The Cremator · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He combs their hair. That is the image that stays: Karel Kopfrkingl, proprietor of a Prague crematorium, bent over a body, drawing a small comb through hair that has no further use for it. He is patient about it. He is gentle about everything, which is the trouble.

The usual way to describe the plot is corruption — a mild man with a private theology of the furnace, pulled into Nazism as the 1930s close over Czechoslovakia. But look at the comb again. Whatever is happening to him was already underway before any German arrived.

Deleuze has a category for this, and it is one of the odder rooms in his system. Between the close-up (a feeling that has not yet become a deed) and the action film (situation, response, resolution), he wedges the impulse-image. Its subject is neither emotion nor achievement. It is appetite: a drive that has fastened onto an object and will not let go. Deleuze called the cinema of such drives naturalism, and gave it two levels. On top sits the derived milieu, a real place with rules and stationery and a dated address. Beneath it, and disclosed through it, is what he called the originary world — not a location but a condition, raw and undifferentiated, of which the polite place is only a skin. And in naturalism there is one direction of travel. He named it the line of slope: an entropy, everything running down toward exhaustion and death.

The fit is exact. A crematorium is a superb derived milieu: municipal, hygienic, a going concern with a proprietor and a schedule. Late-1930s Prague is another. Underneath both, one continuous world in which fire relieves suffering. Kopfrkingl's doctrine is not a belief he holds and could revise. It is the drive, talking. And the slope runs where slopes run: from releasing the dead to producing them.

This is why the lens is worth insisting on. As a corruption story the film is a moral fable, and the lesson is small: ideology ruins a decent man. Read as an impulse-image it is worse and truer, because nothing is added to him. Nazism does not corrupt Kopfrkingl. It employs him. It arrives carrying a vocabulary that matches the appetite he already had, plus a scale he had not dreamed of. The ideology is another derived milieu. It did not make the drive. It gave it an office.

Deleuze's naturalism runs on part-objects: a fragment of the world broken off and overcharged until it carries the whole appetite. Stroheim had gold; Buñuel had feet and shoes. Herz has a comb and the hair of the dead. Note that it is also the tenderest gesture in the film. Where Deleuze's naturalists found the drive in hunger and greed, Herz located his somewhere nobody had thought to look: in care. That is his invention, and it is why the film frightens people who do not frighten easily.

He built it out of glass. The line runs straight from Gregg Toland's wide-angle deep focus in Citizen Kane, which bulged faces and stretched rooms, and which Bazin loved for its honesty — it kept the world whole in the frame and let you choose where to look. James Wong Howe pushed the same optics to fish-eye in Seconds and made ordinary faces monstrous. Polanski used wide-angle swell in Repulsion to grow an apartment around a collapsing mind. Herz's cinematographer Stanislav Milota takes that extreme and makes it the resting state: not a shock effect but the way the world simply looks here. The theoretical joke lands with real force. The lens Bazin trusted to preserve the world's ambiguity, bent a few degrees further, curves the world around one man's head.

That curve is Herz's inheritance from Caligari, where a diseased mind was externalized as warped architecture. In Caligari you could see the distortion was painted on. Here it lives in the optics, which is to say it lives in the seeing. Deleuze's term for an image that shows us a perception being had — where we feel the camera perceiving a perceiver — is the dicisign. Peeping Tom got there by handing the killer a camera and implicating us in his apparatus. Herz removes the apparatus and keeps the implication. Nobody is filming. The curvature is just how the film sees, from the first frame, before Kopfrkingl has done anything at all. We are inside his optic before we are asked.

And the face never breaks. Deleuze separates the reflexive face, immobile, holding one quality, from the intensive face, all micro-tremors and thresholds about to be crossed. Screen monsters almost always work the intensive one: the tell, the crack, the moment the mask slips. Rudolf Hrušínský's never slips. It purrs. Serene contour start to finish, the drive discharging without ever registering there. Lang let the murderer of M plead his own interior case, and Kopfrkingl's rationalizing monologue descends directly from it, except that Lang's man is cornered and Herz's is hosting.

Deleuze, borrowing Brecht, calls a posture that lays bare a whole social relation a gest. The grooming of a corpse is this film's gest. Herz trained as a puppeteer alongside Švankmajer, and it shows in how he treats bodies as arrangeable material; the ritual displays the entire relation without a word of explanation. Tenderness as administration. Service as the shape murder takes once it has staff.

What did this do to narrative? It deleted the turning point. Corruption stories are built around the scene where a man decides, and Herz declines to stage one. In its place he puts the match cut, one scene dissolving into the next as if reality were losing its seams. The cut stops being a joint between separate places and becomes evidence that there were never separate places. The film advances by fusion rather than by consequence.

Notice too what it is not doing. Deleuze's post-war cinema is full of people who can only watch, whose sight outruns their power to act. Kopfrkingl always knows what to do. The circuit runs perfectly. The horror is an intact machine, working smoothly toward the furnace.

Finished as Soviet tanks ended the Prague Spring, shelved by the normalization regime, its director's career broken, the film's forward line was cut at the source. It seeded nothing for years because nobody could see it. Rediscovered decades later, it now sits among the essential horror films, arriving with a proposition the genre had mostly avoided: the monster does not rage, has better manners than you, and can explain himself beautifully.

Watch his hands next time, and watch the edges of the frame bend. The question the film refuses to close is whether he ever knows he is lying, and nothing in that face will tell you. Watch the comb instead. It has already said everything, in the gentlest voice the film has.