Europe Endless - Eastern Europe: Ashes And Diamonds (Dir Andrzej Wajda , 1h43m, 1958)
Onwards, further into the heart of Europe. and into new cinematic territory. It is easy to lean back into stereotype, to consider Eastern European cinema as overshadowed by Soviet Cinema, a medium largely of propaganda, of social realism, and heavy-handed censorship, replaced by a period in the 1980s and 1990s into which national cinemas arrived, blinking, into the sun and set about getting down to the business of making independent films. This is beyond simplifying things; look no further than our first stop on this season-within-a-season, as we step from the metaphorical train and arrive in 1950s Poland. Polish cinema arrives almost with the medium's birth, its first director, Kazimierz Prószyński, patenting his camera before the Lumieres, and by 1914, Polish cinema was as burgeoning as any other European nation's, including Polish films being released in Germany during the First World War. Even exile in Britain did not stop its film-makers, with the vehemently anti-N...
