As part of its See it Big! series, Wajda’s classic film will be presented in a new, state-of-the-art digital restoration, revealing the original richness of the work of cinematographer Jerzy Wójcik and a vivid impression of Wajda’s strong visual sense. The screening on October 14 will be introduced by the film historian and critic David Thomson, and will be followed by a discussion with Thomson and Sony Pictures Classics co-president and co-founder,Michael Barker.
Beautifully photographed and brilliantly performed, Wajda’s heroic 1958
drama is hailed by many as one of the most important Polish films of all time
linking the fate of a nation with that of one man. Based on the novel of the
same title by Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds tells the story of
a disillusioned Home Army soldier, Maciek Chełmicki, a tragic hero, fated by the forces of history to
commit a crime. 
Compellingly played by screen legend, Zbigniew Cybulski, Chełmicki – a
representative of Poland’s “lost” war generation – became a James Dean-like
cult figure for an entire generation of Polish audiences.
Wajda’s third film is not only one of his most important works, but also
the supreme achievement of post-war Polish cinema. On one level Ashes and Diamonds is
a straightforward, suspense thriller and on another it has a dimension of high
tragedy as in ancient drama. Deep down
it has a broader meaning, sometimes missed by non-Polish audiences.
The film’s truth and strength lies in the
way it caught certain momentous historical phenomena which appeared for the
first time in 1944, were still in evidence in 1958, and to some extent still
linger to this day. It has all the
ingredients of a national epic – showing individual destinies being reshaped
during turmoil.
Many strands from the Polish artistic
tradition found their way into the film.
There are clear links to nineteenth-century Romanticism; to Norwid, an
expatriate poet, from one of whose verses its title is taken; to Juliusz Słowacki
and his drama; and most deliberately to the turn-of-the-century Kraków writer and
painter Stanisław Wyspiański. His Wesele
(The Wedding), still one of the most vibrant plays in the Polish theatrical
canon, is a great parable of the nation’s situation in his day. It contains an uncanny riveting scene,
repeated almost literally in Ashes and Diamonds. At the end of a country wedding, the
guests shuffle through a grotesque dance which anticipates a fateful change in
their lives and their country. The Old Establishment now making their final
exit with a sense élan to the strains of Michał
Kleofas Oginski’s
polonez – “Pożegnanie Ojczyzny”
(Farewell to Homeland). Wesele is Wajda’s favorite play and
fourteen years after Ashes and Diamonds, he captured it on film. 
On the
most base level, in Ashes and Diamonds Wajda shows that on this
particular night a man caught up in his past under occupation, tired of heroism
and beginning to feel the possibility of another and better life finds himself
in a position from which there is no escape.
The director fully put into
practice his principle that “the methods must be emotional in order to
influence, and the heroes emotional in order to move.”
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01
35th Avenue, Astoria, NY; http://www.movingimage.us/visit/directions.
