Classics: The Cremator
Sunday 08 Sep 2024Cinema Forum Groningen
Nieuwe Markt 1, 9712KN GroningenKafkaesque and blackly comic vision of the horrors of totalitarian ideologies. Considered by many to be one of the best Czechoslovak films of all time.
Juraj Herz, master of the Czechoslovak new wave of the 1960s, made a terrifying, blackly comic film with The Cremator about an employee at a crematorium in 1930s Prague who believes that death offers the only real relief from human suffering. When he is recruited by the Nazis, he is finally able to make his dream come true: to be able to burn thousands of his countrymen at once.
Mixing pitch-black gallows humor with a disorienting expressionist style - nauseating point-of-view shots, distorting lenses, shockingly fast cuts - the controversial, long-banned masterpiece The Cremator is one of the most perceptive and disturbing film portraits of the banality of evil.
With Introduction
With introduction by filmjournalist Kevin Toma (De Volkskrant)