LES DIAMANTS DE LA NUIT

English description

English title: DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT Original title: DEMANTY NOCY Directed by : Jan Nemec With : Ladislav Jansky, Antonin Kumbera, Irma Bischofova, Frantisek Vrana, Rudolf Stolle, Karel Navratil Czechoslovakia, 1964, 65 min DVD 9, zone 2, Noir & Blanc Original Czech version, with French subtitles Bonus : chaptering · restored master · new subtitles Booklet 20 pages : Press Review of the period of the film, "The Miracle of Czechoslovak cinema" by A. Liehm (article from 1963), filmography DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT is the tense and 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-guardians. The film goes beyond the themes of war and anti-Nazism and concerns itself with man's struggle to preserve human dignity. Nemec's career as a filmmaker in the late 1950s when he attended FAMU, the most prestigious institution for film training in Czechoslovakia. At this time, Czechoslovakia was a communist state subservient to the USSR and artistic and public expression was subject to censorship and government review. However, thanks largely to the failure of purely propagandist cinema in the early 1950s and the presence of important and powerful people within the Czechoslovak film industry, such as Jan Procházka, the 1960s led to an internationally acknowledged creative surge in Czechoslovak film that became known as the Czech New Wave, in which Němec played an instrumental part. The film historian Peter Hames has described him as the "enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave." DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT was the first full-length movie from Czech filmmaker Jan Nemec and as many of the films that conformed the Prague Spring the movie is a perfect synthesis of different artistic movements (expressionism, surrealism, neorealism) and techniques, with a strong influence of documentary films. Nemec is not interested in the narration but he wants to implicate the spectators in the protagonists' experiences through the fabrication of an identity close to their mental state (with the support of subjective camera). Nemec has compared the movie with Tarkovski's IVAN'S CHILDHOOD due to in the film the reality is constantly sublimated through the dreams and visions provocated by the semi-feverish state of the two fugitives, in a kind of poetic realism. Nemec's motivations in placing the viewer in the skin of the two boys occupies a central role in the film since from a metaphysical point of view the film shows the struggle that everyone must choose along his life for freedom.