#444
Post
by MichaelB » Sat Dec 03, 2022 7:11 am
Although one commentary that I have been listening to with considerable interest is Annette Insdorf's for the Criterion Ashes and Diamonds.
I deliberately didn't listen to a single syllable prior to recording my own commentary for the Second Run edition, because I wanted to be certain that I hadn't been influenced by it in any way, but now that that the latter is out in the wild I was very curious to hear how she approached it.
So here's how we tackled the first few minutes.
OPENING CREDITS
AI: I'm Annette Insdorf, Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University, where I often teach Polish cinema. You're about to see Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda's masterpiece of 1958, and the word "Kadr" - K-A-D-R - that's the name of the unit through which he made this film, because after World War II the Polish government created Film Polski, and Film Polski created individual units through which filmmakers could create their feature films. You might, for example, know the name "Tor" - T-O-R - from the films of Zanussi and Kieślowski. We see that in the central role of Maciek will be the actor Zbigniew Cybulski, and I'll be talking a lot about him because he is the heart, the soul, the conscience of this film. But first, a bit of political background. To understand how these events are unfolding, you should know that Poland was ruled, until 1939 at least, by Piłsudski, and then the Russians took over the eastern sections, according to a secret agreement in the Non-Aggression Pact. Well, after the fourth partitioning, a government-in-exile was formed in Paris, but France falls in 1940 and they move to London. In 1956, Gomułka came to power, and this period of de-Stalinisation coincided with Wajda's film Kanal. I'd also mention that the name Jerzy Wójcik you just saw as the cinematographer is very important. He was the cameraman on Kanal, Wajda's dark masterpiece that made just before, and his work in this film demonstrates a unique fact about Ashes and Diamonds: it is a brilliant blend of a visual style modelled on American film, or Western European cinematic technique as well, and of a particularly Polish story. The late 1950s had aspects of this in other countries as well, like Russia with The Cranes Are Flying.
MB: Hello and welcome to the commentary for Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda’s third feature. I’m Michael Brooke, and over the next hour and three quarters I’ll be trying to unpick the complex weave of political, national, historical, diplomatic and artistic threads that make up this extraordinary film, still all but universally acknowledged as one of the greatest masterpieces of Polish cinema nearly seven decades after its original release. It began life as a 1948 novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, who as you can see is the first name to appear in the credits – an important strategic device on Wajda’s part, since his decision to ask Andrzejewski to adapt his own novel was crucial to the film’s success. With Andrzejewski’s implied permission being advertised upfront, Wajda could take far more creative risks with what was already well on the way towards becoming a canonical literary classic, despite its relative youth. In fact, this was the fifth attempt at bringing it to the screen: other directors attached to the project included Wanda Jakubowska, Jerzy Zarzycki, Antoni Bohdziewicz and Jan Rybkowski. They’re all good directors – Jakubowska made The Last Stage, the first important film about the Holocaust, Zarzycki made Lost Feelings, one of the first films to be openly critical about a great Communist project, and so on – and so they might have turned out something worthwhile in its own right. However, it’s very likely that their versions would have been made and/or released during the 1949-56 period when Socialist Realism dominated pretty much everything to do with Polish cinema, and the tantalising ambiguities that pepper Wajda’s adaptation would probably have had to be toned down at best, and most likely eliminated. To emerge in its present form, Ashes and Diamonds needed to be greenlit during a more artistically liberal period, which came about in October 1956 when Poland’s then newly-appointed leader Władysław Gomułka, launched the so-called ‘Polish October’, an across-the-board reaction to strikes and other public protests that created the most liberal cultural environment that Poland had enjoyed since the twin Nazi and Soviet invasions of September 1939. Not coincidentally, the quality and adventurousness of not just Polish films, but creative projects right across the cultural sphere, improved dramatically, and the late 1950s is still regarded as one of Polish cinema’s golden eras.
OPENING SHOTS
AI: The film begins with the sign of the cross on top of a church, and the camera tilts down to reveal our characters. That's important, because it introduces the layering, almost geographical and perhaps ultimately cosmological, that Wajda uses throughout this film. On our right is Andrzej, on the left is Maciek, but notice all the way in the background, in focus, a little girl, a symbol of innocence. Deep focus photography is already being used in the first shot of Ashes and Diamonds, and this is one of the great examples of what Wajda learned from American films. He has said that he owes a great debt to the work of John Ford, of William Wyler, of Orson Welles, and, I would add, of the wonderful cinematographer that they share, Gregg Toland, who really pioneered the use of deep-focus photography in which the mid-ground and background are as much in focus as the foreground. This touch of innocence, of a little girl, will suddenly yield to the harsh political realities of the last day of World War II in Poland. Unlike Andrzej, all buttoned up, Maciek has a kind of comic looseness about him; he'd just as soon be lazing in the sun as committing a political assassination. The little girl will be banished from the frame, because the world of men, of violence, and of political assassination, will dominate.
