Representation of a Traumatic Event: Diamonds of the Night (1964)

Adapted from A Loaf of Bread, the story of Arnost Lustig, Diamonds of the Night, [Démanty Noci] (1964) is the first feature of Czech New Wave director, Jan Nemec. The film is about two Jewish boys who escape from Nazi transport train and search for some food to live. Through the end they are caught by German home-guards and they prepare to execute them. Yet, by the last scene, the film left its path to the audiences i.e. it is ambiguous since the film does not show what happened in reality;  they may or may not be executed. By the all elements of the film such as the signs and transition of memory, the representations of psychological conditions of Jews who threat to have trauma and both social and personal memory of past, even if  Diamonds of the Night has Bunuelian surrealism in a sense, it can be analyzed by trauma theory (and yes, the examination of whether surrealism has traumatic aspect or not is not subject of this analysis). As Radstone argues that “Nonetheless, the notion of victimhood, the emphasis on history and power(lessness), the anxiety about memory, its ambiguous relation to an inner psychic reality and to an outer, public (or cinematic) representation, all tend to align trauma theory” (195), that is why I’d like to write about this Eastern European after war film which I regard, by means of its theme, as it can be one of the best instances for analysis of trauma theory of screen studies. Also, by having a few dialogues and emphasizing physical and psychological conditions of boys, the film itself shows the effects of Concentration Camps to human life. Thus, it means that the film mentions both personal and social history.

Diamonds of the Night, as a matter of fact, seems to have timeless story but indicates time by means of signs of memory such as letters KL – Konzentrations Lager, (Concentration Camp) – on coats of boys in order to make us to understand goings-on in the film. Like trauma theorists’ expressions that of opening up to the memory of events as personal memories, autobiographies, testimonies of family history, the film makes audiences to recollect memories of events by providing it in a timeless zone in terms of hallucinations or dreams of characters. In this sense, if audiences are not aware of the effects of signs of past like why their hallucinations causes flashbacks, they cannot see the ‘real’ trauma. Thus, signs of past, for Diamonds of the Night, especially their boots and coats with letters KL, provide us to understand their psychological conditions  in the sense that they have traumatic personal history connected social realm or history.

Nemec creates a world that the world of war, death and escaping, in which words has lost their meanings; in this world, the hallucinations of characters shows how traumatic their previous life is.

Since the hallucination of the one of  them is also traumatic event, as Radstone also mentions, it can be said that distinction between psychic time of boy and chronological time seems suspended since that traumatic event links other memories as if they happens at the same time. There may not be any distinction between them. For the memory of traumatic event is different from memory of everyday event, it causes to speculate truthfulness of the recollected events in the understanding of traumatic cinema. However, Diamond of the Night is not the traumatic cinema that approaches the past through an unusual admixture of emotional affect, metonymic symbolism and cinematic flashbacks (214)

Just as flashback of our memories that re-collect past events like fragment, Jan Nemec, by using flashbacks, emphasizes KL and connected it both characters and audiences memory. In this sense, flashbacks of this film, reference to Tourim expressions, in the context of trauma theory, do not appear abrupt flashbacks in films of mass distribution (207).

Also, Radstone comes to point that “Hence, the emphasis on temporality and spatiality but ‘displaced’ in relation to event: “trauma” would then be the name for a referentiality that can no longer be placed in a particular time of place, but whose time-space-place referentiality is nonetheless posited, in fact, doubled and displaced relation to an ‘event’” (200) I believe that trauma theory, rather than limits us to time and space or determinates events in their limited relations in that space and time, it provides to integration of psychological conditions to physical “realm” so that we can take timelessness of some films as a reference point. In order to emphasize true reflections of the events such as Holocaust without using any determined reference point, namely, by not manipulating the traumatic event, the film itself reflects trauma of protagonist with hallucinations and repeated scenes which is not far from realism at the end.

I actually would like to say that it is not easy to evaluate trauma cinema in the context of film itself since it is also about the issue of “who makes a film for what”. At least, in the context of Diamonds of the Night, I do not believe that it makes false memories of true experience which can be easily manipulated in terms of memory. Thus, by being one of the best and different example of  concentration camps film, Diamonds of the Night is not a traumatic cinema but it is the film that can be analyzed by traumatic theory in a sense.

You can watch the whole film via youtube. All part of it exists as related videos. It takes 63 minutes.

And you can also check the book, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,(1967 in English) which is Borowski’s collection of concentration camp stories related to the film in order to understand how traumatic events people have lived.

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