#969 Diamonds of the Night (Jan Němec, 1964)

#969 Diamonds of the Night

1964 // Czech // Jan Němec

Criterion Collection (LINK) / Letterboxd (LINK)

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT is a film of Holocaust which largely concerns with the state of mind of its protagonist rather than the history of Holocaust or plot advancement. The ‘story’ is simple but far from being straightforward as the film basically opens with two boys (played by Ladislav Janský and Antonín Kumbera) running away from the off-screen gun firing and shouting presumably from soldiers. But who are they? Why they are running, or more precisely what are they running from? Plot exposition is reduced to a minimal, almost none. Dialogues are as rare as the food the two boys could scarp in the forest. The hand-held camera gets so close and intimate with the characters that one could smell their pain and fear.

We follow the subconsciousness more than their physical presence as the scene would intermittently slip into illusory dream and distorted memory of a city assumed to be the past of the boys, the non-diegetic sound often contradicts with the boys’ perception of their surroundings. Yet we still feel their hunger and thirst by witnessing their blood-spitting dry mouth and grazed feet. When one of the boy enters into a farmhouse to search for food and has a ‘stand-off’ with a peasant woman, scenes are then shuffled intensely between imagination (the boy killing the woman), desire (the woman beguiling him on the bed) and a possible reality (the woman cutting a slice of bread and giving to the boy). The confusion and perplexity of reality is presented eloquently by the disorienting images dislocated from time and probability. Past, present, (possible) future are intermingled to form a singularity, Jan Němec‘s debut feature is arduous yet lyrical at once.

The film is based on the novel “Darkness Casts No Shadow” by Arnošt Lustig who was sent to Terezín and subsequently Auschwitz and Buchenwald during WWII. He had escaped from a death train and was recaptured three times, alike the unnamed boys in the film, all three times he was sentenced to death. The novels he wrote are not only about his personal experience but, as he himself put it, “proved that man is able to destroy his fellow man for a very small reason or without reason, for some demonic prejudices.”

The film has no exposition of how the boys end up in a death train, nor who exactly they are, but we sympathies for them as they are fleeing from a group of old men who are hunting them with guns like they are some sort of prey for entertainment. Near the end when the two boys are kept in a hall where the joyous old men celebrated their successful catch with a feast, their champing noise is disturbingly amplified from a subjective point of view, representing the boys‘ heightened state of mind. It’s the most torturing scene when human empathy is non-existent in a world of prejudice and, more likely, ignorance. The film offers no clear resolution, the parallel universes of the boys being executed or running away freely into another forest are shown respectively. It’s more like a projection of timeline than an open-ending, after spending the an hour running along with their consciousness, it’s understandably that we are eventually lost in a purgatory as well, either way it’s hell.

Film’s Trailer