Les Diamants de la nuit

This movie does weird things to me. Not weird in the way of the surrealists, in the way incomprehensible that is like listening to someone talk to a microphone in a large empty hall from a different room, most of it is booming echo and static hiss but if you pause and concentrate now and then a word becomes audible so that after a while the bits and pieces of information form a whole that may not be coherent but is meaningful and whole upon its partial self. This does weird things to me in the way that there's no microphone and no one to talk to it if there was one and you're just sitting there in the large empty hall and you begin to hear words out of thin air.

When it came out mainstream cinema didn't know that language. It's a bit like what a captured Aztec chieftain in chains could tell Spanish audiences of the jungle. Diamonds of the Night tells a story, but that's not all it does, and that's not all it cares about. It tells an experience of life as lived dreamed or hallucinated. It doesn't even describe it to the viewer, it lets the viewer inhabit the experience. The movie opens and we're running through the forest, guns go off in the distance, we're being chased and we're digging our nails in the dirt running uphill and scrambling for cover. Now we're huddling together for warmth in the cold of the night and now we're back in time and memory to relive a broken shrapnel of life as it once was or as we now think it to have been.

Czech New Wave films were usually lighthearted and humorous snapshots of everyday life and they were not removed from their audience. To the extent that they were avantgarde business, they were rarely contrapuntal to a cinema that could be enjoyed by the average Czech who could pay the price of a movie ticket. When Milos Forman or Jiri Menzel showed the foibles of the common folk, they showed it not to amuse or inform the intellectual, they showed it to that same common folk who may still have a father living back in a village. They confirmed life as the people who lived it knowed it to be. Diamonds of the Night is not like that.

It's hard, demanding, cinema that will not appeal to everyone. There's very little dialogue and the storytelling does not follow arcs. It's cyclical and elusive and suggestive of other things that may or may not have happened or happen again as they did, like somebody is after us and we're running in the forest, we're running in circles and now and then we run through the same clearing that we recognize and we see ourselves running through that clearing.

I love this movie so much because it relates an experience of life that I may have dreamed, or an experience of life that I didn't dream but that's how I would dream it. Two escaped inmates of a Nazi concentration camp run from their unseen captors, in the end we see the captors and director Jan Nemec (in a masterstroke of irony, his last name translates to "German") is saying all manner of beautiful things, about innocence torn asunder and about the regenerative cycle of life, about things that will happen again as they did because that's the way of nature. I like it so much because it suggests things about stakes and games, in this case the hunt is the game and human life is the stake, and a game without stakes is no game at all. If the players don't stand to lose something, the game is a game not worth playing, and if the players didn't enter the game of their own accord, as seems to be the case here, yet we find them on the game table does that mean they are not there by some other accord? I adore movies that deal with fatalism in dreamlike terms and Diamonds of the Night does that.

The beauty of it for me is that it doesn't even matter that they escaped a concentration camp and that Nazi hunters are involved. It leaves out the pomp and circumstance and solemn contemplation of the "WWII drama". This could be about any two young people being hunted through any forest for any set of reasons. But someone is being hunted and there's "truth with malice" in that hunt...

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.

(1964) Diamonds of the Night/ Démanty noci (In Czechoslovakian with English subtitles) WAR DRAMA

Loosely adapted from the autobiographical novel "Darkness Has No Shadow" by Arnost Lustig, co-written and directed by Jan Nemec that has two young boys, První (Ladislav Jánsky) and Druhý (Antonín Kumbera) escaping and are on the run toward the dense forest while it appears are shot at. And while trekking through the forest, we are also shown through flashbacks small hints what each or both of them used to do before Nazis invasion.

This is my second viewing, and I must admit I do not understand everything that was going on, as a portion of this movie is also about the worst case scenarios, in which one of the two boys are suggesting it, before something else happens instead.

This is one of those works of art that deal with historical tragedy not by attempting to paint or even reference the entire picture, but by focusing on a much smaller story, and in that way, revealing aspects of it at a very human level. At the outset here, we find two Jewish boys who have escaped a train bound for a concentration camp desperately running through a dense forest, and are immediately immersed into their struggle.

One of the techniques that Jan Nemec employed was to keep the camera on the boys as close as possible to heighten the sense of disorientation and exhaustion they feel. In a similar way, he got into their heads with voiceless flashbacks to their days before the war, like catching a ride on a streetcar in Prague, or sledding down an embankment in the wintertime, the natural kinds of things their minds might wander to. The memories of a would-be girlfriend, the various streets and doors of Prague, and a solitary bell sounding periodically all make for haunting, surreal daydreams.

The film makes its strongest points about man's inhumanity when we are jolted back to the present, where a group of elderly hunters are tracking them down, perhaps tipped off by the wide-eyed, emotionless woman at a farm house who gave them a little food. "Halt! Halt!" one shouts, while they all fire away at the kids. They're eventually captured, and the geezers celebrate over sausages and beer, eating in front of the famished boys, oblivious to their hunger. They raise a toast to the fact that they "did it," which is intercut with a shot of the boys desperately drinking out of a river while on the run.

This is damning commentary of the German citizenry during the war, and an indictment of those who offered the excuse afterwards that they didn't know the horror of what Hitler was committing. There is such a bitter component to seeing these old men drunkenly carrying on with their fellows after having lived a full life, contrasted to the boys, whose lives seem destined to be cut short, and barbarically. Despite their release at the end, it's done with cruelty, as if it's all a game. It's a story that's obviously specific to real-life experiences of Arnost Lustig and his friend, but there is a universality to it as well, in the older generation being so blind to suffering, which is devastating.

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.