Diamonds of the Night (1964) User Reviews

Visceral Czech Holocaust movie with superb editing

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 8/10 · 21 July 2010]

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.

Yes, the woods ARE dark and deep, but...

[boyzonee · 8/10 · 19 November 2001]

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep."

Some of you may know these Robert Frost lines from the Charles Bronson vehicle "Telefon" where a renegade Soviet intelligence officer (Donald Pleasence) used them for re-activating KGB sleepers in the USA.

In this Czekoslovakian movie the woods are dark and deep indeed, but there's definitely no time to sleep for the two young guys here, on the run from a Nazi concentration camp. The two escapees are being hounded by a band of old (and armed) German villagers, intent on killing them at any cost.

Jan Nemec's film isn't exactly easy to come by, so maybe that's why no one else has a comment on it. I myself haven't had an opportunity to watch it for more than 30 years. It seemed longer then, but actually runs only 63 minutes.

Based on a true story by Arnost Lustig who spent 3 years in Nazi camps and escaped on the way to Dachau. Remarkable b/w cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera and Miroslav Ondrícek that will linger on for a long time. Shouldn't be missed for that reason alone.

On The Trail of 2 Innocent Boys.

[turkerc · 6/10 · 3 November 2018]

I don't think this movie is much surrealistic as it tends to transmit the experience of 2 young boys' about concentration camps. But I do concur strongly that it is timeless. Apart the KL lettering on the back side of their jackets, there isn't much clue about time frame which this movie depicts. It could be easily about Stalinistic oppression too. It is beautifully shot and edited. Memories of boys are gently interspersed into stream. Other times there is documentary-style realism present. I think it reflects their inability to comprehend what it going on in world or at least in their particular view. They are running from soldiers, guns and concentration camps almost instinctively, like animals sensing danger. Hunting scene is the climax of the film. It is a very absurd and inequitable image that nearly 20 old guys with rifles are chasing 2 unarmed boys to death. The most unfavorable aspect of the movie is that it felt uncommunicative at many times, and that is mainly because characters rarely talk. Sounds were impressive though.

Dream-like and haunting. A one of a kind film experience

[Maciste_Brother · 10/10 · 24 June 2008]

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.

A jewel that deserves to see the light of day.

[brefane · 10/10 · 11 May 2007]

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.

Walkabout

[chaos-rampant · 27 August 2010]

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...

"I don't speak German."

[morrison-dylan-fan · 7/10 · 10 April 2016]

Talking to my dad about my plans to watch titles from Czech cinema during the Cold War for a month,I was happily caught by surprise when he revealed that he had recently picked up a Czech New Wave (CNW) movie. With it only having a 63 min running time,I decided it was time to uncover the diamonds of the night.

The plot:

Escaping from a train on the way to a Nazi concentration camp,two boys run into the woods.Trying to hide in the moonlight,the boys experience flashbacks from the horrors that they have seen the Nazis commit.Failing to stay hidden,the two boys are caught by a local shooting gang.

View on the film:

Going over the rugged terrain,Second Run gives the title a terrific transfer which retains the grain on the picture whilst offering a clarity to the central sound effects.

Following the boys in the woods with a frantic tracking shot,co- writer/(along with Arnost Lustig) director Jan Nemec delivers his debut with a full immense atmosphere,as Nemec and cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera keep an unreserved distance with jagged CNW panning shots to the boys which grip the war torn landscape in a documentary rawness. Tearing the exposition and dialogue in their adaptation of Lustig's autobiography to the bone, the writers grind the grain from the stark,almost silent images from the horrors of war with a chilling nightmare-logic unravelling of the fractured minds of the two boys,who shine like diamonds in the night.

Blew me away.

[idvegan · 10/10 · 3 October 2002]

This is an incredible film. Before viewing it I was told it wasn't available in the states, and what a shame. It's stark visuals and haunting imagery kept me on the edge of my seat. I wouldn't care if I got a version w/o subtitles because their are maybe 10 spoken lines, and time is played with as the viewer follows flash backs forwards and dream sequences. This is the best war movie I have ever seen. The beginning scene running up the hill is bone chilling.

