Jan Němec

A Loaf of Bread (1960)

André Crous

A Loaf of Bread, which Jan Němec made for his FAMU graduation, is a tense, perfectly structured short film about a Jewish prisoner stealing the titular foodstuff off of a Nazi-operated train.

A Loaf of BreadCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriter:
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jiří Šámal

Running time: 11 minutes

The Jean Valjean character in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. In Jan Němec’s 11-minute A Loaf of Bread (Sousto), which he made as a student at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, we find a group of Jean Valjeans waiting to seize the day during the Second World War. If they are caught, the penalty will likely be much more serious than incarceration.

They are Jewish prisoners biding their time next to the train tracks in the waning days of Nazi occupation, presumably somewhere inside Czechoslovakia. Their target is a few tracks over: a train wagon containing loaves of bread. The problem? An armed Nazi officer is circling the wagon to ensure none of them gets a piece.

Němec’s screenplay is an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical short story “The Second Round” (Druhé kolo). He wrote and directed the film when he was barely 24 years old. The adaptation is perfectly structured with a setup, an execution, a complication and a resolution. It is commendable, however, that even after the climax, there is a lingering ambiguity that leaves the film the slightest bit open-ended and does not wholly dispatch the tension that preceded it.

After all, films about Jews during the Second World War should never be neatly packaged with a spotless ending. The main characters here are not victors besting their captors but rather survivors successfully making it through yet another trial by fire. But it is not just our extratextual knowledge of events that dampens the enthusiasm, it is also the strong reminder that this is but a small victory because much bigger issues are at stake.

The plot revolves around a bread heist. Three young Jewish men check out the train containing the bread. They count the number of steps the officer takes on the other side so that they know how big the window is for one of them to run there, snatch the loaf and run back unnoticed. They draw lots. Tomáš draws the shortest stick.

He quickly accepts the responsibility, but when the time comes, the moment is almost too big, and he hesitates. One second goes by, then another, then another. He finally takes off, sprinting across the no man’s land to reach the train as the officer takes his 18th, 19th, 20th step. Tomáš only has about 35 seconds left to snatch the bread and run back unseen across the tracks. He reaches inside the truck but struggles to grab himself a loaf. The clock keeps ticking. Finally, he grabs a hold of one. But by now he barely has 5 seconds left before the officer turns the corner. As he runs and realises his time has run out, he flings the bread to his friends hiding under another train.

This central piece of the action, less than 2 minutes of the film’s total running time, plainly demonstrates Němec’s skill at building tension to breaking point with the help of the central filmmaking trio: the story, the visuals and the sound, all supporting and boosting each other. All the while, we hear someone counting the seconds. And we know they only have a window of about 56 seconds in total.

A Loaf of Bread is bookended by two brief moments of narration in Tomáš’s voice. The first is explanatory, and the last is optimistic as it conveys the vital information that the Nazi officer was much weaker than the men had anticipated. Despite the most miserable of circumstances, they are undeterred in their mission to feed themselves. Tomáš tells us that they would try again the next day, and luckily the film does not show us what happened. It is not entirely clear that the voice-over was delivered after the war, and thus, after a successful second attempt, or whether it is delivered more or less contemporaneously with the action, in which case it is not at all self-evident that they would survive another try.

When it comes to stories of the Holocaust and the railway transport of Jews, such doubt is essential in clouding out any perception of victory, even in the smallest of moments.

Diamonds of the Night (1964)

André Crous

By mixing the present reality with memories and nightmarish visions and presenting them all as a fragmented whole, Diamonds of the Night offers a personal, often surreal glimpse of the Second World War.

Diamonds of the NightCzechoslovakia
3.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriters:
Arnošt Lustig
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 65 minutes

Original title: Démanty noci

Diamonds of the Night is an unconventional film about two Jews during the Second World War. For one, the two central characters are taciturn to the point of almost being mute. For another, it is unclear what does and what does not happen in the moment. But it brilliantly conveys a nagging sense of being sucked into a world collapsing onto itself.

