#6: The Strange Case of Angelica

O Estranho Caso de Angélica

Dir.: Manoel de Oliveira

Portugal 2010

97mins

IMDb page

RottenTomatoes page

I sure am making things difficult for myself. When I started Unsequence Cinema sometime last year, the gist of my first post was that this might be a place where I could simply recommend movies to people. And here I am merely six entries in, they’re getting longer and longer and in every one of them there are caveats, conditions, acknowledgements of weakness or obscurity. I’ve been unable to do what I wanted here; that is, to be so inspired by my enjoyment of a film that I could recommend it unreservedly, saying “Just watch it, it’s fantastic.” Instead, the list is varied but small – Bertolucci, Raoul Walsh, Jean Rollin, Juraj Herz and Bergman – and my acclaim for the films has always been a little guarded.

Maybe there’s no such thing as having totally unreserved support for a piece of art. I know this notion is the antithesis to any kind of proper criticism, but there’s simply no way around the fact that every suggestion one makes to another person should be appended with the phrase “if you like that sort of thing”, just as a disclaimer, in the same way that “in my opinion” might one day be mandatory at the beginning of every sentence that offers a qualitative judgement. I’d prefer that we all just take this as an unspoken precondition of everything that escapes our lips, and then perhaps the time saved by omitting to pre-emptively apologise for believing our own opinions could be used more productively. We might win back a third of our waking lives this way. Just think of it.

What am I getting at? Oh yes, The Strange Case of Angelica. This movie has problems. It’s certainly not helping me to get back on track with my stated aim of using Unsequence Cinema to recommend, because it’s the one I have the most reservations about thus far. I’ll get to why, of course, but I think I ought to first explain why I considered it for an entry. 

This film is here primarily because it was written and directed by a 102-year-old man. As far as I’m aware, that alone makes it unique. The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira has been making movies now for more than eighty years, on and off, which is of course a totally freakish achievement. Personally, I respect someone with a long career in the creative arts, and in cinema there’s no one I know of whose career has been longer. One of the most pervasive clichés within any kind of social cultural awareness over the last couple of hundred years is that the best artists peak early and extinguish themselves in a sad collision of misfortune, personal misadventure and critical misunderstanding. All the misses. Everybody’s heard it: if you’re a genius, you’ll know it yourself by 22, you’ll be dead at 27, and the rest of the world might catch up in time for some distant relative you’ve never met to live comfortably off your royalties. This model is cynical, and it fosters such utterly wrong-headed romantic notions that it can only be poisonous to the will. And so when I discover someone with a long and successful creative career, perhaps someone who is peaking in their seventies or eighties, it genuinely lifts my spirits. The very idea, then, that a centenarian is capable of helming a movie (although admittedly this is a low-key drama, not Apocalypse Now) will attract me by its novelty; its mere existence is a massive “fuck you” to those who would perpetuate the personality cult of the Art Martyr. And beyond even that, Oliveira’s later movies offer us the chance to ponder the changes that old age brings to the imagination – that quality so often held to be the purest reserve of children. When an old man sits down to create an original story, what have become the core concerns of his work? What has he abandoned or resolved along the way? In developments that may well be the result of declining physical dexterity as well as a natural distillation of themes and ideas, many older artists have simplified their output. For some reason, I’m thinking here of the uncluttered canvases of Georgia O’Keeffe from the mid-1960s onward, or the raw and lumbering final recordings of the delta blues guitarist Son House over the turn of the 1970s. Something about old age has forced them to reduce their art down to its skeletal form. In the cases of both O’Keeffe and House, the cause was indeed physical degeneration. I’m not saying this is the only way to go, and incidentally Oliveira is remarkably healthy, but I am saying that perhaps being grand is a young man’s gesture.

What I’m driving at here is that The Strange Case of Angelica is most assuredly not a grand gesture, and it really does feel like a film made by a very old man. It is quiet, considered, quaintly attractive to the eye – all made possible by the over-all simplicity of the film. But in this case both the positive and negative connotations of the word ‘simple’ are equally applicable. What The Strange Case of Angelica gains by its modestly charming aesthetic choices and tranquil pace, it almost loses by its unconvincing script and shallow gestures towards symbolism that turn out to be very woolly indeed. And because of how much I wanted to love a movie made by a 102-year-old man, it’s damn near heartbreaking that it turns out to be a handsome but ultimately meaningless experience.

