Juraj Herz

Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy)

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Pavel cups Štěpa's breast as he teaches her to shoot

Czech master film-maker Juraj Herz’s 1971 follow-up to The Cremator is a complete change of gears, pace, look, intent, the whole kit and caboodle, as if Herz wanted to say to the Communist authorities – look, I can do it straight too. Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy) is in colour, for a start, whereas The Cremator was a more serious black and white, and there’s nothing fancy in the lens choices, no unsettling edits, no barbed message hiding in the undergrowth. The story it tells is pretty straightforward too, about a woman desperate to be married who plumps for entirely the wrong man and then repents at leisure. It’s clearly informed by John Schlesinger’s … Read more

The Cremator aka Spalovač mrtvol

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Kopfrkingl seen on a wide angle lens from above

Spooky at first, then chilling and eventually utterly grim, Juraj Herz’s remarkable The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol in Czech) entirely lives up to its billing as the pre-eminent film of the Czech New Wave. Here’s where advocates for Closely Observed Trains, The Firemen’s Ball, Daisies and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders pitch in. And on another day one of those might have topped this fictitious list. But I watched The Cremator last night and I can report that after all these decades it remains powerful and seems timeless. The theme is the corruptibility of the human soul and the subject is a man who is running a crematorium in Czechoslovakia as the Nazis … Read more