Ashes and Diamonds

Ashes and Diamonds (1958) closes Andrzej Wajda's war trilogy, and we think it the finest film postwar Polish cinema produced. It is set on the very last day of the war, with a nation caught between the trauma it is leaving and the Soviet-aligned order about to descend, and it made an international star of its lead.

Zbigniew Cybulski, often called the Polish James Dean, plays Maciek, the resistance fighter in dark glasses sent to carry out an assassination he comes to doubt. Wajda directs in a charged Baroque style: deep-focus black and white, crowded with Catholic and national symbolism, from a crucifix hung upside down to fireworks bursting over a victory ball. In his hands political allegory becomes something close to tragedy.

Made during the cultural thaw of the late fifties, the film spoke to a generation and established Wajda as the conscience of Polish cinema. Its imagery and its romantic hero influenced film-makers across Eastern Europe and beyond, and Martin Scorsese is among its admirers. Cybulski's early death in a railway accident only added to the legend around the role, and the film's reputation has grown steadily since. No other film is as clear about the moral cost of the war's end and the uncertain peace that followed. Wajda would go on to win a Palme d'Or and an honorary Oscar, but this is still, for us, the defining statement of his long and courageous career.