But forget Oliveira’s age and experience for a minute. The opening twenty minutes is very strong indeed, and so even within the film’s own context it’s disappointing that Angelica doesn’t go on as well as it starts. The main character is Isaac, a solitary photographer boarding with a superstitious old landlady somewhere in Portugal. He is called upon late one night in an emergency: the daughter of a wealthy family has died and they want her photographed, one last time, looking beautiful and at peace. He arrives and the house is full of mourners, and a nun who is not well inclined towards the young Jewish man in their midst, but needs must – the dead Angelica is waiting on a chaise longue, and she most certainly lives up to her name. When Isaac looks through the viewfinder, the woman opens her eyes. Naturally he is spooked, and finishes the job quickly before rushing out of the house.

This is the beginning of Isaac’s doomed obsession with the dead young woman. It’s also the middle of it, and very nearly the end too. I’m being facetious, but really there’s no development of this idea beyond the initially striking opening reel. When she opens her eyes for the first time, the audience truly feels it. Later, in a turn that will challenge the commitment of some viewers despite the modest running time, she arrives on Isaac’s balcony as a ghostly apparition and the two of them float dreamily (and horizontally) through the night. The Strange Case of Angelica, then, verges on a sort of weird Gothic romance, and this tone is amply served by the slow and slightly overwrought performances, and beautifully framed interior scenes.

So far there’s nothing stopping the film from being a nicely low-key success, but the number one problem is the script. It is just not a good script at all. At one point Isaac goes out with his camera to photograph some agricultural workers manually tilling the fields. He then pegs these developing prints – angry-looking rustic men with hoes – alongside the prints of the dead Angelica, who occasionally comes to life again within the frames. When asked why he has been photographing such an outmoded practice as manual agriculture work, he says something like “I prefer the old ways to the new”. I may be paraphrasing there, but crucially I’m not simplifying – the film really does offer nothing more than that statement. I’m crying out for this to be developed a little, or explained: if these images stand for Isaac’s growing isolation and distaste for the modern world, what’s the significance of their juxtaposition with the Angelica photographs? Am I not trying hard enough here? There’s no real link, just the pairing up of two things it’s possible for a wistful and detached arthouse film protagonist to be wistful and detached about. And later, there’s a truly bizarre lunch conversation about engineering, matter and anti-matter that comes out of absolutely nowhere and offers no further insight into Isaac’s predicament, either as a direct metaphor or as a way of establishing an ontological or epistemological world beyond/behind the modest little story at hand. Perhaps that’s not what the conversation is there for, but I’ve not come into the film expecting these questions to be addressed, I’m only responding to what’s there, what’s being established by the film itself. And unfortunately, the audience is asked only to accept that Angelica reveals herself to Isaac in the pictures and in ghostly form, and that he falls in love with her to the brink of a kind of mad despondency. How the other elements of the film relate to its central plot frankly escapes me. Reference points seem barely sketched in. It’s rare for me to say this of an arthouse film, but I think it needs to be longer. An extremely well-shot if incongruous fifteen minute discussion about anti-matter might make a beguiling centrepiece in a movie willing to put more flesh on its bones, but in The Strange Case of Angelica it takes up one sixth of the running time, and establishes nothing except that the landlady is a simple woman who doesn’t understand science, and Isaac is a “strange man”.

This is the scene that proved to be most divisive for the users of the now-ubiquitous IMDb; there are arguments on the message boards about it. The usual stuff, you know: one side with a predilection to bait arthouse fans (I have no idea how they even get to see movies like this if that’s how they feel), and the other side who are completely sold on the auteur credentials of the filmmaker or are unwilling to challenge something they’ve become emotionally attached to. I more often fall into the latter camp (and that’s why I banished myself from the IMDb boards a long time ago), but in this instance I get both sides. The fact is, The Strange Case of Angelica is a lovely film in many ways – it’s made with the assurance of someone who has long known how to stage, light and edit his films to get the precise tone and pace he wants – but as a result it’s the photography that will stay in your mind after you see it. The ideas won’t, because there are few. In these screenshots, I think it’s possible to detect the tone of the performances and the patience of each scene, and that in itself is the marker of some cinematic success.

