Poland drama
1958
bw 105 min.
Director: Andrzej Wajda
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1394L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Andrzej Wajda's third full-length film, Ashes and Diamonds
(Popiol y Diament) established the director as a leader of the new
Polish cinema. Set in a provincial town on May 8, 1945, the day of the
German capitulation, Ashes and Diamonds deals ostensibly with
the emergence of a Russian-backed Communist regime threatened by armed
adversaries. A regional party secretary (Szczuka) has arrived to set
up a new government. But so have Andrzej and Maciek, underground
soldiers with instructions to assassinate him. In a moment of confused
transition, five years of occupation and resistance have come to a
sudden end. Previously the Nazis were the common enemy. Now the two
groups who led the anti-German struggle -- the London-directed Home
Army and the pro-Moscow People's Army -- are on opposite sides of the
ideological divide. Because the Red Army liberated Poland, the
pro-Soviet faction (headed by Poles returning from the USSR) has
gained control. A state of civil war exists as splinter groups of
Home Army irregulars take to the forests. Members of such a band,
Andrzej and Maciek have been conditioned to feel that they owe
unquestioning military allegiance to their commanders.
Based on Jerzy Andrzejewski's 1948 novel of the same name, Ashes
and Diamonds was adapted for the screen by Wajda and the
author. Time and space have been condensed to less than twenty-four
hours in and around a single location -- the hotel Monopol -- giving
the drama great theatrical intensity. Maciek, representative of
Poland's "lost" war generation, is the tragic hero, compelled to
commit a crime by the fatality of history. Bound by the soldier's code
of honor to a past steeped in blood, he kills on order without doubts
or remorse, even when, as in the case of two working men, he murders
in error. His eyes are opened to the possibility of a normal life and
the senselessness of further killing only when he falls in love with
the bartender Krystyna. Zbigniew Cybulski totally identifies with
Maciek, bringing to the role a mysterious inner passion and a number
of personal mannerisms, private rituals, and ritualistic props, such
as the German canteen out of which he drinks his vodka, and the
glasses he rarely removes.
Until1958, it had been impossible for a Polish artist like Wajda to
make a film in which an opponent of the new society was presented as a
tragic victim. The Stalinist period in Poland from1949 to1953 had
brought open terror, arrest and torture of members of the Home Army,
as well as enforcement of Soviet cultural models. The Thaw in 1956
resulted in a more independent Polish Communist regime. Finally the
arts, liberated from Soviet-imposed socialist realism, were allowed to
return to the Polish tradition of poetic metaphor and political
allusion.
During long years of dismemberment and foreign occupation,
literature and drama in Poland had always kept alive belief in the
nation's revival. In Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda continues this
tradition, posing the question of Poland's postwar identity. The
thoughtful, tired, middle-aged revolutionary Szczuka adheres to the
communist line about building a collectivist future. But he lacks the
energy and resources to accomplish his own goals. The terrorist Maciek
has no answer but violence. Yet the handsome young rebel, overflowing
with vitality, moves passionately among national mythic images of
suffering and heroism: the white horse, the inverted crucified Christ,
the poetry in the ruined church.
Although of different generations and opposing camps, Szczuka and
Maciek have much in common. Both fought valiantly against the Nazis to
liberate their homeland. Szczuka confronted the Fascists in Spain,
where he was wounded, and then joined the Soviets in World War II;
Maciek took part in the Warsaw Uprising. Both men remember their vast
struggles as better times, and their fallen comrades as true
heroes. And despite nostalgia for heroic deeds, Szczuka and Maciek
attempt to free themselves from the past.
In a fatal web of circumstance, Szczuka and his surrogate son
Maciek are drawn to each other. They have adjacent rooms in the hotel,
and each time they meet, the younger man lights the older's
cigarette. The old Communist's son -- named Marek -- has been arrested
as a member of an outlaw group similar to Maciek's, whose story he
repeats.
When Szczuka ventures out alone at night to visit his imprisoned
son, Maciek at last tracks him down. Shot repeatedly, the bleeding
Communist falls against his assassin and dies clasped in his arms. The
tragedy of wasted individuals reaches its climax with Maciek's death
throes in the dump heap, where he has been relegated by history. (In
an odd footnote, Cybulski died tragically in 1967 while hopping a
freight train. Wajda's film of the same year Everything for
Sale is, in part, a tribute to the actor.)
But the social tragedy of Poland reaches its high point with the
somnambulistic polonaise at dawn when reactionaries, turncoats, and
communists all join hands after the drunken banquet celebrating the
new regime. This powerful image drives from Wyspianski's 1901 play,
The Wedding (later filmed and staged by Wajda). The
trance-like steps constitute a dance of opportunism and compromise out
of which the dancers cannot move.
The final juxtaposed scenes of Ashes and Diamonds raise
troubling questions for the future. The two best men -- on either side
of the ideological conflict -- are dead. But the dance of puppets goes
on, more menacing to revolutionary ideals than terrorism.
-- Daniel Gerould
Credits
Directed by: Andrzej Wajda
Written by: Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy
Andrzejewski
Based on the novel Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy
Andrzejewski
Cinematographer: Jerzy Wojcik
Editor: Halina
Nawrocka
Music performed by: Wroclaw Rhythm Quintet under the direction of Filip Nowak
Art direction: Roman Mann
Sound: Ancona Films, Inc.
Transfer
This edition presents Ashes and Diamonds
in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1
