Jan Nemec - Demanty Noci (AKA ''Diamonds of the Night'')

One of the earliest Czech New Wave films, Jan Němec’s debut feature Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) is also one of the most startling, and remains a thrillingly original piece of cinema even today. Shot largely hand-held and virtually dialogue-free, it follows the desperate journey of two teenage boys who successfully escape a train (presumably) bound for a Nazi concentration camp, only to find themselves hunted down by a band of old men whose physical decrepitude doesn’t make them any less lethal.




As they run through dense, rugged and unfamiliar terrain, their escape is interpolated with their dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and memories. Like Forbidden Games, Fires on the Plains, and Grand Illusion, Diamonds of the Night is an anti-war film that does not deal with actual warfare. With a minimum of dialog, the film conveys the boys' physical and psychological deterioration with a maximum of cinematic bravura.



Unlike other films based on Lustig's writing, Němec's film constantly breaks with conventional narrative and psychological motivation. He is not interested in telling a story or explaining the actions of his characters, but in making a close identification with their mental state. The novella, of course, also employs a flashback structure, but it is conventionally motivated.



Rarely attempted in cinema—Démanty noci is one of the few examples—this is an entirely logical, even "realist", approach. The focus on physical sensation is conveyed through texture, lighting, and sound-harsh sunlight on jagged rocks, ants filling the socket of an eye, the sound of rain soaking into the earth, a bubble of blood in a dry mouth, a fantasy scene of childish laughter on crisp winter air.

Němec's admiration for the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel is evident in this work, with obvious influences from Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928) and L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age, 1930). However, these are no mere quotations and are embedded in Němec's own approach.



For a feature debut by a director still in his twenties, Diamonds of the Night is an extraordinarily confident piece of work, and it still looms large in Němec’s output as a whole - though the brilliant career that this seemed to foreshadow ended up moving in fits and starts, with huge and unintended gaps in his filmography. Although Němec was never as much of a victim as, say, Sergo Paradjanov in the USSR (he did at least avoid prison, though by all accounts only just), his patchy post-1960s career is a testament to the difficulty of maintaining a genuinely uncompromising creative stance in systems - whether communist or capitalist - that have very different priorities.




A realistic and memorable film….



Notes:Well,I've used ''Free User Account'' for all my uploads(because I can't remember my password on rs.com,but I've saved it on IDM) so,as far as I know my files will live only 90 days.So hope you download them soon.Sorry everyone.(I hope to get a new premium account next month)