Andrzej Wajda - 'Ashes and Diamonds': Symbols in the film (60/222) скачать в хорошем качестве

Andrzej Wajda - 'Ashes and Diamonds': Symbols in the film (60/222)

To listen to more of Andrzej Wajda’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Andrzej Wajda (Film director)   Polish film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), whose début films portrayed the horror of the German occupation of Poland, won awards at Cannes which established his reputation as storyteller and commentator on Polish history. He also served on the national Senate from 1989-91. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki] TRANSCRIPT: For a long time I kept on at Cybulski that we didn't have a properly thought through scene in which the secretary gets killed. We knew that they were meeting in an empty space against the background of a long fence; I knew this precisely because I even have drawings that were made earlier. But there was one thing I still didn't know, and this was Zbyszek Cybulski's idea who said to me, 'You know, when I start shooting at him, he should come towards me and hang on to me as if he wanted to embrace me, and it'll be this kind of gesture...' The rest, what happened later has been written about by the critics. We just liked the idea that they would be together, whereas every logical assessment of this situation says that if you're shooting someone, they fall backwards. There's no way that anything else could happen. The victim can try to escape but they would always be running away from their assailant. However, the way the victim falls on him does what we were trying to say. We wanted to say that here everything comes together, that this communism that has been imported from the Soviets together with this youth from the AK, that somewhere here a drama has occurred mixing their hopes with a kind of impotence. I think that's why this film was well received in the world, because I was constantly being told: what are you making a film like this for? Who'll be able to understand it? This is our business, '45. Do they know where, who, with whom, against whom? It turned out that this didn't matter in the slightest because these scenes said something so powerfully that it suddenly turned out, that in church a crucifix has come loose and is hanging upside down. We always see a crucifix like this but now it's hanging like this, so we begin to think. In Christian iconography, we always see the cross standing, on which Christ is hanging and at the foot of the cross there are two figures, Mary and St John. But if suddenly the cross is hanging and the two people standing at its foot are my protagonists, then even those people who don't have this iconography embedded in their consciousness still have it somewhere at the back of their minds. And everyone can see that it's some kind of image that reminds us of something important, something great, and yet there is no better way of showing that suddenly the world has been turned on its head if something like this has happened. We found a demolished church and the idea to have this crucifix hanging like that was an idea I'd had earlier and had drawn it. So these scenes were thought through and carried out while we were shooting. Not many of them were, in fact, none of the scenes I remember today like that ending on the rubbish dump, like the death of Szczuka, like that scene in the church, like... The Polonaise? The Polonaise at the end had been written in by Andrzejewski except that he's written that they all go out into a large space, and so I initially thought they could all go out into an empty market square but I didn't have a good enough place to use. There was nothing like that in Wrocław, Wrocław is a big city whereas the story is set in a small, provincial Polish town so we couldn't do this in Wrocław. But I remember that scene with the glasses, where they're lit... this was Janusz Morgenstern's idea; he was working with me then as the second director. He convinced me to take Zbyszek Cybulski, not to have any doubts about him. And when we were still debating, we felt that in the background there were still all of those who had lost their lives, we kept talking about those who hadn't lived to see '45 having died in the Warsaw Uprising, in the woods, in active service. And suddenly Kuba - Janusz Moregenstern - had the idea. 'Have these burning, have glasses with strong vodka!' And he lights them and each of these glasses is someone's name, someone who had been their friend and who's no longer alive.