Surrealism and creaturely Holocaust killing in Juraj Herz's The Cremator

Baker, Emily-Rose (2025) Surrealism and creaturely Holocaust killing in Juraj Herz's The Cremator. In, Sands, Peter, O'Neill, Mo and Hind, Samantha (eds.) Animality and Horror Cinema. (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature) 1 ed. pp. 27-51. (doi:10.1007/978-3-031-87294-5_2).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Literary and artistic depictions of the Holocaust have long been shaped by a strictly humanising impulse; that is to say, they have been produced by and for the human, and have aimed to emphasise the loss of six million Jewish victims as humans. Situating itself within emerging scholarship on the recent turn to the nonhuman within Holocaust representation and memorialisation, this chapter examines the unusual depiction of Jewish murder in Ravensbrück survivor and Czech Jew Juraj Herz’s macabre comedy horror The Cremator (Spalovač Mrtvol, 1969) as a distinctly nonhuman undertaking which complicates the abiding divisions characterising Holocaust studies: those of victim and perpetrator, but also of human and animal. Combining Holocaust scholarship with perspectives from art criticism and animal studies, it traces the film’s production of what Carrie Rohman has called a “creatural consciousness” or aesthetic, in which the on-screen presence of animals in addition to formally non-anthropocentric elements and aesthetics comes to express the “uncanny animality” of the Holocaust.

Text

Creaturely Fear chapter_Jan24 - Accepted Manuscript

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