Diamonds of the Night

D.O.T.N is an exercise in formalism that attempts to express the anxiety, fear and memories of two Jewish men desperately trying to elude their Nazi captors who want them dead.The narrative shifts back and forth in time, and it's presented in a quasi-abstracted fashion, edited in an aggressive montage style with rapid cutting techniques seemingly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague. It's impressively visceral, but the formal trickery wears thin and lacks a deeper sense of purpose.

There's some really impressive touches and striking, resonant images here, expressing a genuinly impressionistic notion of reality and articulating the nervous desperation and indeterminate memories of the main characters... But I was not engrossed by this dizzy flow of cloudy images, not absorbed in the bewilderment of time and place and psychological anxiety.

From the opening scene tracking two teen boys as they frantically scramble up a hill, the sound of gunfire cracking the soundtrack, Diamonds of the Night is a harrowing experience -- a story of the Holocaust without overt horrors, without heroics, told from the level of basic human instinct as these boys try to survive.

the highlight is definitely the gang of old men, which is almost lynchian in its surreality, but they don't come in until more toward the end, and everything up until that point is insanely boring. one hour long, but it felt like three. the flat characters are more general symbols than real living people. also, for a movie that's mostly visual, the visuals are ass.

An unusual holocaust film, very quiet and somewhat impressionistic, with a sense of time purposely disrupted by non-linear montage-style editing. Though not the top of the crop, it's a classic representative of the Czech New Wave.

audiovisual 85 acting 80 overall feeling 78 avg 81

Viewed February 15, 2022. Jan Nemec's spare, haunting film about two Jewish boys on the run during the Nazi occupation. Shooting the film in winding, close-up tracking shots as the boys run through the woods, Nemec achieves a verite effect, but undermines that through bits of surrealism or more jarring editing choices that break this harshly conceived reality. It's such a sensory-driven film, eschewing dialogue or plot for a series of visceral images and movements.

It's like inhaling a euphoric dab of visceral cinema. It engages with both the primal and cerebral; the personal and historical. It fragments the linearity and causality of events with the desperation of hurriedly processing one's own trauma moments before death. Profound.

Must've greatly influenced the work of directors such as Bela Tarr in how incredibly elemental it feels: every footstep, every breath, every drop of rain is perfectly pronounced which immerses the viewer from start to finish. But aside from some great sound mixing, the lack of character development keeps the film from being anything more than a formal exercise in experimentation and fragmented storytelling.

I dislike montages in films and this film is essentially a 65 minute montage. That being said the imagery and sense of urgency were really well done but I was never invested and I started to actively dislike the jump cut editing and multiple reused, repetitive scenes. I nearly turned the movie off out of boredom during the last part of the film during the scenes with the Doddering Old Fools.

Isso aqui é extremamente literário também, tendo visto ontem o Je t’aime, je t’aime pude averiguar as semelhanças na montagem com o cinema de Resnais onde o tempo é fluído e não fixo, como nada é linear nunca sabemos ao certo o que é realidade ou imaginação, se é passado, presente ou futuro, enquanto Nemec não é particularmente inovador nesse sentido tendo em vista Marienbab, o trabalho dele é preciso e consistente. Box Versátil Nouvelle Vague Tcheca.

Spoilers. When you find a limited amount of food and drink after almost dying of thirst and starvation, you make sure to not waste any. These kids finally get something to eat and drink then let half of it fall all over the ground. They didn't even finish the drink. Stupid.

It's silent, it's painful, it's partly fragmentalized, and outright disgusting. The two main characters don't speak much, but their suffering is evident. The nazis are depicted as old, gluttunous demons whose main hobby is hunting jews as if they were wild animals. They outright disgusted me. Disgust is not a pleasant emotion, but it is an emotion not easily woken in this manner. The story is simple, but the execution is fairly good.

This film will leave you short of breath. It's told with a pressing urgency and fierce passion, and features brilliant black and white photography and some fantastic camerawork. You can almost smell the sap from the trees and pine scent in the air as the camera rushes up slopes and through gulleys at breakneck pace.

Pretty impressive and aesthetically advanced considering it's mostly just two kids walking in the woods...