Diamonds of the Night was Czech director Jan Nemec's first full-length feature film released in 1964. It's based on the true-life experiences found in Arnost Lustig's autobiographical novel Darkness Has No Shadow. Lustig was a Czech Jew who escaped from a train headed to Dachau concentration camp after it was attacked by allied aircraft. Nemec's film is a fictional account of two boys escaping from a train and hiding in the woods.
It's been my observation that successful neophyte directors usually display their potential prowess in the technical areas of filmmaking ("Diamonds" is no exception with its impressive hand-held cinematography and flashbacks-both dream-like and reality-based-chronicling the fate of the two boys who we see have little chance of escape).
Notably the film has little dialogue. It's more a tale of survival than anything specific related to the Holocaust. Nemec only seems to have a vague notion about Holocaust history. Missing is any in-depth examination of the Nazi terror, the nature and extent of the cooperation and collaboration of the occupied populace, characterization of the human faces who committed awful crimes and any sense of how the genocidal campaign (particularly against the Jewish population) took place, leading to the extermination of mass numbers of innocent people.
Much of the action takes place in the forest; one boy (whose shoes are falling apart) exchanges them for food with the other. There are flashbacks to the boys' earlier lives in Prague (as well as dream or fantasy sequences where you can't tell whether events actually transpired or not).
Desperate for food, the boys finally emerge from the forest and one of them obtains milk and bread from a farmer's wife (there appears to be a fantasy sequence in which the boy attacks and murders the woman). Why is that fantasy sequence included? Obviously to show the boy's inner thirst for revenge. But what does that prove? It seems gratuitous and completely unnecessary as the boys are in such bad shape, imagining that one of them can even dream up such fantasies while being given some food, seems unlikely.
Some reviewers have remarked that the end of the film features a "militia" hunting down the boys. The group of rifle-toting elderly men hardly seem like a militia at all. Rather they seem like a club or a hunting party. The fact that they speak German suggests that they are Sudeten Germans, an ethnic group living in Czechoslovakia during the war who were afforded favored status by the Nazi occupiers.
The fate of the two boys is left ambiguous-one scene has the elderly men pretending to shoot them and then letting them go while laughing; another scene shows the two boys shot and left for dead on the ground.
Despite the film's impressive cinematography, this first-time director only seems to grasp the true horror and gravity of the Holocaust in a superficial way. This little "slice of life" hardly begins to convey the enormity of the crimes committed during this particular time in history.
It's been my observation that successful neophyte directors usually display their potential prowess in the technical areas of filmmaking ("Diamonds" is no exception with its impressive hand-held cinematography and flashbacks-both dream-like and reality-based-chronicling the fate of the two boys who we see have little chance of escape).
Notably the film has little dialogue. It's more a tale of survival than anything specific related to the Holocaust. Nemec only seems to have a vague notion about Holocaust history. Missing is any in-depth examination of the Nazi terror, the nature and extent of the cooperation and collaboration of the occupied populace, characterization of the human faces who committed awful crimes and any sense of how the genocidal campaign (particularly against the Jewish population) took place, leading to the extermination of mass numbers of innocent people.
Much of the action takes place in the forest; one boy (whose shoes are falling apart) exchanges them for food with the other. There are flashbacks to the boys' earlier lives in Prague (as well as dream or fantasy sequences where you can't tell whether events actually transpired or not).
Desperate for food, the boys finally emerge from the forest and one of them obtains milk and bread from a farmer's wife (there appears to be a fantasy sequence in which the boy attacks and murders the woman). Why is that fantasy sequence included? Obviously to show the boy's inner thirst for revenge. But what does that prove? It seems gratuitous and completely unnecessary as the boys are in such bad shape, imagining that one of them can even dream up such fantasies while being given some food, seems unlikely.
Some reviewers have remarked that the end of the film features a "militia" hunting down the boys. The group of rifle-toting elderly men hardly seem like a militia at all. Rather they seem like a club or a hunting party. The fact that they speak German suggests that they are Sudeten Germans, an ethnic group living in Czechoslovakia during the war who were afforded favored status by the Nazi occupiers.
The fate of the two boys is left ambiguous-one scene has the elderly men pretending to shoot them and then letting them go while laughing; another scene shows the two boys shot and left for dead on the ground.
Despite the film's impressive cinematography, this first-time director only seems to grasp the true horror and gravity of the Holocaust in a superficial way. This little "slice of life" hardly begins to convey the enormity of the crimes committed during this particular time in history.