If at all possible watch this movie.

Really liked it at first, then...

[wadetaylor · 7/10 · 20 November 2004]

This movie was hard to come by but I found it at the public library for rent. The video included Nemec's A Loaf of Bread, which oddly had subtitles, in German! I know as much German as Czech. Anyway about Diamonds of the Night. At the beginning I really liked the use of hand held camera and even without spoken word I knew what was going on, but as the movie progressed it over-surrealized itself, without establishing itself as a work of surrealism. I am not sure if the tape had the complete version because it just seemed to end with no resolution. Since no one else apparently has seen it, I may never know. It wasn't very long, and was pretty cool at first I'll give it 7/10.

A masterpiece.

[MOscarbradley · 10/10 · 24 March 2019]

Jan Nemec's 1964 masterpiece "Diamonds of the Night" is rightly considered one of the cornerstones of the Czech New Wave. It's a relatively short film, (only 66 minutes), but from its astonishing opening in which two boys race across fields while gunfire rings out around them, it never lets up. Virtually without dialogue, flashbacks or just thoughts in the boys' minds tell us they are fleeing from a train taking them to a concentration camp and that we are probably in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

So extraordinary is Nemec's handling of this fictional situation, we could be watching a documentary, (it's shot in black and white and often with a hand-held camera). The boys themselves were not professional actors, (one of them, Antonin Kumbera, never made another film), and their plight as they make their way through forests to their inevitable capture, is distressingly real and the luminous images have, what best could be described as a 'terrible beauty'. Once an art-house favourite, the film is seldom seen now but its recent release on Blu-ray should hopefully change that.

Making bread from scratch is hard. First you have to clear a field . . .

[tadpole-596-918256 · 6/10 · 28 December 2020]

. . . of a mountain of jagged rocks, as documented during DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT. Next you have to plow the field, sow some seed, weed and irrigate your crop, harvest the wheat and separate it from the chaff--then grow, gather, manufacture or purchase other ingredients, which are blended into your bread dough that in turn must be kneaded, baked and sliced. As pictured in DIAMONDS, some backwards regions are infested with members of the Lunatic Killers gang, who won't be caught dead going through ANY of these steps to earn their bread. They club farm wives to death instead, and pillage their loaves to be fed. This sort of depraved sloth, larceny and murder results in geezer firing squads being taxed to set things straight. But with plenty of beer on hand for the after action party, good times can be enjoyed by all.

beautiful, harrowing and haunting gem

[kubapieczarski · 9/10 · 28 August 2019]

Not so much a movie as much as a celluloid poem, Diamonds of the Night evokes the feeling of a dream (or in this case, a nightmare). Following two boys who escape a train heading for a concentration camp, the film follows as they escape into the woods, are fed stale bread by a farmers wife, are chased and eventually caught by a group of grotesque and bumbling old men who turn them in to the mayor. Within this minimal plot and virtually non-verbal backdrop, a lot is happening psychologically to both characters. As the memories and fantasies of the younger boy unfold, they give us a glimpse into the world they've no choice but to escape.

The cinematography by Jaromír Sofr, as with all Czech new wave films, is utterly beautiful, stark and emotional. The editing gives the film a rhythm that is hypnotic, weaving the viewer through a visual tapestry between past, present and reverie. The experience is a singular one, and a testament to the power of film as an art form of the highest order. Thanks to criterion for putting the gorgeous restoration of this masterpiece on the criterion channel!

Great camera work on an island in the garden

[mrdonleone · 7/10 · 22 March 2019]

