One of the formative works of the Czech New Wave, the school of creative new directors who burst on the scene in the 1960s, Jan Nemec’s 1964 debut feature is both grippingly stark and dazzlingly creative. Combining the realistic tale of two young men escaping from a train carrying them to a concentration camp during World War II with flashbacks and fantasies, Nemec pointed to the freewheeling style that would soon make colleagues like Milos Forman, Jan Kadar and Vera Chytilova international sensations. At the same time, his very personal assemblage of such influences as Luis Bunuel, William Faulkner, Alain Resnais and Robert Bresson may have been too individual to win the kind of acclaim that would greet other directors of the Czech New Wave.
Nemec had previously adapted “A Piece of Bread,” one of Arnost Lustig’s stories about the Holocaust, for his graduation project at FAMU, the Czech Academy of Performing Arts. He returned to Lustig when it came time to direct his first feature, acclaimed as the greatest Czech novelist to come out of World War II. This time he turned to the author’s autobiographical novel Darkness Casts No Shadow, inspired by the writer’s experiences as a concentration camp inmate.
The film starts with a long tracking shot, still the longest in Czech film history, as two young men (Ladislav Jansky and Antonin Kumbera) race through a rail yard and into a nearby forest as guns are fired in the distance. The pace is grueling, and Nemec’s cameras capture the growing pain and desperation as one of the boy’s injures his foot and hunger begins to take hold. In time this is intercut with one boy’s memories of trading his shoes for bread and riding in the train that was to take both young men to the camps. There also are surrealistic moments, possibly hallucinations caused by hunger and exhaustion, as when the forest’s trees start crashing around them or ants crawl over one young man’s face (a clear reference to Bunuel’s 1929 Un Chien Andalou). When the boys reach a farm, Nemec provides two versions of their encounter with the farmer’s wife, one in which she simply gives them food and another in which they rape her and leave her unconscious. This ambiguity continues into later scenes, including a grueling encounter with a group of older German hunters, with no clear sense of whether they succeed in escaping the Nazis.
That fragmentation of experience reflects the chaos of the war as experienced by those living in the midst of it. But it also questions our assumptions. Is our initial empathy with the young men justified? Are they true innocents running for their lives or criminals as depraved as the Fascist regime from which they flee? Is the whole simply a subjective view of the escape from some menacing Other, the random ramblings of a mind pushed to the limits of endurance?
For the leads, Nemec cast two non-professional actors. Jansky was a photographer who had acted only once before, in the 1963 On the Tightrope. Kumbera was a railway worker Nemec had spotted in the documentary Railwaymen (1963). He would never act again, while Jansky would appear in two more films before emigrating to the U.S., where he worked as a photographer, most notably for Frank Zappa and Hustler magazine. Jaroslav Kucera started out as the film’s cinematographer but left to attend a South American film festival. At that point Miroslav Ondricek, who would become one of Forman’s most reliable cinematographers, took over. The lengthy tracking shot that opens the film ate up one third of the picture’s budget.
Although not as commercially exploitable as films like Loves of a Blonde (1965) and Closely Watched Trains (1966), Diamonds of the Night won the Grand Prize for Best Debut Feature at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival and was cited for Best Editing in Films and Filming magazine when it reached Great Britain in 1965. It debuted in the U.S. in 1968, where it was given a pan by the New York Times’ Renata Adler. By that time, Nemec had fallen out with the Czech authorities over his satirical second feature, A Report on the Party and Guests (1966). When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, he lost his position at the official state studio and eventually emigrated in 1972. He would not return to the country until the fall of communism there in 1989. Among his later works was the short documentary “Arnost Lustig Through the Eyes of Jan Nemec.”
In recent years, Diamonds of the Night has attracted more attention from critics, particularly after a 4k restoration in 1968. Historians have always appreciated its place as one of the first Czech films to receive any kind of international recognition, at least in Europe. Contemporary critics have also hailed it for its daring creativity, the power of its soundtrack, which consists mostly of the sounds of heavy breathing and the ticking of a clock, and Nemec’s mix of ultra-realistic footage and fantasy to create a nightmarish atmosphere.
Producer: Ceskoslovensky Filmexport
Director-Writer: Jan Nemec
Based on the novel Darkness Casts No Shadow by Arnost Lustig
Cinematography: Jaroslav Kucera, Miroslav Ondricek
Score: Vlsatimil Hala, Jan Rychlik
Cast: Ladislav Jansky (1st Boy), Antonin Kumbera (2nd Boy), Vladimir Pucholt (Voice of Second Boy), Ilse Bischofova (The Woman), Ivan Asic, Jan Riha
By Frank Miller
