Andrzej Wajda - 'Ashes and Diamonds' and censorship (57/222)

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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: 'Ashes and Diamonds' presented me with an exercise that was completely different from anything I had done in my earlier films, not because it was deliberate, but it was obviously the consequence of what I had learned about the cinema, what I had come to understand, what I had put to the audience in my first two films, 'A Generation' and 'Kanał', all of this propelled me towards a greater clarity. After this film the critics - and not just Polish ones - acknowledged that I'm a director of symbolic scenes, that I'm a director of the metaphorical, that I'm a director of some kind of poetic cinema. I think this is worth mentioning because it isn't just for me; this became clear only once the film had been made, a long time after it had been made, when I realised how the film was being received and accepted by the authorities on the one hand and the viewing public on the other. In order to be understood properly, I'll refer to the final scene, that is, to the scene in which the hero dies on a rubbish dump. When does the director triumph over the censor? I think this only happens in one case - when he makes a film that is uncensorable. This means that as in the case of 'Kanał' no one had foreseen that a film like that would be released. A film about the Warsaw Uprising can be diverse. Of course, it was obvious that the sewers would play a role but no one expected that as a result only the sewers would stick in the imagination of the audience. All the other scenes were just a preparation for what was going to happen inside. Because of this, 'Kanał' has remained in the viewer's imagination as no more than a sewer. None of the people who subscribed and decided to make this film could have predicted this. In 'Ashes and Diamonds' things were similar. Except that the censors pay most attention to dialogue as the words that are spoken on screen, the notions, the ideas, the concepts - everything that is encapsulated in words is closely monitored by the censors because ideology of every kind, not just communist, is formulated by words. Therefore, it's very easy to appropriate words to a given ideology and to reply to the question, can these words be spoken on the screen or not, can we allow someone to say this or not. I think that this is how it was in past ages, too; books were censored mainly from this point of view. Cinema, however, introduces a certain element that's hard to master through censorship, namely, images. An image is no longer a word. In 'Ashes and Diamonds', not one word is said that could undermine the system, whatever is said there is within the boundaries of what was allowed. But what dumbfounded those who saw the film for the first time, what completely unnerved those at the highest level who were to determine whether this film would be released, was a certain intangible ambivalence that was part of the images themselves. The last scene - Maciek Chełmicki dies on the rubbish dump. From the point of view of the censor, the censor can wonder and say: what is the proper place of those who raise their hand against the communist authorities? The rubbish dump. Which rubbish dump? The rubbish dump of history. Aha, he dies on a rubbish dump - this scene can remain. It's acceptable, it can stay. Meanwhile, the cinema audience sees this scene in a completely different way. The future audience will say: just a moment, they're killing our boy, our AK partisan, we like him, we've been on his side all the time and not only are they killing him, but they're doing it on a rubbish dump! What kind of authorities murder our boys on a rubbish dump? There's no convergence between these two interpretations, which is why the film could be released, and this was the case not just with this scene but with other scenes, too.