I don’t want to leave Manoel de Oliveira on a bad note because it’s not a bad film, it’s just a strangely empty one, so I fully intend to watch another of his films very soon, a very old one, Aniki-Bóbó. This is his first feature length fiction, released in 1942, and if my memory serves me it was featured in Mark Cousins’ stunning The Story of Film last year. That was the real reason I found myself watching Angelica: of course I wanted to see the work of a centenarian filmmaker, but I also wanted the opportunity to see something he made in his early thirties, which in cinematic terms is practically an ice age ago. I may report back.

#5: Hour of the Wolf

Vargtimmen

Dir.: Ingmar Bergman

Sweden 1968

88mins

IMDb page

RottenTomatoes page 

Oh dear. I appear to have neglected this little blog-hole for a few months. It wasn’t an accident, I didn’t forget the password or anything; it was studious avoidance. I had a lot of second-year university stuff going on and I barely made it through with acceptable marks, so suffice to say the last thing I wanted to do on my off-time was sit down to a clicking-and-wheezingly overheated laptop for another round of wretched analysis, even if it’s of the extra-curricular sort and therefore doesn’t oblige me to shoehorn in words like ‘discourse’ and ‘hybridise’ just to prove to some utterly self-interested academic that we’re definitely reading from the same hymn sheet, yeah? Because, of course, we’re not. I spent weeks indulging forlorn fantasies of a time in the not-too-distant Summer when I could sit down and write about something purely for the enjoyment of it, and I suppose that time is now. 

I’ve seen quite a few movies since my last post back in February, but not nearly enough. They’ve been stockpiling away on my external hard drive this whole time. By God, there’s almost 350 of them: whole chunks of the filmographies of Renoir, Hitchcock, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Wilder, Buñuel, Cassavetes, Tarkovsky, Almodóvar; big daunting epics like Marketa Lazarová and Profound Desires of the Gods; even the impassible monoliths of Peter Watkins’ La Commune (Paris, 1871), Tarr’s Sátántangó, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 – Noli Me Tangere and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (just who exactly am I kidding with those last two?). A lot of absurdly demanding viewing there, and I’m sure I’ll die before I see them all – I’m predicting an early demise, you see. Aside from back-to-back viewings of a few Jia Zhangke movies for a symposium at my University (of Sussex), I thought I’d take it easy with some shorter running times. No shame in that, is there? After all, the quarrelsome game-changing film critic Pauline Kael’s apparent favourite movie is only 37 minutes long. (Watch it, by the way – it’s fucking beautiful.) And luckily, most of the films of Swedish master Ingmar Bergman clock in around the 90 minute mark. So a Bergman it is today then. 

Hour of the Wolf is, apparently, his only out-and-out ‘horror’ film, but a quick glance at the IMDb page reveals that Bergman’s late-1960s period also included the psychological merger/breakdown drama Persona and a made-for-TV movie involving dangerous ritual sexuality called The Rite, so it’s clear that he was at least comfortable with the kind of themes that, in another director’s hands, might lead quite naturally to a classic horror genre piece. I’ve seen neither Persona nor The Rite, so I can’t be of much help there – in fact I might as well come clean now and say that Hour of the Wolf is only the third Bergman movie I’ve watched. The others are the acknowledged classics Wild Strawberries and Through a Glass Darkly; both are visually stunning, emotionally fraught, eyebrow-raising and jaw-dropping in their own mournful and tragic and slightly tense way. Hour of the Wolf was made over a decade after the director’s ‘golden year’ (1957, when both Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal were released) and in that time Bergman had clearly been nudging at the boundaries of psychological cinematic provocation: the truly surprising incestuous content of 1961’s Through a Glass Darkly is no less envelope-pushing than the pure horror of Psycho or even Robert Mitchum’s sleazy paedophilic turn in Cape Fear. While there is no one specific theme in Wolf that might count as ‘adult’ content to quite the same level, the film is undoubtedly revelling in the freedoms afforded to it by that decade’s broken taboos. The result is twofold – firstly, it works on its own as a piece of unsettling hallucinatory psychological horror, and secondly, it reveals how close Bergman had actually been to that style over the preceding decade. It might well be thought of as ‘the only Bergman horror movie’, but it’s hardly much of a diversion. To my eyes, it seems like he only needed to darken the tone and the rest of his style almost realigns itself to match – the existential ruminations and remote windswept settings remain, and Sven Nykvist’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography picks out the pain and dread of the protagonists in close up as well as it does the lines of mania and dark purpose in the demonic Baron von Merkens and his constant houseguests. There is also the cast of regular Bergman players – Max von Sydow, Liv Ullman, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin – that make the film feel properly canonical, as well as the very familiar theme of an artist going through a personal crisis.

