Bohemia Chic

The co-founder of Exhumed Films on why he'll screen a creepy Czech film at National Mechanics

by Shaun Brady

screening

Gathering in a bar to watch movies usually means that the film itself is far less important than booze, company and conversation. So it comes as no surprise that the bulk of the Philebrity/TLA screening series at National Mechanics have been nostalgic, familiar choices. King Britt chose The Wiz; R5's Sean Agnew, the half-remembered '80s Val Kilmer comedy Real Genius; hell, hizzoner Michael Nutter screened the Christ-didn't-we-finally-just-get-everyone-to-shut-up-about-that-Vince-Papale-biopic Invincible.

But leave it to Exhumed Films co-founder Joseph A. Gervasi to break that pattern and serve up a slice of Eastern European discomfort. For his entry, Gervasi selected the obscure 1968 Czech film The Cremator, directed by virtually unknown director Juraj Herz. "When TLA first approached me," Gervasi says, "I knew I had to select a film that was not only unfamiliar to most 'regular' film fans, but elusive even to avowed cinephiles."

Gervasi will screen a British-made DVD of The Cremator featuring an enthusiastic intro from the Brothers Quay, who refer to the film's imagery as "daggers to the eye." Herz was involved with the early films of Quays' mentor Jan Svankmajer, and brings a touch of the animator's disjunctive editing tricks to bear. But rather than Svankmajer's playful surrealism, he winds up with a nasty anti-Fascist parable that marries the monochromatic purgatory of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls to the comic existential dread of David Lynch's Eraserhead.

The title character is a vision of cherubic, elegant evil, the overproud director of a baroque crematorium who becomes a Nazi-inspired mini-dictator, eventually turning even on his beloved — but part-Jewish — wife and children. This is the second Czech New Wave horror film that Gervasi has brought to Philly screens. First was The Valerie Project, which paired Valerie and Her Week of Wonders with Greg Weeks' score, at I-House.

"The Cremator presents a much darker end of the CNW spectrum than Valerie, even though they both drink deep of the same well of surrealism," he says. "My hope is that despite the fact that the film is being presented on DVD and in a bar, that audience members will spend a little less time chitter-chattering and drinking their alcoholic swill and more time watching this morbid flower unfold its black petals."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Cremator, Thu., March 6, 7:30 p.m., free, National Mechanics, 22 S. Third St., philebrity.com/tlascreeningseries.