The 1961 movie that “announced the arrival of a master filmmaker”, according to Martin Scorsese
Given there are more than 800k Polish people living in the UK, it’s possibly surprising that most of us don’t know all that much about their country. Sure, they make delicious massive sausages and most of them could drink you under the table, but in general, what is Poland famous for? Well, it certainly should be famous for its cinema, as Martin Scorsese will tell you.
If you want to know just how good Polish directors can be, then may I entreat you to hunt down the 1981 movie Possession starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani and watch it as soon as you possibly can, because it is unlike anything you’ll see, even 45 years after it was made; a dizzying, horrific, emotional, beautiful, tear-inducing masterpiece from Andrzej Żuławski.
And Żuławski is far from alone in making a huge contribution to modern cinema and hailing from Poland; another Andrzej also influenced Scorsese as he wrote in The Guardian some years ago, acknowledging one director in particular: “My introduction to Polish cinema came with Andrzej Wajda’s trilogy: Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal and A Generation, actually, they were released out of order here in the US, and we saw Kanal first, followed quickly by Ashes, both in 1961, and then we got to see A Generation later.”
He added, “Among the three, it was Ashes and Diamonds that had the greatest impact on me. It announced the arrival of a master filmmaker”.
Made in 1958, Ashes and Diamonds indeed finished Wajda’s trilogy of war films, and it tells the post-WW2 story of a Polish soldier ordered to assassinate a high-ranking member of the communist party. One of the most historically famous films to be made in Poland, it caused a stir politically but was well reviewed by critics on its release.
Once it was released internationally, and it was delayed due to Polish authorities stepping in to ban it in places like the Cannes Film Festival, it was heralded as a great work, twice nominated for Baftas and winning the main prize at the Venice Film Festival. Scorsese is not the only household name to reference the movie as one of his favourites, so do Francis Ford Coppola and Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters also claimed that the film had a big influence on him as a young man, with two of the band’s later songs featuring references to the movie, which starred Zbigniew Cybulski, an actor who represented a Western European rebel of cinema, like a Polish James Dean.
Scorsese called him a ‘great actor’ and a ‘generational icon’, and Cybulski would star in several of Wajda’s key films, including the first in the war trilogy, A Generation and the romantic drama Innocent Sorcerers.
So close were the pair in fact, that Wajda even made a film about him after his tragic death from falling under a train at just 45, in 1967. Made two years later, the meta-movie Everything for Sale was the story of a director searching for his lead actor, who goes missing from the set. Wajda, meanwhile, lived a long life and died at the age of 90 in 2016 after a career for which he received an honorary Oscar from the Academy, thanks to four of his films being nominated for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’.
