Juraj Herz (4 September 1934 – 8 April 2018) was a Slovak film director, actor, and scene designer, associated with the Czechoslovak New Wave movement of the 1960s. He is best known for his 1969 horror/black comedy The Cremator , often cited as one of the best Czechoslovak films of all time, though many of his other films achieved cult status. He directed for both film and television, and in the latter capacity he directed episodes of a French-Czech television series based on George Simenon 's Maigret novels.
49-675: Herz was born in 1934 in Kežmarok , in modern-day Slovakia, to Jewish parents. He was a Holocaust survivor , having been imprisoned at the Ravensbrück concentration camp during his childhood. Roughly 60 members of his family perished during the Holocaust, but all of his immediate family members survived. After attending secondary school in Bratislava , he studied photography at the city's University of Applied Arts, going on to study directing and puppetry at
98-458: A free royal town . The town was a stronghold of the noble Thököly family. The Hungarian magnate and warrior Imre Thököly was born in the town in 1657. He died in exile in Turkey in 1705 but in the 20th century his body was returned to Kežmarok and he is buried in a noble mausoleum in the town's Lutheran church. The town's other monuments include a castle, many Renaissance merchant houses, and
147-617: A distinction between phonemic /l/ and /ʎ/ which survives in Slovak. With the beginning of the national revival of the mid-18th century, Czech historians began to emphasize their people's accomplishments from the 15th through 17th centuries, rebelling against the Counter-Reformation (the Habsburg re-catholization efforts which had denigrated Czech and other non- Latin languages). Czech philologists studied sixteenth-century texts and advocated
196-501: A dozen additional counties in Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, North Dakota and Minnesota . As of 2009, 70,500 Americans spoke Czech as their first language (49th place nationwide, after Turkish and before Swedish ). Standard Czech contains ten basic vowel phonemes , and three diphthongs. The vowels are /a/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /o/, and /u/ , and their long counterparts /aː/, /ɛː/, /iː/, /oː/ and /uː/ . The diphthongs are /ou̯/, /au̯/ and /ɛu̯/ ;
245-558: A drama about the death of a child, was entered into the 27th Berlin International Film Festival . Herz intended to make an adaptation of Alfred Jarry 's absurd erotic novel Supermale but was forced to shelve it by the government. His 1982 movie Ferat Vampire ( Czech : Upír z Feratu ), a horror movie about a murderous Ferat sports car fuelled on human blood, starred Jiří Menzel and future first lady Dagmar Havlová . In 1986 Herz released The Night Overtakes Me ,
294-561: A more-restricted distinction between "hard" and "soft" consonants (see Phonology below). The term "Old Czech" is applied to the period predating the 16th century, with the earliest records of the high medieval period also classified as "early Old Czech", but the term "Medieval Czech" is also used. The function of the written language was initially performed by Old Slavonic written in Glagolitic , later by Latin written in Latin script . Around
343-502: A museum of ancient books. In pride of place is the Protestant church built in 1688 entirely of wood. The church also contains an organ of 1719 with wooden pipes. The church has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008. Before the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, Kežmarok was part of Szepes County within the Kingdom of Hungary . From 1939 to 1945, it was part of
392-514: A realistic chance of returning as a major language. However, Josef Jungmann and other revivalists used Dobrovský's book to advocate for a Czech linguistic revival. Changes during this time included spelling reform (notably, í in place of the former j and j in place of g ), the use of t (rather than ti ) to end infinitive verbs and the non-capitalization of nouns (which had been a late borrowing from German). These changes differentiated Czech from Slovak. Modern scholars disagree about whether
441-484: A slow rise from low to high, quickly dropping to low on the last word or phrase. In modern Czech syntax, adjectives precede nouns, with few exceptions. Relative clauses are introduced by relativizers such as the adjective který , analogous to the English relative pronouns "which", "that" and "who"/"whom". As with other adjectives, it agrees with its associated noun in gender, number and case. Relative clauses follow