Max von Sydow plays the artist Johan in perfect sympathy with Bergman’s sense of pace and his by-then established commitment to using geographic isolation to reflect and influence mental isolation. Johan has retreated with his pregnant wife Alma (Liv Ullman) to a cottage on a rocky, wind-buffeted island, ostensibly for artistic reasons – he’s going through a period of stifled creativity, and the couple appear to be relying on sales of his paintings as their only source of income. Their home life is no romantic idyll, however, as the increasingly dour and disturbed Johan complains of being pestered by the island’s other inhabitants, and the viewer quickly suspects that these meetings might be outright delusions. Johan spends the days wandering around the island, attempting to paint but always at the mercy of these strange meetings – fending off the enthusiastic therapist Mr Heerbrand, or succumbing to the temptation of his ex-lover Veronica (Ingrid Thulin), both of whom approach him unbidden upon the craggy ridges and slopes. How ‘real’ these people are is not Bergman’s concern in Hour of the Wolf: they’re ‘real’ if they have an effect, and their capacity for tormenting him is very real. This is where Wolf diverges most crucially from classic horror tropes, both before the film was made and after (as I’m not attempting to set it in a chronology). Horror films will commonly establish their own principles early on as to where the fear that is to be engendered has its source – for instance, is it a fear of the supernatural, as in ghost stories? Or a fear of the mythical, as in monster stories? The ‘logic’ of ghosts in genre stories works differently from the ‘logic’ of monsters, but there is usually some adherence to the pattern of one character ‘witnessing’ something and attempting to persuade others around them that there’s definitely a threat. Cue scepticism, liberal amounts of fate-tempting, numerous reveals of the too-late or just-in-time varieties, and there’s your horror film. But what Bergman’s movie has, and in this he shares the curious achievements of plenty of off-the-wall exploitation/horror/giallo features of the 1960s onward, is a disregard for the ‘burden of proof’ dynamic that horror’s most famous and most conservative movies accept as a matter of course. One of the most creatively liberating results of the advent of ‘psychological’ horror is that it can incorporate traditional elements of supernatural, mythical and of course even ‘realistic’ horror (i.e. the threat is a murderer and he’s a real human being) and deploy it almost as iconography, as symbol, and so it has all the cultural import of reliably scary figures and tropes but doesn’t have to follow their exact rules. Dracula can come out in daylight, Polanski can have depraved hands clawing through the walls in Repulsion, Darren Aronofsky can plunge a perfectly serviceable feelgood ballet-dancing success story deep into mindfuck territory and totally get away with it. Likewise, there is no questioning Johan about these encounters that are very probably in his head; instead Alma is just doleful and wounded, knowing that no matter how much she loves her husband he is undoubtedly very troubled indeed. He is absent, withdrawn, and they both seem so doomed that the film doesn’t bother setting up the possibility of an escape or solution. Everything that’s spoken by Alma or Johan could potentially be the key to unravelling the mystery of just exactly what happens in Hour of the Wolf, or perhaps nothing could. It’s not a spoiler to mention that one exchange between the couple, concerning Alma’s idea of a soulmate-ish psychological empathy between two people who love each other, recurs at the film’s close to suggest that the ‘realness’ of the apparitions is a moot point. This is, crucially, because Alma begins to see them too. 

Hour of the Wolf is really about Alma and not Johan. She introduces the story direct to camera, and performs a sort of coda similarly, in retrospect. The audience’s struggle to understand Johan is her struggle, and her devotion to him is sad while somehow inevitable. It’s clear she has lost him at some point in the story that is about to unfold, and so from the very beginning the tone is tragic. Both Ullman’s in-character introduction and the sound recording of Bergman directing the construction of his own set that runs during the opening credits are conscious metafictional gestures, but strangely they don’t really amount to much. A quick search on that bastion of unassailable truth we all know as Wikipedia reveals that Bergman added these elements to counterbalance his own self-consciousness at the personal content of the film, as a way of flagging up the story as a construction, an invention. But he really needn’t have – as I mentioned before, the artist-in-crisis theme is well-explored in many of his films, and without the director’s somewhat nervous reaction to whatever he felt he was exposing too nakedly in Hour of the Wolf we would surely still be guessing now – by virtue of the ultimately unknowable, that perpetual motion device sustaining all great Art Arguments – which movie was truly Bergman’s ‘most personal’. But that’s not to say this one is; it’s just one of a few whose ‘constructed’ nature he has decided to flag most prominently. Who knows why he balked? Perhaps it’s been set down somewhere in print that I’ve yet to find. In fact, as I can only guess at the sheer size of the world’s Bergman scholarship, I’d say it must be. 

