Diamonds of the Night & A Loaf of Bread

Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci)

Directed by Jan Němec. With Antonín Kumbera, Ladislav Jánsky, Irma Bischofova
Czechoslovakia 1964, 35mm, b/w, 64 min. Czech with English subtitles
A driving forward motion propels Němec’s debut feature, an almost wordless film that jumps between silence and bursts of gunfire, close-ups and long shots, the present and a time that may be past or future, real or dreamed. As in A Loaf of Bread, two young men flee a train taking them to a prison camp. They search for food in the countryside while trying to remain unseen, resorting to violence in their desperation. Caught by a militia made up of doddering old men, they face a firing squad, where perhaps freedom and youth are the actual targets. Diamonds in the Night is a startling, accomplished debut, unconcerned with exposition, favoring raw depictions over plot, with glimpses of city life and surreal vignettes that imitate and equal early Buñuel and Vigo.

Preceded by

A Loaf of Bread (Sousto)

Directed by Jan Němec
Czechoslovakia 1960, 35mm, b/w, 11 min. Czech with English subtitles
In this swift short made as his FAMU graduation film, Němec encapsulated what was to become his first feature. Based on a story by Arnošt Lustig, a writer who had escaped from the Theresienstadt concentration camp, this tense film studies a pair of starving young prisoners as they attempt to steal food from a Nazi supply train. Němec has noted the influence Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) had on his early work—revealed here in his precise framing as well as the concentration on details of hands and faces. Němec’s mastery of form and his close attention to the desperation brought on by war previewed the haphazard barbarity he would reveal in Diamonds of the Night.

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