490-612: A tragic drama about his experiences in the concentration camp. Herz emigrated to Germany in 1987. His last major films were paranormal thriller Darkness ( Czech : T.M.A. ; 2009), and Habermann (2010), a war drama about the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II. Herz was very interested in genre films, especially horror. He was very interested in dark, macabre elements and themes and also erotic imagery, which genre films allowed him to incorporate. Herz also frequently used psychological horror and politically dissident elements in his films. He said that dark humor
539-474: A verb; information about its subject is encoded in the verb. Enclitics (primarily auxiliary verbs and pronouns) appear in the second syntactic slot of a sentence, after the first stressed unit. The first slot can contain a subject or object, a main form of a verb, an adverb, or a conjunction (except for the light conjunctions a , "and", i , "and even" or ale , "but"). Czech syntax has a subject–verb–object sentence structure. In practice, however, word order
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#1732908485085588-557: Is twinned with: Moses Itauma , (born 2004) professional boxer Czech language Czech ( / tʃ ɛ k / CHEK ; endonym : čeština [ˈtʃɛʃcɪna] ), historically also known as Bohemian ( / b oʊ ˈ h iː m i ə n , b ə -/ boh- HEE -mee-ən, bə- ; Latin : lingua Bohemica ), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group , written in Latin script . Spoken by over 12 million people including second language speakers, it serves as
637-612: Is a member of the West Slavic sub-branch of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. This branch includes Polish , Kashubian , Upper and Lower Sorbian and Slovak . Slovak is the most closely related language to Czech, followed by Polish and Silesian . The West Slavic languages are spoken in Central Europe. Czech is distinguished from other West Slavic languages by
686-615: Is a recognized minority language in Slovakia, Slovak citizens who speak only Czech may communicate with the government in their language in the same way that Slovak speakers in the Czech Republic also do. Immigration of Czechs from Europe to the United States occurred primarily from 1848 to 1914. Czech is a Less Commonly Taught Language in U.S. schools, and is taught at Czech heritage centers. Large communities of Czech Americans live in
735-614: Is a town in the Spiš region of eastern Slovakia (population 16,000), on the Poprad River . Prior to World War I , it was in Szepes county in the Kingdom of Hungary . Settlement at Kežmarok dates back to the Upper Stone Age . In the 13th century the region contained a community of Saxons , a Slovak fishing village, a Hungarian border post and a Carpathian German settlement. Its Latin name
784-422: Is also relevant to the declension patterns of nouns, which vary according to whether the final consonant of the noun stem is hard or soft. Voiced consonants with unvoiced counterparts are unvoiced at the end of a word before a pause, and in consonant clusters voicing assimilation occurs, which matches voicing to the following consonant. The unvoiced counterpart of /ɦ/ is /x/. The phoneme represented by
833-432: Is flexible and used to distinguish topic and focus , with the topic or theme (known referents) preceding the focus or rheme (new information) in a sentence; Czech has therefore been described as a topic-prominent language . Although Czech has a periphrastic passive construction (like English), in colloquial style, word-order changes frequently replace the passive voice. For example, to change "Peter killed Paul" to "Paul
882-678: Is one of the EU's official languages and the 2012 Eurobarometer survey found that Czech was the foreign language most often used in Slovakia. Economist Jonathan van Parys collected data on language knowledge in Europe for the 2012 European Day of Languages . The five countries with the greatest use of Czech were the Czech Republic (98.77 percent), Slovakia (24.86 percent), Portugal (1.93 percent), Poland (0.98 percent) and Germany (0.47 percent). Czech speakers in Slovakia primarily live in cities. Since it
931-575: Is realized as its voiceless allophone [r̝̊], a sound somewhere between Czech r and š . The consonants /r/, /l/, and /m/ can be syllabic , acting as syllable nuclei in place of a vowel. Strč prst skrz krk ("Stick [your] finger through [your] throat") is a well-known Czech tongue twister using syllabic consonants but no vowels. Each word has primary stress on its first syllable , except for enclitics (minor, monosyllabic, unstressed syllables). In all words of more than two syllables, every odd-numbered syllable receives secondary stress. Stress