This one-hour film, Czech director Jan Němec’s début feature, is as full of contrasts as its title suggests. It is drawn from the eponymous book (more specifically, the short story entitled “Darkness Casts No Shadow”) by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig and is filled with fragments of dreamlike memories, nightmarish visions and brutal reality. Following a black screen and the ominous tolling of a bell, the opening sequence is by far the film’s most memorable. Lasting an impressive 137 seconds, it is an exhilarating unbroken tracking shot that follows two young men (Antonín Kumbera and Ladislav Janský) uphill, frequently in close-up, as they run away from a train. Every so often, another round of bullets reminds us that this is life and death.

Finally, albeit temporarily, they reach safety deep in the forest. Because of the jackets, marked with KL, for Konzentrationslager, they were wearing, one can assume they were headed for a death camp. But the darkness they have just escaped has stained their consciousness and begins to penetrate their lived reality, too, as a giant field of rocks in the middle of the forest soon makes very clear. Suddenly, a tram passes Prague’s Municipal House in broad daylight, and we see one of these men, wearing the KL jacket, jumping in, before there is a cut back to the forest.

The film will be filled with such moments, all without any dialogue – in fact, it takes almost a full 15 minutes before either of the two men speaks a word. Many of the inserts are taken through the window of a moving vehicle, presumably a bus or a train. We see life outside continuing as normal, as if nothing is the matter, but the implication is that we share the point of view of the Jews being transported away from this “normality” that is oblivious to them.

This is confirmed when we get an insert showing the inside of a windowless train compartment meant for cargo, but we see a group of people, some dressed in striped pyjamas. The two nameless young men are seated in a corner at the far back. They devour the corn they had snuck in and put on the shoes they had hidden in their jackets. But this is the past from which they had just managed to break free. Or is it? The story unspools in such a fragmented manner that the pieces ultimately fit together so loosely that the big picture escapes us. There is even room for an (admittedly slightly contrived) reading of the ending as a prelude to the opening.

Diamonds of the Night is at its best during those brief moments, created via the inserts, that give us a vivid sense of the fear and confusion inside the mind of the younger man (Kumbera). A few shots, brilliantly captured by director of photography Jaroslav Kučera (who would become one of the most prominent cameramen of the Czechoslovak New Wave), show tall trees being felled and falling almost straight onto the camera. In another famous composition, ants crawl over an anonymous (either remembered or imagined) young man’s feet, hands and face. And in one of the most action-packed scenes, when he goes to a farmhouse to beg for bread, he imagines himself, over and over again, killing his well-doer out of concern that she will surrender him to the authorities.

But many might view all these interruptions as little more than impressionist smudges on a threadbare storyline, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. In particular, there are too many flashbacks (albeit distorted or misremembered, as made clear by the KL coat that Kumbera’s character is already wearing) to brighter days, and they do not appear to contribute substantially to our understanding of the characters or their backgrounds.

The last part of the film is the most interesting because of the tension it evokes through a very simple approach: repetition and little alteration. Having been captured by a group of dimwitted Kraut fogies, members of the so-called Volkssturm militia, the two men are made to stand with their hands in the air and face a blank wall. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, the old Germans merrily gorge themselves on chicken and drink pints of beer. Every so often, there is a cut back to the two men, immobile with fear. This alternation between the two shots, as well as the contrast between the silence and the yack-yack-yacking, creates incredible tension.

But while the film gives an atypical insight into the mind of one of its two central characters, the other (Janský) remains an enigma. Towards the end of the film, an apparent flashback even seems to suggest the possibility that he never made it past the opening scene. And as potent as some of the images are, there are just as many shots whose meaning is not immediately evident or are needlessly repeated. 

Diamonds of the Night is a film of contrasts. It uses an experimental approach to conjure up a world of mental imagery that doesn’t always connect with the viewer. And yet, we do get a glimpse of the main character’s inner struggle to make sense of the senselessness around him.