DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT

Jan Nemec's 1964 masterpiece "Diamonds of the Night" is rightly considered one of the cornerstones of the Czech New Wave. It's a relatively short film, (only 66 minutes), but from its astonishing opening in which two boys race across fields while gunfire rings out around them, it never lets up. Virtually without dialogue, flashbacks or just thoughts in the boys' minds tell us they are fleeing from a train taking them to a concentration camp and that we are probably in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

So extraordinary is Nemec's handling of this fictional situation, we could be watching a documentary, (it's shot in black and white and often with a hand-held camera). The boys themselves were not professional actors, (one of them, Antonin Kumbera, never made another film), and their plight as they make their way through forests to their inevitable capture, is distressingly real and the luminous images have, what best could be described as a 'terrible beauty'. Once an art-house favourite, the film is seldom seen now but its recent release on Blu-ray should hopefully change that.