Andrzej Wajda rounded out his war trilogy with this mesmerizing and poignant touchstone of Polish cinema.
“If we could only celebrate a Warsaw not in ruins.”
Ashes and Diamonds is the third and final film in Polish director
Andrzej Wajda’s unofficial
War Trilogy, and where he really begins to separate himself from the pack and develop his own directorial style. Each film in the trilogy focuses on a different period of WWII:
A Generation (1955) follows a group of young friends who join an underground resistance during the
German occupation of Poland in 1942;
Kanal (1957) depicts a small unit of the
Home Army (consisting of trained soldiers as well as resistance fighters and sympathetic civilians) who become trapped in a labyrinthine sewer system while trying to escape the Nazis during the 1944
Warsaw Uprising; and
Ashes and Diamonds takes place on May 8, 1945, the day Germany officially surrendered.
In
Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda’s alluring, exploratory shot selection and
Jerzy Wójcek’s elegant use of light and shadow poetically capture the contrasting mood of post-war Poland: beautiful, yet utterly destroyed. A country paradoxically hopeful and despairing. Its citizens simultaneously joyous for the end of their nightmare and in misery for all they’ve lost.
There’s a scene towards the end of the film where party-goers promenade around a ballroom in celebration of the end of the war, both boisterously drunk and gravely sober, their faces expressionless, lost between victory and defeat, as if they’re wearing death masks in memoriom of their loved ones and all the victims of the war, all the destruction it left behind.
Comments
Post a Comment