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.
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