Tag Archives: A Man Escaped

Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night

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The Czech film poster for DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (1964), directed by Jan Nemec

In what must be one of the most astonishing opening scenes in a movie, two young men jump off a moving train and flee into the surrounding woodlands, racing up a ravine, over mud, rocks and uneven ground. And the cameramen follow them both in their lunging, zigzag movements from the front, side and behind as they race deeper into the darkness accompanied by sounds of their heavy breathing, gun shots, cries of “Halt!” and a steam engine train chugging slowly into the distance. The viewer is immediately pulled into a grim tale of survival and human endurance which alternates between stark realism and dreamlike imaginings. Flashbacks from the escapees’ past life also interrupt the narrative to create a haunting and ambiguous portrait of two men on the run during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during WW2. Demanty Noci (English title, Diamonds of the Night, 1964) was the feature film debut of Jan Nemec and it remains one of the defining masterpieces of Czech New Wave cinema in the 1960s.

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Don’t Act Cool, Just Be Cool

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The Japanese film poster for A Certain Killer (1967) aka Aru Koroshi Ya starring Raizo Ichikawa.

The yakuza thriller has been a prominent genre in Japanese cinema since the silent era when soon to be celebrated directors like Yasujiro Ozu dabbled in gangster melodramas like Walk Cheerfully (1930) and Dragnet Girl (1933). Once conceived as B-movies with low-budgets and rushed production schedules, the yakuza film graduated to A-picture productions in the 1970s but the genre really hit its stride in the 1960s with such stellar examples as Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower (1964), Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) and his more wildly stylized follow-up, Branded to Kill (1967). Still, there are so many superb yakuza films from this period waiting to be discovered by American audiences and one of my favorites is A Certain Killer (1967, Japanese title: Aru Koroshi Ya) from director Kazuo Mori.

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The Holy Bray

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The title character of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is a donkey who goes through a series of owners in his sad life as a beast of burden.

Films about animals or featuring them as the main protagonists are usually the province of Walt Disney and other family friendly productions such as Benji (1974) and March of the Penguins (2005). Other than the horror genre, though, there have been relatively few departures from the usual formulaic approach to this type of movie with Jerome Bolvin’s dark satire Baxter (1989) and the ethnographic Story of the Weeping Camel (2003) being two of the rare exceptions. Yet nothing can really compare with Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), directed by French filmmaker Robert Bresson, which stands alone as a profound and singular achievement in this category.   Continue reading →