors in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.

Eschewing just the one role they’re instead multi-instrumentalist Actor-Producer-Cinematographer octopi, unable to channel all of their energies into acting. They also lack a lot of discipline in the edit by including bits of improvised comedy which would honestly feel more comfortable in a YouTube skit or student work.

Scenes which should cut right into the heart of the film and hone in on the source of division between these two brothers, one egotistical the other naive, whistle by and feel totally hollow by the end. As two characters existing in a script, sure, they have an arc, but in the end they are going through the motions, not exploring or experimenting.

This is wider issue with the film. It doesn’t ever feel like the script has left the page. I started the film thinking to myself “Wow, what a fantastic idea.” and ended it in the same state.

That’s not to say I’m disappointed in it, or that in it’s current form it’s worthless. Far far from it, there are scenes which stand out, thought went into the costume and set design. A whole lot of work went into the visual effects, and I’m not just talking about the act of compositing and so on. Both of these film-makers self-financed and stuck it out from the start to the end with creativity and passion, that has to be respected.

If you enjoyed the visual style of Annihilation, love low budget Sci-fi like Primer or dabble in H.P Lovecraft this’ll be your sort of thing. Netflix innit.