Diamonds of the Night: Into the Woods

At least, that was the sense I had first watching  Němec’s cataract, as teenager in film school myself; the other New Wave insurgencies offered up, from everywhere, could feel genteel and secondhand by comparison. It’s a burn that hasn’t healed over—the leaner Němec’s film seems, the larger its circumference of reverb expands. Of course, what we took for hyperreality in the movie’s first act may not necessarily be “real” at all—Němec’s scheme quickly broadens, approaching his ambition for what he called “dream realism” by shuffling diegetic “reality,” memories (of the transport the boys escaped from, for example), and various modes of hallucination (the German camp acronym “KL,” for Konzentrationslager, painted on the protagonists’ long coats, as they dash through train cars and saunter past Nazis on sunlit city streets). The weave aggregates into a shifting consciousness caught on plastic, a torrential object mirroring a subjectivity scarred by experience. But the subjectivity doesn’t steer our empathy or understanding, because it’s not attributed to either boy—or to anyone at all. It just is; it’s the film itself, its own concrete manifestation of doubt and torment and hope. In the fantasy chunks, the rotten foot is healed, and the boy’s desperately needed cane is twiddled idly—a wishful daydream that could belong to either boy, or both, or Němec, or us.

The moment of Diamonds of the Night was a heady one, on the edge of the Iron Curtain in the post-Khrushchev-thaw years, a young culture filthy with samizdat, underground artist alliances, and dissident cabals, but Němec stood out as a John Brown among obstreperosities. Even his film-school career was riven by charges of insubordination, threats of expulsion, and censorship; denied permission to shoot one Lustig story for his thesis short film, he simply chose another and bulldozed through (with 1960’s A Loaf of Bread), winning festival awards in Amsterdam and Oberhausen. Famously, his second feature, the conscientiously provocative parable A Report on the Party and Guests (1966), was banned by the government “forever,” and by the end of the decade, Kamil Pixa, the general manager of the production company Krátký film Praha, reportedly explained the filmmaker’s blacklisting to his face thus: “You know, Němec, we can’t let you make movies. You are so clever and such a swine. You would learn how to do it better than those who we are allowing to work now, those nontalented cretins. You would build up your position, and when the party and society stopped watching you, you would stab us in the back. You are unreliable. Simply forget about making films again.”

You think of the well-known crack, recounted by André Breton in Les manifestes du surréalisme, of Paul Valéry’s about his poet’s anti­pathy toward writing novels because he could never bring himself to put down a sentence like “The marquise went out at five o’clock.” With his first films, Němec kept faith with this protomodernist poetical recalcitrance, and in Diamonds of the Night he pursues it with an obstinate rigor usually reserved for avant-garde filmmakers, from Dziga Vertov to James Benning. Even the film’s last act, which otherwise explodes with bald-faced social critique (the German locals, drunk and dancing and slobbering their sausages, hit the hills for a shooting party with their family shotguns and capture the two starving fugitives), launches into fitful abstraction, with granular-detail still lifes (hallways, windowsills, keyholes), repeated splats of hallucinatory action (an old-timer’s boozy jig), and a much-noted and fascinatingly indeterminate two-pronged ending, in which the boys are executed by these self-indulgent old Germans and then escape again (or still) into the forest.

Němec, in any case, did not have the career he should have, interrupted as it was at the end of the Prague Spring and then running in low gear in Germany, France, and the U.S. for two decades, before he returned to Prague after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 to make a handful of very odd, free-form valedictory films up until his death in 2016. By the same token, given the kind of artist Němec was, it may’ve been the only career imaginable for him, an abbreviated and brawl-scarred calendar of resistance, against conformity and orthodoxy and whatever force of state or business might insist he make cinema its way or no way at all. It’s more than fitting that his two masterpieces, Diamonds of the Night and A Report on the Party and Guests, however different, are both bitter, roiling currents of struggle, in which the besieged individual is offered no hope for himself but fights on regardless.