Diamanten der Nacht

Made in 1964 this was a film that has more than stood the test of time. It opens with two Jewish boys running from a train transport somewhere in Germany. They are running for their lives and the film captures the sheer fear and desperation perfectly. Using camera techniques that take you with them rather than as a voyeur you are transported with them to their plight. The hand held camera is often used to show in graphic detail the hardships they go through.

They are starving, wet and cold – add to this the exhaustion and fear and you can feel only pity for these two lads. The film also uses flash backs and dream sequences to things that may or have happened and repeated visuals of nightmares and glimpses of what might have been. Instead of acting as an alienation device though, these techniques help to explore the complex feelings and mind sets of the boys.

At only 68 minutes long it does seem to fly by but it is a film you will remember long afterwards. In some scenes the boys have the letters 'KL' painted on their backs. I tried to find out what this was referencing and I think it indicated that they were inmates of the concentration camp at Krakov – this would fit with them being transported to another camp which is the film's back story. This is a brilliant, stark, moving and exceptional piece of film making that I can highly recommend to cinema history fans.

Two young men escape from a prisoner transport train on their way to a concentration camp. They try to survive in the dense woods, but the unforgiving terrain forces them back to civilization.

I started out enjoying this film. It's lack of dialogue (very little is spoken for much of the runtime), handheld camerawork, and harsh locations were innovative and compelling. However, as the film progressed I grew tired of the lack of narrative and the tedious experimental-film-style digressions, in the form of quick jumps for a few seconds, to what I am assuming were supposed to be the random thoughts and memories of one or both protagonists. By the film's third act, wherein a large band of elderly and doddering German citizens awkwardly chase the duo through the forest, the whole thing had fallen apart for me, and became laughable and pretentious. As usual, many or most will disagree with me, as this is another critically acclaimed "masterpiece" that I failed to connect with and/or fully comprehend. It's only 67 minutes long.

I saw DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT one late night and I thought the movie was a recorded dream. It felt so unreal and dream-like that I thought I was inside someone's head and experiencing their dream state. The 60 minute long film is experimental but even so it's more powerful than an entire year's worth of best films. It has a documentary feel to it but the repetitious editing (day-dreams?) and amazing sound-scape obviously pulls it out of that category. The film at times feels more real than reality. The cinematography was jaw-dropping. The image quality of the version I saw was faded and it didn't look like it was a new digital transfer (or maybe that's how the film was made to look like), regardless the look was unique: super fluid editing, camera composition and movement. It's a truly amazing cinematic achievement, probably more so today as it clearly stood the test of time and its experimental qualities resonate beautifully today.

A must see for fans of pure cinema.

This surrealist masterpiece directed by Jan Nemec has had limited exhibition in the US. Mostly seen at film festivals and in museums, this 63 minute film concerns two boys who escape from a train taking them to a Nazi death camp. As they run through dense, rugged and unfamiliar terrain, their escape is interpolated with their dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and memories. Like Forbidden Games, Fires on the Plains, and Grand Illusion, Diamonds of the Night is an anti-war film that does not deal with actual warfare. With a minimum of dialog, the film conveys the boys' physical and psychological deterioration with a maximum of cinematic bravura. This sadly neglected film deserves a Criterion DVD release.

The movie follows the diamonds of the night, two plucky lads from Prague. The Nazis are giving off bad vibes to our brace of youngins, they're on a train wearing coats with letters KL painted on the back, which look suspiciously like they could be standing for Konzentrationslager (concentration camp). So the geese attempt to climb out of the sauce and jump train. That's the first scene of the movie which is a brilliant tracking shot that should be cinematic history if it's not already regarded as such. They run/stumble to the top of a hill whereupon they collapse, and you can feel their bronchi beseeching air, the blood in their mouths, the two different types of saliva, thick on the roof, thin under the tongue. The guys are less acting than living an experience that the director is demanding of them. It's very reminiscent of the Zanzibar film Le révélateur that came four years later in France, and although the use of sound here is good, it could, very much in common with that film, have been shot without. In that sense it's very cinematic.

The film as a whole is one of the best pieces of editing you can see, and shots of survival in what look like the fir-carpeted foothills of the Sudeten mountains are juxtaposed with memories of Prague, where they have just come from. In particular we see the closed doors of people who won't help them, who we don't see, and rather fabulous Wellesian shots of Josefov and other quiet areas of Prague. A lot of the editing is repetitive and short shots are later expanded on. One example is a ghostly love story that is cut off by the purging of the Jewish areas. The use of sound here is quite good, even in shots where there should be no sound you hear muffled glaucous conversations that make everything seem very strange.

It's another Holocaust shock film really, the shock of the Third Reich has never really gone away, apparently civilised modern society all across Europe disintegrated into a quagmire of venality and self interest, which leads one to wonder whether, even on one's own street, there are not folk who would cheerfully dismember you given abrogation of the usual checks and balances of society.