So anyway most of this movie is on the Run and then you can enjoy nature the way it is and it's always nice to see a movie about nature and especially in a forest that resembles the one my grandparents used to have a house in for vacation you know and that you were hunting through the forest on the wild animals was very nice almost hunting like the Nazis are doing on the voice at a certain time in this movie and that is a very interesting but for the rest it's not really that much important no no no on the contrary what is nice to see is that they found some camera tricks in the early days of 1962 whenever this movie was made in still to be able to use a camera on an effect that even our days boots flabbergast the people and then and then it's a bit boring and a bit silly and becomes more a home Papa party but it's but it's still yeah interesting to know what happens to the heroes of the movie but it's more like definitely Swedish or a Polish movie in locking Marburg man or has many of the East European countries they had its hard to do in the wartime Jack and so because of this it is interesting to know the terrorism that happens that as well as the other movie that I saw come and see by the Russian guy I forgot his name but it was all so terrible movie about the horrors of war and when I say horror I don't usually think about scary things but always about Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now which was also about war and it's strange that war is always man-made and it's always the horrors that we think that we create is always what we did ourselves and blah blah blah blah blah and a lot of blah but for the rest what can we say about can we do this movie should be seen to enjoy the camera work yes inshallah

Czech WWII drama directed by Jan Nemec

[AlsExGal · 4/10 · 13 October 2022]

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.

Groundbreaking Czech new wave cinema

[t-dooley-69-386916 · 9/10 · 2 May 2015]

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.

Devastating

[gbill-74877 · 8/10 · 29 October 2023]

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.

A harrowing one-act movie

[ArtVandelayImporterExporter · 6/10 · 23 April 2024]

Two boys jump train en route from one concentration camp to another. Or so we're lead to believe.

I offer that proviso because we get a harrowing escape through the woods that appears to be as linear as it is harrowing. The lengthy tracking shot goes on for so long the actors need to bend over and use their arms and hands to continue to propel themselves forward, like a lower primate would. BTW, this was for decades my recurring nightmare.

At this point if you're not hooked you better check your pulse.

However, once the boys have put enough distance between themselves and the gunfire that is whizzing past their heads, they slow their pace and one of the main characters starts to hallucinate, likely from intense hunger.

From that point on, we don't know what's real and what's Memorex. But it's so exhilirating that I was 57 minutes into it before I realized the plot, such as it is, wasn't going anywhere. Then I noticed that the film was only 67 minutes long.

We get an unlikely resolution to the chase that appears to be a return to linearity. But then Directir Nemec subverts even that before we're done.

By the end, I wasn't sure whether any of it was real. It's ultimately a one-act escape film with hallucinations, plus a prologue. Memorable for its artistry, but not what I'd call ground-breaking storytelling. The synopsis of the novel upon which this film is based sounds a lot more interesting, to be honest.

Unique direction that deserves discussion

[jordondave-28085 · 8/10 · 13 November 2023]

(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.

diamonds in the night

[mossgrymk · 8/10 · 2 January 2021]

By eschewing a back story about and dialogue between the two escapees I assume that director Jan Nemec was trying to "universalize" them as symbols of all suffering humanity everywhere so that the viewer would have greater empathy than if she or he saw them as victims of a particular time and place. For me, though, the absence of characterization served only to further distance me from the two kids so that I felt as if I was observing their struggles rather than participating in them. The result is that I was moved by the horrendous imagery and sounds more than i was devastated by the destruction of people I felt I knew. Give it a B.

Lacks something that really makes a difference

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 12 September 2016]

"Démanty noci" is a Czechoslovakian movie from 1964, which means it is over 50 years old already. The director is Jan Nemec and he is also the one who adapted Arnost Lustig's story "Darkness has no Shadows". The film's international title, however, is "Diamonds of the Night" and for Nemec it is one of his most famous works, even if it has not received as much awards attention as some of the other stuff he did during his career. Nemec died earlier this year and this film we have here is among his early career works, he was not even 30 when he made it. It is the story of two boys fleeing from the Nazis and it is a black-and-white film that runs for only slightly over an hour, relatively short. Now you have all the basic information and can decide for yourself if you want to see it. The good news for foreign audiences is that there is almost no dialogue in here at all, so you can watch it without subtitles. Sadly, this is also one of the reasons why it is, on many occasions, pretty difficult here to see and understand what exactly is going on. It is certainly a very artsy film that has its very own niche despite the subject being very frequent of course in film. And it is a subject that I usually have a great interest in. But neither of the characters nor the story as a whole managed to make me care for any of the aspects or protagonists here. It was more weird than entertaining or informative. I don't recommend the watch.

MOVING BUT WHERE TO?

