Communists on Film: Amy Goodman and ‘Ashes and Diamonds’

    This week, two films are opening at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater and Cultural Center just outside of D.C. They are Steal This Movie, Please! and Ashes and Diamonds. Steal This Movie is a brand new biography of far-left journalist Amy Goodman. Ashes and Diamonds is a 1958 Polish movie about communism.

    Despite being decades older, Ashes and Diamonds is by far the better and more relevant movie. In fact, it’s a film we are considering screening at the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival. Steal This Movie, Please! is just the same old radical leftism that Hollywood has been churning out for decades. “Consolidation of media” is bad, capitalism is bad, Cuba is good, etc. Goodman is praised by both Jane Fonda and punk traitor and fool Tom Morello.

    Ashes and Diamonds, on the other hand, tells an ageless and relevant story about the tragic nature of totalitarianism. The Andrzej Wajda film opens on VE Day, May 8, 1945. World War II is over. However, in Poland, another battle looms – the incoming Soviet puppet regime. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski), and Drewnowski (Bogumił Kobiela) are three resistance fighters opposed to communists as much as Nazis. They botch an assassination of Communist party apparatchik Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński). Maciek is ordered by his superiors to try again. 

            Agonized by his mistake, Maciek meets and falls in love with barmaid Krystyna (Ewa Krzyżewska). He has an epiphany: the war is over for him.“I can’t kill or hide any more!” he cries to his commanding officer. Throughout most of the film, Maciek wears sunglasses, a symbol of his trauma and need to hide away from the totalitarian systems oppressing him. When Krystyna asks why he keeps them, Maciek replies: “A souvenir of unrequited love for the homeland.” Eventually, letting the guard down with Krystyna, he takes them off. The communists, of course, don’t care that Maciek is in love. He’s supposed to be married to the state.

    Like people all over the world – and in America – today, the characters in Ashes and Diamonds just want to live, love, raise families, follow their faith. The left has never been able to just leave us alone. 

          The title of Ashes and Diamonds is taken from lines by the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Norwid: “Will there remain among the ashes a star-like diamond, the dawn of eternal victory?” As film historian Annette Insdorf notes in her excellent commentary that comes with the Criterion Collection DVD of Ashes and Diamonds, the communists made director Wajda include a scene where the new communist commissar is giving a speech to war-weary veterans, promising the grand new world coming that will usher in a beautiful new  Poland. Despite this socialist propaganda, however, the message of the film is clear: communism is a lie, and the Soviet takeover of Poland and Eastern Europe after World War II was one of the great moral evils of the 20th Century. One movie critic put the choice this way: “Are the diamonds of future law-abiding peacetime prosperity under communist rule – that is, effective rule by those who started the war invading Poland in league with the Nazis – preferable to the ashes of wartime suffering which at least offered certainty and purpose?” The point is that both systems of oppression are evil.

    Now, more than sixty years after the 1958 release of Ashes and Diamonds, we have a film like Steal This Movie, Please!, which is teaching the same old nonsense. The review of the film in the New York Times offered this paragraph: 

    Early in the film, [Amy] Goodman is referred to as both an activist and a journalist. That isn’t the position of every independent news outlet. But it’s true that perspective colors the story reporters see, and thus tell; being aware of that doesn’t mean you’re not still seeking to unearth the truth, and that’s how Goodman views it. “Steal This Story, Please!” makes a strong case that a plurality of independent outlets and more journalists, not fewer, are vital to a healthy democracy — and that without a revitalization of the independent press, we may lose the ability to discern the truth altogether.

    Of course. If we can only get more communist reporters, America will be free. They always promise a new world coming, and it always winds up in ashes.