A tense, brutal story of two Jewish boys who escape from a train transporting them from one concentration camp to another. Ultimately, they are hunted down by a group of old, armed home-guardists. The film goes beyond the themes of war and anti-Nazism and concerns itself with man's struggle to preserve human dignity.
Diamantes en la noche, Noites de Diamantes, Nattens diamanter, Yön timantit, Les Diamants de la nuit, Διαμάντια της Νύχτας, Az éjszaka gyémántjai, I diamanti della notte, 夜のダイヤモンド, Diamenty nocy, Diamantele nopţii, Алмазы ночи, Diamantes de la noche
USA
USA
imminent death experienced in a disorienting, constantly roaming present of grotesque, hallucinatory detail. very beautiful tracking shots and subjective editing/sound design that form this strange historical loop viewed through a wandering mind.
Holocaust features abound still nowadays. So what would it make Démanty Noci to shine above most of them? Its sheer honesty. Jan Nemec explores a side of war catastrophe that no other movie has shown: the inner thoughts of youth amidst harrowing circumstances. Modern society labels this as surrealism. It is not: it is a journey through disturbed minds.
We say that thoughts and fantasies may distract us from reality. However, in such harsh and awful circumstances, it is the thoughts and fantasies that took these youngsters to either an idealized existence or to their past, better lives. Hence, reality is the distraction from a better life. I really hope none of us ever understand this.
99/100
Very special entry in the Czechoslovak New Wave. Visceral and energetic. Gorgeous cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera (Daisies). Very interesting cutting that requires the viewer to fill in blanks and conclude for herself what is and isn't reality.
Scans are the same for both Second Run and Criterion.
“The image was digitized from the original negative on Agfa and Kodak film stock in 4K. Missing parts were replaced from a duplicate positive. The source of the sound was the sound negative. The goal of digital restoration was to make the film available in a form similar to what audiences would have seen at the time it was first released, in 1964,” - said Tereza Frodlová from the Czech National Film Archive.…
A bell rings incessantly. A clock ticks in the distance. For whom this bell tolls and this clock ticks, time is irrelevant, if not non-existent. Dreams, memories, hallucinations, hopes, doubts... reality. It sets in and there is no where to go. No light at the end of the tunnel for these two unnamed Konzentrationslager escapees. Only certain death by way of an unyielding, evil regime. Jan Nemec’s staggering minimalist masterpiece Diamonds of the Night does not bother with exposition. There is very little dialogue in the film. Instead, we are shown glimpses of the past and present. Distortions of reality both before, during and after the events taking place onscreen. Our characters enter a state of delirium as they wander aimlessly through the…
Jan Nemec's debut feature film is sustained by its minimalist form of eternal and tireless flight, only interrupted by evocative and dreamlike snippets presented in flashback format. It is in this simplicity where the director finds the way to transmit the sensations of suffering and overwhelm to the spectator, who witnesses an impetuous search for survival on the part of the protagonists, without a doubt Nemec was one of the outstanding authors of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 60s, the most prolific decade of cinema in the former Central European republic, in which he directed this peculiar and evocative work about the Jewish holocaust based on the story written by Arnost Lustig about his own experiences in the horror…
Diamonds of the Night is an intense, in your face, depiction of two boys on the run from a deportation train on it's way to a concentration camp.
Filmed up close and personal, aided by breathtaking cinematography, it manages to utilize the short running time to full effect, and I was hooked right away.
Jan Nemec' debut feature is really something else, a visual nightmare of both the horrors of war, civil or otherwise (the unfolding events are actually not limited in scope to just WWII, as it is never mentioned), and sections of dream like sequences telling an alternative route the life of one of the boys could have taken.
A disgusting last third, I can't say too much without spoiling, is an honest depiction of humanity's faults and darker side. Rough stuff.
I have this fetish for pictures of rain, nobody does it better than Diamonds of the Night.
2/30: Czechia (2018: 27th out of 27, 2019: 2nd out of 30)
One of those highly respected but lesser-known directorial debuts, Diamonds of the Night stands near the likes of Truffaut, Welles, and Godard as the first, and sharpest, in a long career of hits. Jan Nemec was a standout in the Czech New Wave, though hindsight hasn't bestowed unto him a ton of added international popularity. This film in particular got a Blu-ray release from The Criterion Collection, with two more getting added to their "Pearls of the Czech New Wave" set (DVD only), but this being his most famous film on either website, it still barely scrapes 2,000 views on Letterboxd, and not…
Definitely "Diamonds of the Night", by Jan Nemec, and released in 1964 as one of the films of the Czech New Wave, displays a powerful feeling of immediacy, with your eyes jarred by the movements of the camera following the desperate escape attempt of two Jewish boys during World War II, but also taken into their subjective memories of Prague and more subjective fantasies that show one of them standing with a young woman, and even the stuff in the present is presented subjectively, but in all those scenes that intermingle present with memory or fantasy the boy is wearing the long coat with the letters KL painted on it, signifying concentration camp prisoner, as if even his memories and…
Jan Němec's debut feature is undoubtedly his masterpiece and one of my favourite films of the Czech New Wave. It is an extreme essentialization of its source novel, Darkness Casts No Shadow, which recounts the true story of the author's escape from a death camp at the age of 16. Every aspect of the filmmaking is superb, each could substantiate its own essay, and all coalesce to elevate the film well beyond the 20th century's fixation with filmed theatre, without actually spilling into the realms of avant-garde. The sheer precision of this paring away of all that is extraneous (dialogue, context, etc) to the core phenomenology of the story produces a pioneering work of cinematic art that is profoundly experiential,…
Jan Němec: I will show you the depths of humanity's hope, compassion, cruelty and despair in 67 minutes.
Zack Snyder: I need four hours for the superpeople to punch everyone.
Hear the church bells ringing,
glass shattered, clinging always clinging,
casting kaleidoscopic visions,
through these memories, collisions,
running in the dead of night,
sounds of nothing, constant ringing,
hear the choir singing, singing always singing.
Jan Němec’s Démanty noci (Diamonds of The Night) from 1964, is a film telling the story of two Jewish boys' escape, through a scattered narrative and poetic editing.
Démanty noci manoeuvres multiple planes of reality. Memories of time past emanate from the minds of the protagonists. Their thoughts made visible. Past, present, dreams and delusion merge as the boys lose sanity.
Their escape seems unending, a perpetual search for provisions and protection. Their escape seems futile, as their stalkers always seem to be just a…
305. review: Jan Neměc and Jonathan Glazer
Unfortunately, I think 'The Zone of Interest' is not an interpretation but a mere illustration of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, the 'banality of evil'. The problem with Jonathan Glazer's popular picture book, however, is not just that he seems to know nothing about philosophical developments after Arendt. A much bigger problem is what one enthusiastic critic said, unwittingly revealing the main shortcoming: "Instead of showing fascination even as a criticism of the central characters, Glazer renders the fascists as flat, dull objects." FLAT, DULL OBJECTS. And, yes, the critic got the inspiration for this telling phrase from Glazer himself, who declared: "These characters have no faces. There's no conscience, there's no salvation, there's…
