Review: Diamonds of the Night (1964)
Cast: Ladislav Jánsky, Antonín Kumbera, Irma Bischofova
Director: Jan Nemec
Country: Czechoslovakia
Genre: Drama | War
Editor’s Note: The following review of Diamonds of the Night is a continuation of Rowena’s Spotlight on the Czechoslovak New Wave.
The Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia and the imposition of “Normalisation” beginning in 1968 put a stop to the careers of many filmmakers, among them, Pavel Juráček. The same happened to Jan Němec, who was definitively banned from making films in the country in 1969. However, as Němec shared in a 2001 interview, Czechoslovak authorities had already banned him from making films as early as 1966 (though he was still allowed to work in television). The reason for such a ban was the alleged incomprehensibility of his 1966 three-segment film, Martyrs of Love (which will be discussed in a separate review). In the mid-1970s, Němec received the option to go into exile, which he took. While in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s, Němec was able to make three feature films and several short films. In addition, he made the 1968 documentary film Oratorio For Prague. Němec began Oratorio For Prague to chart the heady days of the Prague Spring in August 1968. But of course, the last batches of footage that he and his crew ended up capturing were of Warsaw Pact forces and their tanks marching into the city, the resistance of the people, and the violence that broke out. It is a work far removed from his feature films since it directly addresses actual life, but necessarily so.
Němec studied directing at FAMU and his graduate film was The Loaf of Bread (1959), based on a story set during World War II by the late writer Arnöst Lustig; the story’s protagonists are two male prisoners who steal bread from an SS-guarded freight car. For his debut feature film Diamonds of the Night, Němec looked once again to a narrative of World War II, with two male prisoners as the lead characters, and based on a work by Lustig. This time Němec adapted Lustig’s novel Darkness Casts No Shadows, which details Lustig’s experiences of being transported to a concentration camp and his escape from the transport in 1945. Němec collaborated with Lustig on the screenplay.
But while Němec retains the aforementioned details of the narrative, the resulting audiovisual work is another matter altogether and entirely his vision. Such is the force of Němec’s vision that the film manages to address the subject and transcend it at the same time; in the process, it also addresses the question of film as a powerful medium of expression, according to his rigorous sensibility. One of the film’s most immediate characteristics is its unconventional running time, just a little over an hour. This unconventional running time is actually uniform across his three features. Němec always apparently worked to finish a film rather quickly, lest the authorities spontaneously decided to shut down the production. For Němec to extract such a distinct filmography from a self-imposed limited method of filmmaking is a testament precisely to the force of his vision, of which Diamonds of the Night is an intense manifesto.
Such is the force of Němec’s vision that the film manages to address the subject and transcend it at the same time; in the process, it also addresses the question of film as a powerful medium of expression, according to his rigorous sensibility.
For Diamonds of the Night, Němec worked with two cinematographers, Jaroslav Kučera and Miroslav Ondríček as Kučera’s assistant. Between the two of them and in collaboration with Němec, they achieve tactile, intimate images of the insular world of the two young male prisoners who have escaped the transport. Insular because the film consists stubbornly of only a number of things and not the larger context in which they take place: the young men running through and wandering in the woods while hungry and exhausted; their attempts to get some food from a country house; their arrest by an elderly contingent of countryside ethnic German guards; and their possible execution. Insular also because the film presents these exterior events that befall the two young men in tandem with their interiority, their unspoken stream of thoughts, in the form of flash cuts. That is, the film is constantly pierced with their subjectivity, privileging that of one of the young men in particular, as it presents the exterior events. The result is an hallucinatory splitting-open of narrative and subjectivity so that they bleed into each other.
If Juráček’s films can be regarded as a cinema of (absurd) reason in waking, everyday life, then Němec represents a cinema of sensation of waking, everyday life, at least with this film. Put another way, Diamonds of the Night explores the representation of sensation, the stages of feeling and thinking before the formation of thoughts—hence its blunt disregard for names and dialogue. It staunchly pursues what Němec calls “pure film.” If Juráček presents a disorienting world with disoriented characters, he at least shows in elaborate detail how one drifts into that world. But Diamonds of the Night begins in medias res, “in the middle of things,” with the two young men running and panting across the woods. In this opening sequence, the camera runs parallel to the two young men; at times, the camera comes excruciatingly close to their bodies, so that the men’s breathing could be one’s own. Why they are running, who may be in pursuit of them, the film does not clarify until much later. The only clue that Němec provides is through the soundtrack, a cacophony of gunfire and “Halt!” mixed with the young men’s breathing and their bodies brushing against dirt and foliage. Moreover, the film’s presentation of a limited number of events is circular and repetitive, all the better to create a claustrophobic atmosphere and magnify the young men’s frazzled state of mind and physical sensations over and above narrative coherence.
the camera runs parallel to the two young men; at times, the camera comes excruciatingly close to their bodies, so that the men’s breathing could be one’s own.
Němec makes constant use of flash cuts to convey sensation. If the spectator is more unmoored than anchored at the level of narrative, s/he is nevertheless held afloat and guided by recurring, haunting images at the level of sensation. Images of hands, legs, neck, and face covered with ants; trolleys in the city; city facades; one of the young men walking in an empty street; pillows at a windowsill; a woman and her cat looking out from a window ledge; inside a train car with older men in prison uniforms; legs walking on pavement; flash cuts of tracking shots of kids playing in snow, city spaces or the countryside. A combination of these shots persists throughout the film, like sparks of light flashing in one’s eyes and capturing the flow of past and present in one’s stream of perceptions and impressions. In the next section of the film, when the young men encounter a house in the countryside and one of them goes inside to ask for food, a series of shots of him rushing up to the woman of the house and beating her, details of objects, and their quiet looks at each other constitute one intense example of the film’s close blending of imagination and actuality, interiority and exteriority. In the third section, a new set of flash cuts hypnotically interact with the young men’s arrest: stairways, doorbells, elevators, alongside city spaces and facades.
Contributing greatly to the film’s unsettling atmosphere, as hinted at above, is Němec’s use of sound. If some of Němec’s imagery references his admiration for the work of Luis Buñuel, then his use of sound arguably references the influence of Robert Bresson. At any given moment the soundtrack could be of a bell tolling or people conversing, out of sync with what one sees. In this way, the soundtrack further opens up the space shown in the given image(s) to ambiguity and multiplicity, in an economic way. For instance, in the last section, when the two young men are taken outside to be executed, one sees the old German countryside guards raise their guns like a firing squad and one hears the order of “Attention! Fire!” But what follows instead are sounds of clapping and singing. Then one sees them running and walking again, through streets and the woods, as if condemned Sisyphus-like to do so. But in this way, the two young men always running and/or walking avoid an otherwise inevitable death. It also brings everyone back to the film’s outset, wavering in and out of time, in and out of narrative.
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