Slovak-born filmmaker Juraj Herz could easily have ended up as Czechoslovak cinema's great ‘might-have-been’, forever denied the status he deserved. Though he began his film career in the 1960s, a decade widely acknowledged as the most favorable and thus the richest in Czech and Slovak film history, Herz spent much of that era on the fringes of its key developments, at arm's length from the internationally prestigious New Wave. When he broke into feature production in the second half of the 1960s, the results were promising but not fully realized, the victim in part of compromises enforced by the Barrandov apparatus. The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol, 1969) – Herz's third feature and his breakthrough as a powerful, assured, and original film artist – coincided with the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which brought in its wake a ruthless refreezing of cinematic culture that could have either destroyed his fledgling career or doomed it to mediocrity.

As it happens, though, Herz forged one of the most consistently successful careers (artistically and commercially speaking) in the Czechoslovak cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, proving one of the brightest sparks amid what was often a dull, dispiriting climate for national cinema. Essential to his success was the approach Herz took to the authorities at Prague's Barrandov Studios, a mix of defiance and adaptability, provocation and pragmatism.