Release Date: April 16, 2019
Prices and Links:
Criterion: $31.96
Amazon: $27.99
Director: Jan Němec
Writers: Jan Němec, Arnost Lustig
Starring: Ladislav Jánsky, Antonín Kumbera, Ilse Bischofova, Ivan Asic, Jan Riha
With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czechoslovak New Wave. Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds of the Night closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, a hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual poetry. Along with visceral camera work by Jaroslav Kučera and Miroslav Ondříček—two of Czechoslovak cinema’s most influential cinematographers—Němec makes inventive use of fractured editing, elliptical storytelling, and flights of surrealism as he strips context away from this bare-bones tale, evoking the dizzying plight of consciousness lost in night and fog.
SPECIAL FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Prices and Links:
Criterion: $31.96
Amazon: $27.99
Director: Jan Němec
Writers: Jan Němec, Arnost Lustig
Starring: Ladislav Jánsky, Antonín Kumbera, Ilse Bischofova, Ivan Asic, Jan Riha
- Czechoslovakia
- 1964
- 67 minutes
- Black & White
- 1.37:1
- Czech, German
With this simultaneously harrowing and lyrical debut feature, Jan Němec established himself as the most uncompromising visionary among the radical filmmakers who made up the Czechoslovak New Wave. Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds of the Night closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, a hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual poetry. Along with visceral camera work by Jaroslav Kučera and Miroslav Ondříček—two of Czechoslovak cinema’s most influential cinematographers—Němec makes inventive use of fractured editing, elliptical storytelling, and flights of surrealism as he strips context away from this bare-bones tale, evoking the dizzying plight of consciousness lost in night and fog.
SPECIAL FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Interview from 2009 with director Jan Němec
- A Loaf of Bread, Němec’s 1960 student thesis film, based on a short story by Arnošt Lustig
- Arnošt Lustig Through the Eyes of Jan Němec, a short documentary on Lustig from 1993
- New interview with film programmer Irena Kovarova
- New video essay on the film’s stylistic influences by scholar James Quandt
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Atkinson
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