Saturday, March 10, 2012

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Director: Andrzej Wajda                               Writer: Jerzy Andrzejewski
Original Music: Filip Nowak & Jan Krenz       Cinematography: Jerzy Wójcik
Starring: Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, and Waclaw Zastrzezynski

European filmmaking has suffered through the years in its comparisons with Hollywood, especially in the first half of the Twentieth Century. So, what European filmmakers lacked in terms of a polished visual style they had to make up for in other ways, usually the brutal frankness of their stories, and the realism provided by relatively inexperienced actors and use of actual locations instead of constructed sets. The Polish film Ashes and Diamonds is no exception.

The major downfall of the film in terms of being dated is a 1950s post-production style similar to that of Stanley Kramer, in which all of the sound--everything, voices, birds chirping, footsteps, and gunshots--is dubbed in after the final edit. What this leads to is a very sterile soundtrack similar to those in High Noon or The Defiant Ones, or other European films like The Third Man. For me, this has always been something that turned me off to Kramer’s films, and has had a definite effect on my viewing of the film. Still, its inclusion on The A List makes a lot of sense

Set at the end of World War Two, Zbigniew Cybulski's Maciek is a Polish resistance fighter who has now found himself on the opposite side of the struggle from his liberators. Ordered to kill the leading Communist district leader, he begins to have a crisis of conscience after falling for the beautiful barmaid Krystyna, played by the wonderful Ewa Krzyzewska. Where Cybulski is a bit frenetic on camera, Krzyzewska is utterly believable and the primary impetus for watching the film.

While the first half is interesting in its own way, the real payoff comes at the end of the film. In one of the most beautifully filmed sequences ever, director Andrzej Wajda and Cinematographer Jerzy Wójcik set up the end of an all night banquet, with the remaining elite of the society still dancing in the early morning light. The small band, urged on in playing a creaking version of Chopin’s Polonaise when only the pianist really knows it, provides the perfect soundtrack for the end of an era, dancing out its final moments of existence. It’s a truly transcendent moment in film history.

Unfortunately, the essay by Peter Keough in The A List isn’t. His emphasis on Cybulski and his sobriquet as the “Polish James Dean” is hardly the point. He also spends far too much space rehashing the plot instead of telling us why it’s “the seminal masterpiece of Polish cinema and one of the greatest films of all time.” For that, we need to read elsewhere. The motifs and juxtapositions of incidents, combined with iconography and symbolism are a rich mine that Wajda has provided that will produce analytical diamonds for a long time to come.

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