Diamonds of the Night

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT   ****

Jan Němec

1964

IDEA:  Escaping from a train en route to a German concentration camp, two young men seek refuge in the woods.

BLURB:  Through feverish montage at once physically immediate and atemporal, Diamonds of the Night astonishingly conjures a threshold consciousness poised somewhere between a waking nightmare and a quivering dream, a death rattle and a vision of immortality. Never giving primacy to one over the other, Němec instead collapses an eternity’s worth of perceptual states into an unbelievably tense 60-odd minutes, creating a hypnagogic skein of documentary realism, memory, and dream. It’s as much a multi-sensory immersion in character subjectivity as it is a sort of out-of-body cinematic haunting. At first thrusting the viewer into the earthly peril of its two protagonists, whose panicked flight into the woods is captured in breathless long take, the film soon introduces hallucinatory intervals and reveries, slipping both into and out of their besieged psychical states. The palpable, urgent details of their environment and circumstances - mud-streaked skin, gnawing hunger, mazes of trees, an incapacitated foot - are adjoined with flashes to indeterminate times and places, movements made and imagined. These could be before, during, or after the war; fantasies of capture and escape; perspectives that assert and then defy the corporeal rootedness of the characters. A multitude of potentialities ripple outward with elemental force, concentrating the specificities of the boys’ experience into a pervasive, eternal historical vapor, a consciousness passed down and shared by us all. The arresting black-and-white images, highlights blazing against the darkness like the titular gemstone, sear the retinas and stir the mind. The film has hardly any dialogue, and requires even less: bypassing language, its resonance is visceral, densely affective, practically metabolic, giving form to both traumas and dreams that never die.