I’ll go on as if it’s still a mystery. Perhaps the exact content of Johan’s fears – the Bird Man; the old lady who, when she removes her hat, also removes the rest of her face – match Bergman’s down to the last detail. The chain of grotesque, macabre transformations and impossibilities that occur as Johan returns to the Baron’s house to reunite with Veronica is the stuff straight out of vivid nightmares, and this makes up arguably the film’s most striking sequence. Another candidate is a flashback, confessed by Johan to Alma in a climax of despair and guilt, in which the artist is suddenly provoked into fatally attacking a small boy who bothers him by the rocky water’s edge. It’s actually shot very differently from the rest of the film; it’s washed-out by sunlight, the camera spins queasily, the editing is like an experimental 16mm short. It’s an extremely effective few minutes, and even more so because it remains unresolved – like the other encounters earlier in the film, we’ve no idea if Johan really killed a boy. But he is weighed down as if he had, and this newly sunken depth proves to be the breaking point in their marriage. Johan attempts to force his loving wife off the island after this, and the Baron’s house beckons.

I’ll not attempt a full synopsis here; the film is too abstract for such formalities. It wouldn’t reveal anything or pique the interest of those who haven’t seen it. I try to avoid spoilers, as I’m always unsure exactly who I’m writing these entries for, but in this case the screencaps themselves could count as spoilers. Some of the shots in Hour of the Wolf are so breathtakingly beautiful, intimate and demented that you’d be better off going in totally cold – at least then you’ll not be waiting for the onscreen arrival of whichever startling image may have drawn you in. I suppose the safest way to end this entry now is to revert to the standard Unsequence Cinema question of how to recommend the movie. Well, if you’re familiar with Bergman already then you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into: his style is singular and this work is a particularly stripped-down and unreal variation upon that theme. It is properly dark and puzzling, even alarming towards the end. If you don’t know Bergman but you’re interested in seeing how an arthouse luminary might tackle a horror movie both feet first, set aside 90 minutes on a wet weeknight. The experience may prove to be memorable.

#4: The Cremator

Spalovač Mrtvol
Dir.: Juraj Herz
Czechoslovakia 1969
96mins

Juraj Herz’s The Cremator is exactly the kind of film I had in mind when started this site: it’s highly unusual, not particularly well known, and most importantly it’s very good indeed. Made in 1968, it is a product of a creatively healthy time for Czech cinema, and its assured combination of dark comedy and psychological fantasy-horror makes for a memorable and creepy viewing experience. The eponymous cremator is Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusínský), a man who cannot be distracted for long from his favourite conversational topic: death. To say he is proud of his job would be a massive understatement; he repeatedly expounds upon the spiritual significance of burning the recently dead of his native city, Prague. He holds close to his heart some Buddhist principles that may be quite fatally mangled, believing that cremation is the best way to return each man’s essence to the earth and be reincarnated, and (with more alarming implications) that death is the only real release from suffering. This can all be deigned from the eerily calm orations that make up at least 80% of all the film’s speech, and Herz visually matches this spoken dominance by keeping the audience’s view ruthlessly subjective – we follow only Kopfrkingl throughout, for better or worse, and at certain moments of heightened tension the camera entirely adopts his perspective. The tricks Herz uses to do this give The Cremator its expressionistic visual style and most significantly its editing style, which I’ll get to after I try to synopsise without dropping any big spoilers.

It’s not immediately apparent that the film is set sometime in the 1930s, but a visit by Kopfrkingl’s friend Mr Reinke sets the audience straight – he is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Nazis and the inevitable occupation of Czechoslovakia. Reinke plants a seed of doubt in Kopfrkingl’s mind concerning the ‘purity’ of his own blood, which leads him to ask his Jewish doctor Bettelheim about its nature – can it be ‘pure’ or ‘mixed’, or even perhaps ‘tainted’? “There’s no difference in blood.” He replies. “It’s like ashes. You say yourself that all human ashes are the same, be they French or Spanish, doctor or clerk.” But the old doctor’s words go unheeded as Kopfrkingl slips further into collaboration with Reinke and his Nazi sympathisers, acting as a spy and informant against even those closest to him.

