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Christopher Media. Let's make some noise. Oh, oh. I'm gonna I think of them's funny.

Oh... Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White. Joining me once again is Ms. Sam Deegan.

Hello.

Check Timber continues with a look at Yuraj Hertz's The Kremator. Released in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring.

The cremator stars Rudolf Horinsky as Carl or Roman Kopfrikanulgo. Yeah, I'm going to have real

problems with some of these names this time. And man dedicated to the idea of liberating the soul

from the body through the practice of cremation. The film tells the tale of how he goes from

acting as the loving husband to embracing Nazism and his descent into madness that

gripped the world in the 1930s and 40s and still grips it today. Though, of course,

this being a Czech film from that time, not everything is as it may initially be portrayed on

the surface. Now, we're going to be talking about the full film, meaning the end, the beginning,

and a few things in between. So if you haven't seen the cremator and don't want the thing ruined for you,

turn us off and come back when you're ready? Now, Sam, when was the first time that you saw

the cremator and what did you think? I want to say it was somewhere between eight to ten years

ago, and I saw it actually screened in a bar. It wasn't what I was

expecting. And so basically the way that it was advertised was sort of as kind of an absurdist

black comedy. And it was part of this sort of intermittent but kind of ongoing screening series that would happen at random locations around Philadelphia.

So all these sort of people sitting down for dinner also got to watch the cremator and I don't think we're prepared for it.

But I fell immediately in love with it.

It was actually the second Czech film I ever saw after

Valerie in her Week of Wonders. So of course it just made me want to go out and find so many more.

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