Diamonds of the Night

Jan Nemec's 1964 Diamonds of the Night is essentially an hour-long student picture, the sort of thing that an earnest young man in an Eastern bloc country (Nemic is analumni of Prague's famous FAMU) directs to show that he has the native skill and technical accomplishment to move onto something bigger, better, and more meaningful.  The film exhibits extraordinary proficiency and it's exciting in a grim, joyless sort of way, but the picture is too resolutely unpleasant and dire to be taken seriously.  I found that watching the movie was an ordeal.

Two boys escape from a train bound to a concentration camp.  They flee through a vast, scary forest like characters in a Grimm Brother fairy tale for a quarter hour before anyone speaks.  Then, they come to an isolated farm-house, either steal or are given some food -- pivotal plot elements are intentionally ambiguous in this movie-- an encounter that triggers a surreal manhunt.  The posse pursuing the boys are all old German Home Guards between 75 and 85 years old, ancient wrecks tottering up the wooded hills with antiquated shotguns in a slow motion pursuit.  Notwithstanding the superannuated nature of the pursuers, the boys are in even worse shape than their elderly pursuers:  wet, starving, hobbled by bad shoes, scarcely able to run themselves.  Ultimately, the elderly search party catches up with them.  The old men feast on roast chicken, sausage, and beer while waiting for the authorities to arrive and take possession of their prisoners.  The authorities either don't show up or they do and the boys are either executed or they are let go -- in the film's final scene, the two boys are still stumbling through the crepuscular forest.  This is the whole story -- the film is only 64 minutes long.  And, even at that length, Nemec pads the material with either flashbacks or hallucinations of some kind -- we see the boys wearing long coats marked in paint "KL" (Konzentration Lager) casually riding streetcars and wandering around the eerily empty streets of Prague.  Whether these scenes, often visually striking, represent a dream of freedom or an earlier memory is unclear.  One of the boy's seems to have a girlfriend in Prague, although she doesn't come to door when he rings the bell -- it may be that they are visiting a brothel in a dim alleyway in the city.  Sequences repeat and the same shots are used half a dozen times -- an uncanny image of pillows piled on a windowsill is repeated at least four or five times:  either it's a dream or an image of the sort of pillowy comfort that the harried boys desire or has something to do with sex.  We just don't know.  The Supplements to the film, excellent as always with Criterion, note that even laconic summaries as to film's plot frequently vary on key points.  For instance, we don't know if the kids are Jews fleeing a train that will take them to their extermination or military deserters -- both possibilities are implied. (The movie is based on a novella by a Jewish Auschwitz survivor and so the wise money is on the former option.)

Fully a third of film's budget, which must have been minuscule, was devoted to the showy opening shot, a bravura tracking image that lasts two minutes and shows the boys fleeing across a clear cut in the forest, the train stopping somewhere behind them, and the sound of machine gun fire.  This shot requires the boys to scramble up a steep hill -- it looks like it's sloped about 45 degrees or more.  (Pictures taken on location show a ski-jump like track system ascending the face of the brambly, clear-cut hillside.  Nemec made four takes with this set-up and says that all of them were ruined in some way.)  The densely saturated black and white image of the boys scrambling up the hill returns at intervals throughout the movie -- it's impressive but only one iteration shows how extremely steep the the hill actually is.  The scene has a dreamlike quality -- it's like the sort of hazards and obstacles one encounters in a nightmare, a landscape that tilts in such as way as to become essentially impassable.  This shot rhymes with the harrowing slow motion pursuit, more conventionally cut, a crowd of old men in hunting caps and suits and ties staggering like zombies up a steep hill as the boys flee in front of them -- this is also exceedingly nightmarish particularly since the camera emphasizes the haggard, elderly, and senile appearance of most of the men:  it's like an allegory of crabbed old age pursuing youth.  Ascent imagery is also distributed through the film in the form of spiral stairs in Prague, a steep sledding hill on which figures that Brueghel might have limned are playing  in the snow, and, finally, an uncanny elevator in an ancient framework of filigree-scaffolding.  The film's surrealism is thoroughgoing and overt - we see ants pouring out of a hole and covering a boy's wrist and hand and later, seeming to swarm out of his eye.  A vast field of scree somehow tempts the boys to ascend and we watch them hobbling upward over unstable shattered rocks.  (Here's where I began to sense that the film was primarily surrealist in affect -- why would people who are hiding with ravaged, blistered feet ascend a nightmarish landscape of this kind? -- it's a purely expressionistic landscape.  Similarly, when the old men in the posse feast, the audience is treated to big close-ups of their toothless jaws masticating chicken bones and gnawing on sausage, the sounds of their chewing mercilessly amplified -- it's deeply unpleasant particularly since the wounded and starving boys are standing in the room, facing a wall.  Just about every scene is shot with an alternative:  when one of the boys enters the farmhouse and sees an austere, forbidding-looking woman, he either murders her or simply begs for bread.  At the end of the movie, the boys are either killed by a firing squad comprised of the nasty-looking old men or survive a mock execution in which the old men actually applaud them.  We see the boys lying dead on the road and, also, escaping through the woods.  James Quandt offers a visual essay pointing out five influences on the film -- they are Bresson, Resnais' Last Night at Marienbad, Bunuel and Dali, Tarkovsky's The Childhood of Ivan etc.  But I thought the film most resembles aspects of Ambrose Bierce's Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, not mentioned by Quandt -- there is a sense that, perhaps, the whole story is imagined, a plot confabulated in a dying brain, and that the boys may have been gunned down even as they jumped from the fatal train.  (The way that the movie is shot closely resembles the great French version of Bierce's story shown on Twilight Zone  in February 1964, made by Robert Enrico, a nearly silent 28 minute movie, also in intense black and white so as to resemble the photographs of Matthew Brady -- the movie won a prize at Cannes in 1962.)

I didn't like the movie but it's impressive enough in a grim way and more interesting to think and write about than to see.  The two actors are non-professionals.  One of them was "shunter" in a railyard near Prague.  After the movie, the boy fancied himself a movie star, got into fights and broke his leg and, then, simply vanished.  The other boy left Czechoslovakia -- he was a photographer and ended up in LA working for Hustler magazine.  Nemec tells us he specialized in close-shots of female genitalia.