"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.

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.

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.