Diamonds of the Night (1964, Jan Němec) (Patreon)

52/100

Second viewing, last seen right before the turn of the millennium proper (i.e. December 2000). Remembered virtually nothing about it, and there's arguably not much to retain apart from the central image of two boys running desperately through the woods; Němec engages in some mild experimentation, interrupting the harrowing present tense with a mix of disorienting interludes—some apparently flashbacks, others clearly fantasies, still others ambiguous—but the case for this as an avant-garde work seems overstated to me, despite the near-absence of both dialogue and context. (The latter is abundantly clear, the former largely unnecessary.) A lot of the interpolation, e.g. traveling shots of the forest floor abruptly cutting to traveling shots of concrete and then back again, frankly feels like padding, designed to get the film to something like feature length (and barely achieving that goal at 67 minutes). Having watched Němec's first-rate, rivetingly tense short "A Loaf of Bread" (available on the Criterion disc) immediately beforehand, I have a hard time not perceiving Diamonds of the Night as a bloated sequel, revisiting methods that simply can't sustain a longer work. Unfair, perhaps, but ultimately the film just seems neither formally nor experientially exciting enough to justify its narrative skimpiness and almost complete lack of characterization. That I wasn't even sure whether or not I'd seen it, and had to check my master list, speaks volumes; I watched Kanal, for example, way back in 1995, and haven't yet revisited it, but that one's forever burned in my memory.