980-499: Is unrelated to vowel length; both long and short vowels can be stressed or unstressed. Vowels are never reduced in tone (e.g. to schwa sounds) when unstressed. When a noun is preceded by a monosyllabic preposition, the stress usually moves to the preposition, e.g. do Prahy "to Prague". Czech grammar, like that of other Slavic languages, is fusional ; its nouns, verbs, and adjectives are inflected by phonological processes to modify their meanings and grammatical functions, and
1029-663: The Basilica of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and the Wooden articular church in Kežmarok . According to the 2001 census , the town had 17,383 inhabitants. 95.21% of inhabitants were Slovaks , 1.59% Roma , 0.83% Czechs and 0.43% Germans . The religious makeup was 77.50% Roman Catholics , 10.98% people with no religious affiliation, 4.83% Lutherans and 2.63% Greek Catholics . Kežmarok
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#17329084850851078-706: The Kralice Bible between 1579 and 1593 (the first complete Czech translation of the Bible from the original languages) became very important for standardization of the Czech language in the following centuries as it was used as a model for the standard language. In 1615, the Bohemian diet tried to declare Czech to be the only official language of the kingdom. After the Bohemian Revolt (of predominantly Protestant aristocracy) which
1127-603: The Leskovec-Dresden Bible , also dates to this period. Old Czech texts, including poetry and cookbooks, were also produced outside universities. Literary activity becomes widespread in the early 15th century in the context of the Bohemian Reformation . Jan Hus contributed significantly to the standardization of Czech orthography , advocated for widespread literacy among Czech commoners (particularly in religion) and made early efforts to model written Czech after
1176-676: The Slovak Republic . On 27 January 1945, the Red Army dislodged the Wehrmacht from Kežmarok in the course of the Western Carpathian offensive and it was once again part of Czechoslovakia. Kežmarok had an ethnic German majority until around 1910, and Germans stayed a large minority until the end of World War II . Most Germans were evacuated to Germany or the Sudetenland before the arrival of
1225-772: The Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU) alongside Jan Švankmajer . He remained in Prague after he completed his studies to work at the Semafor Theatre and Barrandov Studios . Herz was self-taught as a film director. His first experience working on films was as second-unit director under Zbyněk Brynych ( Transport from Paradise ; 1962) and Ján Kadár ( The Shop on Main Street ; 1965). Because he had attended DAMU rather than its sister film school, FAMU , Herz
1274-519: The Velvet Revolution in 1989, but achieved wide international acclaim and cult status. It was re-released in 2017. The film combined horror and black comedy, and is often cited as one of the best movies ever made in Czechoslovakia. The following year saw Sweet Games of Last Summer , an expressionist adaptation of Guy de Maupassant . Herz was best known for his work in the horror genre; he
1323-727: The high medieval period, and the standardization of Czech and Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the modern written standard became codified in the context of the Czech National Revival . The most widely spoken non-standard variety , known as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague , but is now spoken as an interdialect throughout most of Bohemia . The Moravian dialects spoken in Moravia and Czech Silesia are considerably more varied than
1372-406: The voiced velar fricative consonant (/ɣ/) and consistent stress on the first syllable. The Bohemian (Czech) language is first recorded in writing in glosses and short notes during the 12th to 13th centuries. Literary works written in Czech appear in the late 13th and early 14th century and administrative documents first appear towards the late 14th century. The first complete Bible translation ,
1421-515: The 7th century, the Slavic expansion reached Central Europe, settling on the eastern fringes of the Frankish Empire . The West Slavic polity of Great Moravia formed by the 9th century. The Christianization of Bohemia took place during the 9th and 10th centuries. The diversification of the Czech-Slovak group within West Slavic began around that time, marked among other things by its use of