[Richie-67-485852 · 3/10 · 21 December 2020]

Often you find gems in the foreign film world that start just like this one so I am all in when I come across these types of films. In addition, Jewish persecution during the Hitler days, their camps and stories are endless, heartbreaking and make one pause and take note to put it mildly. Now to the film. It starts out well enough but mature and seasoned viewers notice that it dwells too long on scenes including well after the point made. That tells me they don't have a story. We remind ourselves that it is a movie made by another culture so we give the benefit of the doubt and watch on. It wanted to pay-off but never made the connection. Perhaps this viewer expected a more conventional story along the theme lines? One can relate to starvation, despair, injustice and so on but this movie cut a new path for its viewers but left me behind. When I watch a movie, I want to be led, directed, even drawn-in and a good script-story plus director can carry this off. I found myself having to do more work and less viewing to make sense of the story portrayed. The main actors never looked into those hand-held cameras which is quite a feat considering they were all over the place. There was a compelling part involving some old men existing rather than living making the point that poets ask us to consider. Is it worth a watch? Yes because it may be your cup of tea presented in such a way that it invokes deep thought, questions or sympathies. Not for me but thank you

Confused. Too much "nová vlna" for me.

[daviuquintultimate · 5/10 · 24 December 2023]

"Nová vlna" (New Wave) was a cinematic movement in Czechoslovakia, regarded as avant-gardist (in the sixties, when it bloomed), and, as far as I know, much cherished by critics and film historians up to now.

The few things we can state for certain about "Diamonds of the Night" is that there are two young men on the run, followed and harassed through the woods by a bunch of toothless and fanatic old nazis with hunting rifles as old as they are. And that's all.

All the rest is wrapped in mystery. Some (once) experimental cinematic trends are characterized by a fuzzy way of editing the movie (see for exemple the Soviet montage theory of the twenties): it's the same for the "nová vlna". As a result, for what regards "Diamonds of the Night" there are some important issues that are undecidable. We don't know if the two fugitives are shot, in the end, or not; we don't know if they kill people to get some food or it is given to them by good-hearted civilians; we don't even know if the story takes place in Czechoslovakia or in Germany: for each of the above alternatives the film offers and presents both horns of the dichotomies (they are killed, and they're not; they kill, and they don't; they are in one country, they are in the other). So it's up to you to decide, if you really are interested in deciding.

A as final consideration, let me say that the main nucleus of the plot is easily conveyed, and it could have been more easily conveyed, and wasting less time, if the run in the woods would have lasted, say, 5 minutes, instead of the 40 or more minutes of uninteresting and utterly repetitive footage.

Limited Holocaust chronicle disappoints despite impressive cinematography

[Turfseer · 4/10 · 14 March 2021]

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.

artsy-fartsy holocaust - a sure way to be successful?

[karlericsson · 1/10 · 6 June 2010]

This film represents the worst in cinema. It's "artsy-fartsy", which means that it pretends to have something to say by being incomprehensible. It's not David Lynch, who, in some of his films stumbles very near "artsy-fartsy" without actually delivering it. It's also not "Un chien andalou" (Bunuel), which does indeed evoke the feeling of a dream (as Lynch often evokes the feeling of nightmare) and therefore is not "artsy-fartsy". No, this is the work of the bulls-t artist, guarding himself with a holocaust-theme in order to make money with his shenanigans.

Other bulls-t artists guard themselves with nudity, which at least can be defended in that it sees vanity punished, meaning that the career-minded young actress lets herself be persuaded to strip in a "fine" "art-"film, which turns out to be just artsy-fartsy.

Yes, even art-films are business just as much art is business and no art at all.

What makes films like this one so abominable is that it prevents many people to see films that are truly art, like "Un chien andalou" or political films like "Bicycle Thieves" or "Burn!".

The Holocausts Had enough horror stories with out this made up garbage.

[ghcheese · 1/10 · 24 February 2021]

The old people would not have run these boys down. They did not support Hitler. It was the young and stupid just like today in the United States. The Horror comes from the young who say they fight factious. Sadly they are the Factious. The truth is those old people would have fed them and helped them escape.