Ashes and Diamonds

Today, 7 October, is the 77th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic.

On this day in 1949 the GDR came into being — the moment the Soviet bloc's hold over Eastern Europe acquired its first formal state.

Ashes and Diamonds depicts the beginning of that process.

The film takes place on 8 May 1945, the day Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended, in a small Polish town. On that single day two forces are fighting for the country: the Home Army, loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and the Polish Workers' Party, which is taking power.

Maciek Chełmicki, a young Home Army soldier, is ordered to kill Szczuka, the new regime's local party secretary.

Four days ago, on 3 October, the film marked 68 years since its Polish premiere. It opened officially on 3 October 1958; around 1,722,000 Poles saw it in its first year.

Why recommend it today?

First, it is the archive's first film from Eastern Europe outside the Soviet Union. Of the previous 22 entries, Come and See (1985) is Soviet; Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were a blank. Poland is filled in today.

Second, it completes a Cold War line with the other film running today. In Poland in 1945 the communists were taking power; in Indonesia in 1965 communists were being massacred. The two films are the northern and southern ends of the same Cold War — one shot while it was happening, one shot forty years later.

Third, two joints already exist on the site. Spring in a Small Town (1948) is also set just after the war, also in a house the war has rewritten, also about a love that arrives too late — only on the Yangtze rather than in Poland. And Breathless (1960): Cybulski's Maciek and Belmondo's Michel are both young men whose bodies run out before their era does, both dying pointlessly in the closing minutes. Breathless came two years later, but this film had already struck that pose.

1945 年 5 月 8 日。欧洲的战事在这一天结束。

波兰的一座小城里，两名男子在一座乡村小教堂外等待一个人。他们的任务是：在他出现的时候开枪。

事情出了差错。他们杀错了人。

命令随即重下——任务没有取消。于是当天晚上，两个人在一家酒店的餐厅里，坐在一场庆祝战争结束的宴会中间，等着那个人再次出现。乐队在演奏，人们在跳舞，有人在为死去的战友点燃酒杯。

Maciek Chełmicki 就是在那里遇见 Krystyna 的。

他二十四五岁，戴墨镜，穿一件不太合身的夹克。他本来应该只在这里待几个小时。他本来应该只做一件事。

（这里不再往下说。）

The crowning achievement of the Polish Film School

Ashes and Diamonds (Polish title Popiół i diament) is a Polish film of 1958, 103 minutes, black and white, in Polish. Directed by Andrzej Wajda, from Jerzy Andrzejewski's 1948 novel — a set text in Polish schools at the time. The screenplay was written by Andrzejewski and Wajda and finalised in January 1958. Cinematography by Jerzy Wójcik, editing by Halina Nawrocka, music by Filip Nowak.

It closes Wajda's war trilogy, after A Generation (1954) and Kanał (1956). Marek Hendrykowski calls it the most important achievement of the Polish Film School.

Squeezing a novel into a single day

In November 1957 Wajda wrote to Andrzejewski proposing a decisive change: cut the subplot of the judge Antoni Kossecki, compress the whole story into one day, and make Maciek the sole centre. Andrzejewski agreed.

That decision is the film's form. The novel is a multi-stranded social panorama; the film became a film about the last twenty-four hours, set on 8 May 1945, the day Germany surrendered. The future of an entire country is folded into one man's final day.

Form: an aspect ratio Polish cinema had never used

The film was shot in 1:1.85, unprecedented in Polish cinema at the time. Its principal studio set was the dining room of the Monopol Hotel; location work used St Barbara's Church in Wrocław and a chapel near Trzebnica. Shooting ran from March to June 1958, over 60 days.

Performance: a man who refused his costume

Maciek is played by Zbigniew Cybulski, championed by assistant director Janusz Morgenstern (Wajda had considered Tadeusz Janczar). Cybulski refused the partisan uniform proposed by costume designer Katarzyna Chodorowicz and insisted on "1950s-style dark glasses, a jacket and tight jeans."

That refusal defines the film: a soldier of 1945 wearing the clothes of the 1950s. Polish audiences were not watching a period piece; they were watching a young man of their own moment. Cybulski's performance was compared to James Dean, and he became the face of a generation.

Three scenes people remember

• The burning glasses. In the bar, Maciek and Andrzej set fire to glasses of rectified spirit in memory of fallen comrades. The film's most famous scene is not in the novel — Morgenstern invented it.
• The inverted Christ. Sheltering from the rain in a bombed church, Maciek recites from memory a poem written on the wall. An inverted crucifix hangs in the church; Time Out London lists it among the film's most powerful images.
• The death in the rubbish dump. At the end, Maciek dies in agony on a garbage heap. The critic Richard Peña calls it one of the most powerful and most quoted endings in cinema.

The title comes from a poem

It is taken from Cyprian Norwid's play Za kulisami-Tyrtej: whether a starry diamond will remain at the bottom of the ashes, the dawn of an everlasting victory. It is the same poem Maciek finds on the church wall and recites from memory.

Censorship: it nearly did not open

Its release was itself a fight. Party intellectuals objected to a Home Army soldier as the protagonist. It took Andrzejewski himself, backed by other writers, to convince activists of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) that the film's ideological message was sound; without the novelist's intervention Wajda's film might never have been released.

It was barred from the Cannes competition and sent instead to Venice, where it won the FIPRESCI prize. Around 1,722,000 people saw it in Poland in its first year. It received two BAFTA nominations: Zbigniew Cybulski for Best Actor and Andrzej Wajda for Best Film.

After 1989: the film was put on trial too

This is not an uncontested film. After 1989 Polish critics revisited it: Andrzej Werner accused it of historical simplification; Waldemar Chołodowski argued it implied that representatives of the underground should be isolated from society; Krzysztof Kąkolewski regretted that for years it served as the outside world's window on postwar Poland. Others, including Tadeusz Lubelski, hold that Wajda's version treats the underground more warmly than either of the two rejected adaptations.

Its influence

• Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Francis Ford Coppola, Paweł Pawlikowski and Roy Andersson all name it among their favourite films
• In 2013 Scorsese selected it for Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema
• In a 2024 Letterboxd interview, Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio called it a key inspiration for The Departed (2006)
• Roger Waters said the film had a huge effect on him as a young man; Pink Floyd's "Two Suns in the Sunset" (1983) references it
• Rankings: Empire's 100 Best Films of World Cinema (2019) #38; BBC's 100 Greatest Foreign-Language Films (2018) #99; Village Voice's 100 Best Films of the 20th Century (2001) #86; third-greatest Polish film in the 2015 poll by the Polish Film Museum in Łódź
• Rotten Tomatoes 96% (27 reviews)