MB: Now, I’m assuming that you’ve already seen the film at least once, so I don’t need to tell you how deceptive this bucolic opening shot is: you already know that these two men, Maciek Chełmicki, played by Zbigniew Cybulski, and Andrzej Kossecki, played by Adam Pawlikowski, are would-be assassins about to carry out a hit. Wajda deliberately withholds quite a bit of important information at this stage, especially the vital detail that the film mostly takes place on 8th May 1945, the day World War II ended, at least as far as Poland was concerned, and when all the old certainties started to evaporate. Wajda also withholds as much as possible about these people – later on in the film, there’s hardly a shot in which Maciek isn’t wearing his iconic dark glasses, but he’s taken them off here. You can see them on his head, but a first-time viewer probably wouldn’t notice until he actually puts them on. Why does this matter? Because dark glasses in the context of a Polish war film set after 1944 denote someone who had irreparably damaged his eyesight in the sewers of Warsaw when fighting the Nazis on behalf of the Polish Home Army – which of course had been the subject of Wajda’s second film Kanal. It’s a happy coincidence that, by the time that Ashes and Diamonds was made, shades denoted an indefinable sense of cool, especially in Western Europe and America – it certainly helped cement Cybulski’s image as an international screen icon – but that’s not how they would have been interpreted in 1945, and certainly not in Poland. One of the reasons why this film still seems so vibrantly alive is that it’s peppered with imaginative touches like this – this reaction to ants crawling over his gun helps humanise Maciek just before he does something decidedly inhuman. See also Andrzej’s rapport with the little girl, who he now has to shoo away because he doesn’t want her to see what he’s about to do.
THE ACTION BEGINS
AI: You should be aware that these men, Andrzej and Maciek, represent the AK, the Armia Krajowa, the Polish nationalist Home Army. During World War II, they constituted one of the two primary forms of resistance to Nazism. They, however, were also as much anti-Communist as they were anti-Nazi. Therefore, as World War II comes to its end, the Armia Krajowa has orders to murder the representatives of the Communist Party, those who are presumably going to lead the new Poland, but not while many Poles desire a free nation. You'll see now that, as this man is killed by the bullets, suddenly his body becomes fire. This is one of the theatrical touches, the self-conscious images, that Andrzej Wajda is prone to. His body falls into the church, and we're made aware of the fact that this place can no longer be a sanctuary in the violent and politicised Poland at the end of World War II. The men believe that they have killed the right people, so to speak, those that they were assigned to murder. We are soon going to find out that that was not the case, as will they. So Ashes and Diamonds begins, not with fulfilling a cause nobly, but rather with tragic waste.
MB: This lookout in the hat who’s gesturing frantically towards them is Drewnowski, played by Bogumił Kobiela – we’ll be seeing a lot more of him later on, but for now let’s just note that he’s pointedly avoiding doing the dirty work. Unlike them, he’s unarmed. And now the symbolism starts. It’s probably reading too much into this image to observe that the top of this telegraph pole looks like a cross, and that the man who’s just fallen out of the jeep took on a pose similar to him being nailed to one, but there’s nothing ambiguous about this shot: the smoke clears to reveal Christ looking impassively down over another innocent pawn of political machinations. Wajda would carry on using unashamedly religious iconography like this throughout his career, not least in Katyń, made nearly fifty years later, and it’s a reminder that, although Ashes and Diamonds was produced behind the Iron Curtain, Poland remained a profoundly spiritual and proudly Catholic country, regardless of what its government of the time liked to pretend. And here we have an absolutely iconic shot, as important a symbol of an entire era of Polish cinema – indeed, European cinema - as Marilyn Monroe’s dress billowing up over the subway grate was to 1950s Hollywood, and arguably as significant an image of a freedom fighter standing up for what he believes in as Albert Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara, which wouldn’t be taken for another couple of years. The chances are that you’ll have seen a still of Cybulski in shades with a machine gun long before you actually watched the film, and it outwardly seems conventionally heroic. But look at the actual context - he’s just shot an unarmed man in the back, at such close range that he’s burst into flames. Even before we’re told that the dead man was an entirely innocent victim of mistaken identity, this is surely the polar opposite of the thing that heroic role models are supposed to stand for, and an early instance of one of the film’s many ambiguities.
(So we clearly cover broadly similar ground and in a pretty similar way - which makes me even more glad that I didn't listen to her commentary before recording mine! Although one crucial difference is that Insdorf was recording a one-off commentary whereas I had a three-film canvas to play with, so I'd already tackled some of the topics that she raises - the film unit system, Polish WWII history and postwar history, the Home Army, the deep-focus cinematography - in considerable detail over A Generation and Kanal.)