The narrative arc is essentially the familiar one of the man misled past the point of no return, not dissimilar to my #1 entry The Conformist in fact, and a necessary dynamic in these stories is for the audience to want the character to resist capitulation, to reassert himself and come to realise what he is doing is wrong. As The Cremator adopts a dread-laden and claustrophobic vibe from its very start, it’s quite clear that Kopfrkingl will not come to that realisation. The issue then becomes how far he will go. There is a definite sense of inconsistency between Kopfrkingl’s Buddhist misreadings and the bullish Fascism of his friends. Sure, he’s incurably morbid and joyless, but does he have it in him to be a tool for a murderous state?

The extent to which he is just flat-out deranged is difficult to assess because, despite the overt references to Nazism and date-specific setting, the film plays out more as a fantasy than anything else. Realism has no grip on this story, which allows Herz and his editor the space to bring in techniques that really disorient the viewer – frequent cuts between extreme close-ups and medium shots make it difficult to discern when there is a change of scene and location, which has a kind of montage effect. In fact, it’s like Kopfrkingl’s life is lived entirely in montage and fluid cross-cutting. The scene changes often intersect in unusual and temporally impossible ways, as when Kopfrkingl is simultaneously witnessing a Jewish religious celebration and recounting it to Reinke: the latter wasn’t there, but his mouth enters the shot and asks probing questions right into Kopfrkingl’s ear as he watches. There is at least one example of a character reacting to the sound of something from the following scene – in fact, the sound cues the quick transition. If you like little touches like that, you’ll be regularly raising your eyebrows at The Cremator.

The horror element comes from Herz’s use of wide-angle lenses to emphasise subjectivity and the space of the interiors, and this can be really unnerving when combined with the fast editing and the impressive sets. The cremator’s imposingly large tiled bathroom becomes the scene of a particularly nasty act, and you can’t really go far wrong with an underground white room full of coffins, can you? The supporting characters add to the sense of unreality – everywhere he goes, Kopfrkingl sees a man bickering with his too-sensitive wife, an adolescent boy comically over-fascinated by his laconic girlfriend, and a silent dark-haired woman carrying flowers. Some of these people add comedic elements, but their behaviour seems completely locked into repetition. They’re like the anonymous aristocratic guests at Resnais’s mansion in Last Year at Marienbad – their intention may well be as satirical avatars or stand-ins, but their raw effect onscreen is first and foremost disconcerting.

There is a scene where Kopfrkingl and Reinke speak to each other about laying off the crematorium staff from different rooms in a brothel, and Herz plays masterfully with the set’s door frames and mirrors. Here is the clip: [I can’t seem to correct the aspect ratio, sorry!]



There are some very odd framing decisions too, partly in conjunction with the aforementioned wide-angle lens shots, and I can only guess that these eccentricities are there to create a visually unsettling relationship between the characters’ bodies and faces and the (frequently unusual) spaces they inhabit. For instance, during a late scene where the extent of Karel Kopfrkingl’s Nazi collaboration is shockingly revealed, Herz places Hrusínský in front of a huge hellish Boschian fresco, framing several shots to include the most of its detail and editing the sequence together into a dizzying montage that confirms the audience’s deeply felt dread and apprehension as to how pitch-black the movie is prepared to go. I won’t spoil it here, but remember while you watch that Juraj Herz is one of only two filmmakers to have survived Auschwitz. Knowing this, the denouement and final shot of The Cremator could make this film one of the most audacious works of fiction ever created by a Holocaust survivor on the subject.

If this all sounds a bit too rich in formal self-consciousness, then let me reassure you that every fancy technique is employed with great skill, and with enough regularity to elevate them from little visual tricks to the constituent parts of a proper bona fide cinematic voice. In other words: it’s consistently odd, but it’s just how the movie speaks. There’s so much more to say about it, but I will refrain from deep analysis: The Cremator is a nightmarishly strong statement about the potential for man to be swayed by mysticism and dogmas, as well as by flat-out coercion, and may well be one of the most distinctive movies ever to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain.