Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and other Wajda films
Apr 4, 2017 3:55:15 GMT
spiderwort, petrolino, and 1 more like this
Post by london777 on Apr 4, 2017 3:55:15 GMT
I saw it a couple of times in the 'sixties but not again until tonight, an interval of some fifty years. It was not as good as I had remembered. It was even better.
When I watched it earlier I was only a few years younger than its star, Zbigniew Cybulski, and I identified with him in the film. He was in Poland, and Eastern Europe, a phenomenon like James Dean in the West, and like Dean he died young (at 39 in a train accident, having just said goodbye to Marlene Dietrich). But Cybulski's career was on the slide by then. He never matched his early success with Ashes and Diamonds. He appeared in another decent movie, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). I quite enjoyed the film but (52 years later) had forgotten he was in it.
Watching tonight I realized how much of his performance was stolen from Dean, and how mannered it was. His death scene, which had teenage girls swooning throughout the Eastern Bloc, now seemed almost comical.
He and a few others were called the "Young and Angry" group in Poland, and coincided with the (supposed) English literary movement "The Angry Young Men". He plays a crazy mixed-up kid here, but Polish youngsters of his generation had a lot more to be crazy and mixed-up about, having fought in the Resistance and experienced the horrors of the Nazi occupation. They were not just throwing a tantrum because Daddy would not let them borrow the Oldsmobile or Mummy told them to turn down the volume of Bill Haley. Nonetheless, Cybulski's mood-swings and indecisions did not seem to me to be very realistic, unless his experiences had left him unbalanced.
This time my attention was much more on the other characters: the very beautiful Ewa Krzyzewska in her debut, and a host of other parts with whom I had been impatient as a young man because I wanted to press on with the plot and see what would happen to our hero, but now found they presented a rich panorama of the Polish populace, and I enjoyed these brief diversions from the main plot.
The cinematography by Jerzy Wójcik is outstanding, with its contrasts, shadows and the haze from the firework display and the constant smoking. For fifteen years I lived in a nest of Poles and, boy, did they smoke! The begging and buying of cigarettes occupies many lines of the dialog. If you look at the credits of US movies it is amazing how many of the cameramen are Polish. Those commies must have run a hell of a good school of cinematography.
I do not remember any non-diegetic music in the movie, so either there was none, or it was very good. There was plenty of diegetic music, as much of the action occurs during a party to celebrate the German surrender the previous day, and that was of the usual dreary Polish popular kind where every song seems to be a variant of "Monte Cassino".
The action almost observes the unities, taking place within a 24 hour period and in a single provincial town.
My final thought was what a surprising amount of freedom Wajda enjoyed under the then Communist regime. The hero is a pawn of the nationalist terrorists sponsored by survivors of the pre-war semi-fascist regime, and the incoming communist nomenklatura are heavily satirised as greedy chancers. And while the principal communist is played as a dignified and tragic figure, even he seems to be floundering in all the social chaos. You would never find that sort of even-handedness in a Russian film of the period.
The nearest approach to propaganda is a scene near the end where the bourgeois characters drunkenly dance the polonaise to a discordant and exhausted orchestra before vanishing into the haze, but I could take that bit of agitprop because it was beautifully done and reminded me of the Dance of Death in the Seventh Seal of the previous year.
I have optimistically added "and other Wajda films" to the title in the hope that others may chip in.
When I watched it earlier I was only a few years younger than its star, Zbigniew Cybulski, and I identified with him in the film. He was in Poland, and Eastern Europe, a phenomenon like James Dean in the West, and like Dean he died young (at 39 in a train accident, having just said goodbye to Marlene Dietrich). But Cybulski's career was on the slide by then. He never matched his early success with Ashes and Diamonds. He appeared in another decent movie, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). I quite enjoyed the film but (52 years later) had forgotten he was in it.
Watching tonight I realized how much of his performance was stolen from Dean, and how mannered it was. His death scene, which had teenage girls swooning throughout the Eastern Bloc, now seemed almost comical.
He and a few others were called the "Young and Angry" group in Poland, and coincided with the (supposed) English literary movement "The Angry Young Men". He plays a crazy mixed-up kid here, but Polish youngsters of his generation had a lot more to be crazy and mixed-up about, having fought in the Resistance and experienced the horrors of the Nazi occupation. They were not just throwing a tantrum because Daddy would not let them borrow the Oldsmobile or Mummy told them to turn down the volume of Bill Haley. Nonetheless, Cybulski's mood-swings and indecisions did not seem to me to be very realistic, unless his experiences had left him unbalanced.
This time my attention was much more on the other characters: the very beautiful Ewa Krzyzewska in her debut, and a host of other parts with whom I had been impatient as a young man because I wanted to press on with the plot and see what would happen to our hero, but now found they presented a rich panorama of the Polish populace, and I enjoyed these brief diversions from the main plot.
The cinematography by Jerzy Wójcik is outstanding, with its contrasts, shadows and the haze from the firework display and the constant smoking. For fifteen years I lived in a nest of Poles and, boy, did they smoke! The begging and buying of cigarettes occupies many lines of the dialog. If you look at the credits of US movies it is amazing how many of the cameramen are Polish. Those commies must have run a hell of a good school of cinematography.
I do not remember any non-diegetic music in the movie, so either there was none, or it was very good. There was plenty of diegetic music, as much of the action occurs during a party to celebrate the German surrender the previous day, and that was of the usual dreary Polish popular kind where every song seems to be a variant of "Monte Cassino".
The action almost observes the unities, taking place within a 24 hour period and in a single provincial town.
My final thought was what a surprising amount of freedom Wajda enjoyed under the then Communist regime. The hero is a pawn of the nationalist terrorists sponsored by survivors of the pre-war semi-fascist regime, and the incoming communist nomenklatura are heavily satirised as greedy chancers. And while the principal communist is played as a dignified and tragic figure, even he seems to be floundering in all the social chaos. You would never find that sort of even-handedness in a Russian film of the period.
The nearest approach to propaganda is a scene near the end where the bourgeois characters drunkenly dance the polonaise to a discordant and exhausted orchestra before vanishing into the haze, but I could take that bit of agitprop because it was beautifully done and reminded me of the Dance of Death in the Seventh Seal of the previous year.
I have optimistically added "and other Wajda films" to the title in the hope that others may chip in.