1470-663: The Nazis during World War II. The film was selected as the Czechoslovak entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 42nd Academy Awards , but was not accepted as a nominee. In 1972, it won the Festival de Cine de Sitges Best Film award, as well as awards for Hrušínský and cinematographer Stanislav Milota . Immediately banned by Communist censors after its premiere, The Cremator was not seen again in Czechoslovakia until after
1519-668: The Red Army. The evacuation was mostly the initiative of Adalbert Wanhoff and prepared the diocese of the German Evangelical Church between mid-November 1944 and 21 January 1945. It also had a large and active Jewish community. During World War II, under the auspices of the First Slovak Republic , nearly 3,000 of the town's Jews were deported to German death camps . The town's pre-war Jewish cemetery has now been restored. The town contains many historic monuments, including
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1568-434: The conservative revivalists were motivated by nationalism or considered contemporary spoken Czech unsuitable for formal, widespread use. Adherence to historical patterns was later relaxed and standard Czech adopted a number of features from Common Czech (a widespread informal interdialectal variety), such as leaving some proper nouns undeclined. This has resulted in a relatively high level of homogeneity among all varieties of
1617-427: The dialects of Bohemia. Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising ten monophthongs , three diphthongs and 25 consonants (divided into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories). Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has a raised alveolar trill , which is known to occur as a phoneme in only a few other languages, represented by the grapheme ř . Czech
1666-405: The easily separable affixes characteristic of agglutinative languages are limited. Czech inflects for case, gender and number in nouns and tense, aspect, mood , person and subject number and gender in verbs. Parts of speech include adjectives, adverbs , numbers, interrogative words , prepositions , conjunctions and interjections . Adverbs are primarily formed from adjectives by taking
1715-477: The final ý or í of the base form and replacing it with e , ě , y , or o . Negative statements are formed by adding the affix ne- to the main verb of a clause, with one exception: je (he, she or it is) becomes není . Because Czech uses grammatical case to convey word function in a sentence (instead of relying on word order , as English does), its word order is flexible. As a pro-drop language , in Czech an intransitive sentence can consist of only
1764-487: The language. Czech is spoken by about 10 million residents of the Czech Republic . A Eurobarometer survey conducted from January to March 2012 found that the first language of 98 percent of Czech citizens was Czech, the third-highest proportion of a population in the European Union (behind Greece and Hungary ). As the official language of the Czech Republic (a member of the European Union since 2004), Czech
1813-844: The last two are found only in loanwords such as auto "car" and euro "euro". In Czech orthography, the vowels are spelled as follows: The letter ⟨ ě ⟩ indicates that the previous consonant is palatalized (e.g. něco /ɲɛt͡so/ ). After a labial it represents /jɛ/ (e.g. běs /bjɛs/ ); but ⟨mě⟩ is pronounced /mɲɛ/, cf. měkký ( /mɲɛkiː/ ). The consonant phonemes of Czech and their equivalent letters in Czech orthography are as follows: Czech consonants are categorized as "hard", "neutral", or "soft": Hard consonants may not be followed by i or í in writing, or soft ones by y or ý (except in loanwords such as kilogram ). Neutral consonants may take either character. Hard consonants are sometimes known as "strong", and soft ones as "weak". This distinction
1862-500: The letter ř (capital Ř ) is very rare among languages and often claimed to be unique to Czech, though it also occurs in some dialects of Kashubian , and formerly occurred in Polish. It represents the raised alveolar non-sonorant trill ( IPA : [r̝] ), a sound somewhere between Czech r and ž (example: "řeka" (river) ), and is present in Dvořák . In unvoiced environments, /r̝/
1911-462: The official language of the Czech Republic . Czech is closely related to Slovak , to the point of high mutual intelligibility , as well as to Polish to a lesser degree. Czech is a fusional language with a rich system of morphology and relatively flexible word order . Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German . The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in
