Paths in the Dark Woods

Two teenage boys run desperately through the woods. We learn very little about them but we know they escaped a truck bound for a concentration camp in 1963's Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci). Based loosely on the autobiography of Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig, it's a film with very little dialogue, instead telling a visual and auditory tale of raw human experience.

The point of view stays more with the prettier of the two boys, played by Ladislav Jansky, whose confused memories and dreams we're privy to. In ways strikingly evocative of human thought we see potential actions and circumstances repeated as he considers them, and memories of past events recur as he dwells on them. He remembers trading his shoe with the other boy (Antonin Kumbera) for some food. When he breaks into a cottage, he stares mutely at the woman he finds in the kitchen and we watch ideas play out on screen--he hitting her with a stick, an image of her smiling on the bed. We see her slice a loaf of bread and giving it to him. This is probably what actually happens but it's as dizzingly ambiguous to us as it probably is to him.

The film gives a very good impression of being malnourished, out of your wits, humiliated at a young age, and compulsively assigning shame and guilt to senseless circumstances.

Director Jan Nemec and his cinematographer Jaromir Sofr make this human experience beautiful even as it is horrible and appropriately brief, only an hour and seven minutes. Diamonds of the Night is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1247

A button waits behind the morning hill.
A thread and needle stitch the start of day.
The night dissolved beneath the window sill.
The gloveless hands were offered keys to play.
A walking lunch was mainly bone and plant.
A face was shrinking past the point of babe.
The leaky shack was built upon a slant.
In secret bibles, Abram changed to Abe.
The choicest legs could punch a telephone.
As wheels entrap the digits ink'd call.
A distant number faintly heard the tone.
The final wire will connect them all.
Asleep, the moving toy examines gears.
A thousand plastic beads determine years.

New Animation for Old Years

Firsthand experience of the Holocaust is hard enough to imagine as an adult, but how strange it must have been for a child in a concentration camp, in addition to horrifying. Yesterday I finally got a chance to see the 2011 short film Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest, the final project of Ingrid Pitt before her death. One of my favourite actresses, she's best known for her work in British horror films in the 70s, particularly the great The Vampire Lovers and the decent Countess Dracula. When she was a little girl, she and her mother escaped from a concentration camp in Poland near the end of World War II; the short recounts this experience. It's so short it's a bit hard to judge, but something of her experience is translated in a fascinating way by the decision to let a ten year old boy named Perry Chen do the animation. Still, I can't help feeling the film would've been better off with Bill Plympton animating the short himself.

Plympton did do the storyboards and his style is clearly recognisable in the character designs. The animation itself is crude and clearly produced with a simple computer programmme. But I guess there is something in the simplicity of how Chen conceives of black planes shooting scribble bombs at Nazis who keep their rifles straight up on their shoulders as they flee. His imperfect perceptions match up a bit with Pitt's recollections.

Her voice sounds frail and emotional, very different to the newest thing I saw her in, the 1984 Doctor Who serial Warriors of the Deep. She appeared in a few things since then, I just haven't seen them.

Warriors of the Deep is kind of a low point both for Doctor Who and Ingrid Pitt but she had a nice supporting role in the BBC Television Shakespeare's production of Comedy of Errors the year before that.

Maybe because she wasn't feeling well, maybe because she was close to death, made her emotions particularly raw when recounting her childhood experience, but it really works, in any case. She recalls dogs at the concentration camp that were always snarling but for some reason never barked. She remembers a little boy who found her and her mother in the forest who at first wanted his father to shoot them. Something of the strangeness and confusion of the experience comes through.

I don't know how this movie took five years to complete. Maybe if Plympton were hand drawing it, I would understand. Anyway, it's an interesting work and a fascinating part of Pitt's life.

Children in the Ruins

Among the many difficult jobs Allied forces faced after World War II was reuniting families separated by the Nazis. 1948's The Search is about the small children found in concentration camps and the efforts to find their parents, who were often dead. Shot on location in the ruins of post war Germany, there's an astonishing feeling of authenticity to the film but also an extremely effective, bittersweet drama between its leads, Ivan Jandl and Montgomery Clift.

Karel (Jandl) is among a group of children found in various concentration camps before ending up at a UN transit camp. Karel was in Auschwitz and has a more difficult time mustering the courage to speak than the other children but all of them are traumatised. As we're told in voice over by Mrs. Murray (Aline MacMahon) the children are conditioned to fear adults, especially adults in uniform.

The voice-over and the authentic locations give the film a documentary feel but it becomes more of a story when the children escape from an ambulance and scatter through the ruins. Karel, believed by the UN workers to have drowned, ends up meeting an American soldier named Steve (Clift) who takes him in.

Clift and Jandl are so good in this movie. Unhappy with the dialogue, Clift also contributed to the screenplay and his performance has all the naturalism you'd expect from a method actor as well as Clift's natural warmth. Steve's been eager to get home but he quickly forms a bond with Karel--who he calls Jim--and wants to stay and care for him.

Jandl won an Oscar for his role but because his native Czechoslovakia had become communist he was not permitted to travel to the U.S. to accept the award. According to Wikipedia, he didn't know any English during the making of the film and learned all his lines phonetically. If true, that's amazing because he gives such a natural, emotive performance. This may be due partly to Fred Zinnemann's direction and I would suspect having someone as natural as Clift to play off of helped as well. The kid has naturally sad eyes, too.

But all this makes it hard to account for the adorably excited reaction he has when Steve gives him a new pair of shoes--"My shoes!" he cries immediately. Not just in individual moments but over the course of the film he gives a performance with a clear progression. From withdrawn and emotionally paralysed by trauma to a kid who's responded to the comparative normalcy of an affable anchor like Steve with some of the normal energy and curiosity of a child. I found myself getting caught up in the relationship between these two characters and I felt really happy for every good thing that happened and terribly anxious even at some of the most obviously manipulative moments.

These real war torn locations along with the performances give the film an Italian Neorealist feel and I thought of Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City. But it's a very good film in its own right.