Screen: Focusing on the Outer Edge of Existence
By RENATA ADLER, HOWARD THOMPSON
Published: March 15, 1968
"DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT," which opened yesterday at the Bleecker Street Cinema, is a realistic Czechoslovak film about two escapees from a German concentration camp; it makes one realize just how valid and necessary absurdism, particularly the austere absurdism of great dramatists like Beckett or even Pinter, is.
The two young men (played by Antonin Kumbera and Ladislav Jansky) run for a long time, and the handheld camera runs realistically with them—becoming dizzy when they tire, taking on their memories and hallucinations, ducking and hiding, and resting when they do. With one of them, it keeps removing a shapeless bandage to examine an injured foot. It shows the condition of their mouths when, after starving for many days, they try to eat a piece of bread. It shows them hounded and caught and released. For long stretches of the film there is no sound except their breathing, or church bells, or the ticking of a clock. It is all quite depressing and real, and when one sits through it all one feels one has accomplished something.
The problem is that it doesn't really work and that it probably cannot be done this way. If you want to convey monotony it has to be stylized; it cannot be lifted from life intact and conveyed on the screen. And for characters on the outer edge of existence, living an extreme of misery, realism is somehow inappropriate. One loses interest. It looks unreal. Two men running, one ceaselessly preoccupied with his foot, the other in a kind of trance, both hounded by a band of toothless German-speaking Czechoslovaks—in Beckett it would be stark and stylized to the point of ritual. The documentary spirit is too real to draw one in.
Jan Nemec, who directs, seems aware that when an artist is being deliberately dreary he must know exactly what he is doing. The movie, in its own slow time, is very carefully made. It is only that one becomes accustomed to its desperation very quickly — as eyes adjust to the dark — and then one finds one's way about too comfortably.
"Diamonds of the Night" was shown at the Czech Film Festival at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year.
The titles that appear in this silent classic are extraordinary: "The Chaps Get Busy;" "Blow the Hooter." And the music, whose dramatic line is almost entirely divorced from anything that is going on in the story, leads a lunatic life of its own.
DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT, screenplay by Jan Nemec and Arnost Luistig, from a story by Mr Lustig; directed by Mr. Nemec. A Caskoslovensky Film Production released by Impact Films. At the Bleecker Street Cinema, 144 Bleecker Street. Running time: 70 minutes.
First . . . . . Antonin Kumbera
Second . . . . . Ladislav Jansky
The Woman . . . . . Ilse Bisehofveva