1960-564: The return of the language to high culture . This period is known as the Czech National Revival (or Renaissance). During the national revival, in 1809 linguist and historian Josef Dobrovský released a German-language grammar of Old Czech entitled Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der böhmischen Sprache ('Comprehensive Doctrine of the Bohemian Language'). Dobrovský had intended his book to be descriptive , and did not think Czech had
2009-441: The spoken language. There was no standardization distinguishing between Czech and Slovak prior to the 15th century. In the 16th century, the division between Czech and Slovak becomes apparent, marking the confessional division between Lutheran Protestants in Slovakia using Czech orthography and Catholics, especially Slovak Jesuits, beginning to use a separate Slovak orthography based on Western Slovak dialects. The publication of
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2058-461: The states of Texas , Nebraska and Wisconsin . In the 2000 United States Census , Czech was reported as the most common language spoken at home (besides English ) in Valley , Butler and Saunders Counties , Nebraska and Republic County, Kansas . With the exception of Spanish (the non-English language most commonly spoken at home nationwide), Czech was the most common home language in more than
2107-424: The upper classes. Modern standard Czech originates in standardization efforts of the 18th century. By then the language had developed a literary tradition, and since then it has changed little; journals from that period contain no substantial differences from modern standard Czech, and contemporary Czechs can understand them with little difficulty. At some point before the 18th century, the Czech language abandoned
2156-438: Was a form of expression, and that even serious films should be laughed at. Herz died in Prague on 8 April 2018, aged 83. His death was announced on Facebook by Slovak actor Andrej Hryc , his friend and long-time collaborator. Ke%C5%BEmarok Kežmarok ( German : Kesmark or Käsmark ; Hungarian : Késmárk , Rusyn : Кежмарок , Yiddish : קעזמאַרק , romanized : Kezmark , Polish : Kieżmark )
2205-659: Was defeated by the Habsburgs in 1620, the Protestant intellectuals had to leave the country. This emigration together with other consequences of the Thirty Years' War had a negative impact on the further use of the Czech language. In 1627, Czech and German became official languages of the Kingdom of Bohemia and in the 18th century German became dominant in Bohemia and Moravia, especially among
2254-472: Was first mentioned in 1251 as Villa (Saxonum apud Ecclesiam) Sancte Elisabeth . In 1269 Kežmarok received its town charter. It also had the right to organize a cheese market (hence the German name Kesmark ("Käsemarkt" - "cheese market"). In 1433 the town was severely damaged by a Hussite raid. After 1440, the count of Spiš had a seat in Kežmarok. In the 15th century (and then once more in 1655), Kežmarok became
2303-550: Was initially not part of the core group of directors who would form the Czechoslovak New Wave . His 1965 short film The Junk Shop was excluded from the group's manifesto anthology Pearls of the Deep (1966) due to its running time. Herz made his breakthrough with his 1969 film, The Cremator , based on a novel by Ladislav Fuks , starring Czech actor Rudolf Hrušínský as a demented crematorium manager who collaborates with
2352-529: Was killed by Peter" the order of subject and object is inverted: Petr zabil Pavla ("Peter killed Paul") becomes "Paul, Peter killed" ( Pavla zabil Petr ). Pavla is in the accusative case , the grammatical object of the verb. A word at the end of a clause is typically emphasized, unless an upward intonation indicates that the sentence is a question: In parts of Bohemia (including Prague ), questions such as Jí pes bagetu? without an interrogative word (such as co , "what" or kdo , "who") are intoned in
2401-598: Was one of the few Czechoslovak film directors working horror films during the Communist period. His other horror works included 1972 murder drama Morgiana and a gothic re-interpretation of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast ( Czech : Panna a Netvor ) in 1978. Herz's 1971 drama Oil Lamps ( Czech : Petrolejové Lampy ) was in competition for the Palme D'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival . Herz's 1976 film Day for My Love ,
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