ASHES AND DIAMONDS (co-wri & dir by Andrzej Wajda, w/ Zbigniew Cybulski, 103mns, Poland, 1958)

*Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us. 

How a great film gets a rhythm, an essential musicality all its own is one of the great mysteries. 

There are so many component parts to cinema. And often, finished movies still feel like an ill-fitting marriage of those component parts.

But every now and then you fall right through the artifice into the dream. As you do in Andrzej Wajda's all-time great ASHES AND DIAMONDS.

The movie follows anti-Communist Polish underground fighter Maciek across one day, night, and morning as he moves from a failed assassination attempt to a one night stand to one more attempt to kill his target and its aftermath.

The movie is shot in a stunning moody high and low black and white. Maciek's odyssey across a night feels not unlike, in a perverse way, a kind of high stakes political AMERICAN GRAFFITI, DAZED AND CONFUSED, or BEFORE SUNRISE.

The movie has the unity of action and location that gives it the throbbing pulse and weight of Greek tragedy. It also courses with a dark humour and even darker romanticism that seems to capture the frustration, yearning, inner conflict Poles wrestled across all the terrors they faced from World War II through Soviet occupation.

Wajda constructs and edits the movie as a cross-cutting tour de force between Maciek's long dark journey into the night of the soul with a post war party being held at the bar/hotel he stays at while he waits to make his second assassination attempt.

The whole movie has a kind of hiding in the twilight feel as everyone celebrates getting through one crisis (World War II and German occupation) but sensing the start of a new one (Soviet occupation).

There is a fatalistic poetry, sexuality, energy that infuses every image, every scene.

Maciek, played by a moody, charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski, meets Krystyna (Ewa Krzyżewska), a bartender/waitress at the hotel, and they spend part of the night making love, wandering around bombed out churches, falling in love.

It's near impossible for anyone who hasn't truly lived through the Central and Eastern European 20th century crisis of constant war and occupation to understand the competing psychologies that wrestle in the same soul. Yet so many of these movies burst with a determined sexuality (Milos Forman's LOVES OF A BLONDE feels like a sibling film). This emphatic rebel yell that no oppressive regime is going to suppress the sex impulse.

There's also something to movies that take place across one night that mirror life, death, resurrection. The irony often being the most lively part of the movies happen in the death phase when the characters, in the witching hour, have traversed over to some kind of other world before having to return to the reality that faces us each sunrise to sunset.

ASHES AND DIAMONDS may be a kind of dance of the dead but it's one done by characters who experience another world, another layer, another understanding, another existence hiding somewhere in the bedsheets and slatternly slats of streetlight and drunken songs and cigarette smoke of a party still going strong at three in the morning.

Where is this world? When do we visit it? When does it leave us behind?

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club