Diamonds of the Night is an unexpectedly beautiful, intense film that shows Jan Němec's control of the medium from his first feature. Short, it consists of little story: Two prisoners on the way to a concentration camp escape the train and run for their lives. The film opens abruptly with shots and two men running and stumbling up a hill as fast as they can. The tracking camera is close in as we hear their feet in the brush, the shots echoing behind them and their fast, tiring breathing. The scene runs for minutes, and we catch glimpses of them helping each other get away.
The visceral intensity of Diamonds comes from such close, physical detail. The first boy wears only a loose-fitting, thin shirt that offers little protection from the snags and needles of the conifer forest they escape into, and every time he falls or snags on a stick, we viewers wince. And the boy has no shoes, no protection from the cold, wet elements of the forest. The second, taller escapee has a coat and ill-fitting shoes that hurt his feet, and he lumbers as though he is walking in pain. As the weather varies from cold to wet, the boys take us through their intensely physical trials.
But Němec introduces great beauty into this suffering. Jaroslav Kucera’s black-and-white cinematography makes the boys’ forest a palette of blacks, whites and grays that flicker and shift as the camera looks up at the leaves overhead or in front of the young men to the branches in their path. The woods become a multi-toned blur, too, when the camera pans the woods as the boys run. Near starvation, the escapees come to a village, and Kucera’s camera captures the round face of a farm woman with the even light of portraiture. Soon, though, the same soft, complementary light is showing us the macabre and ugly old men who are awkwardly hunting down the young boys with the brutality they would use in hunting animals. Throughout their unrelenting cruelty, the film's cinematography gives these old men a grotesque beauty. The black-and-white cinematography in Diamonds recalls Jean Vigo’s short À propos de Nice, both for its monochromatic medium and for its focus on the distorted faces of the old villagers.
Elements of Diamonds also recall another Vigo short, Zéro de conduit. In the Vigo short, as the students take over the school, the film moves into a tone that resembles fantasy or reverie with its stylized celebration, and in Diamonds, the narrative of the boys’ suffering is interrupted by similar mental and tonal digression. Sometimes, we see a memory as one boy thinks back on trading his shoes to the other, and sometimes we something that may be a dream or a memory, like the shots of the boy walking along a field as seen from a chateau wall. There are scenes of cable cars and fraying city signs, and memories of women. At other times, the narrative digressions show the character’s thought, as when the boy is trying to decide what to do with the farm woman. And this eruptive device, which often introduces beauty into the intensity of the boys’ suffering, becomes key to the ending of the film.
At barely over an hour, Diamonds of the Night is both an intense and beautiful aesthetic experience, a rare piece of cinematic art that is truly under appreciated.
