Tag: victory

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Riefenstahl

Directed by Andres Veiel
Certificate 15
115 minutes
Released 9 May

There is something deeply depressing about the fact that one of the most talented female film directors who ever lived is also without a doubt also one of the most troubling. Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) is best known today for the documentaries Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), the first a record of the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Rally, the second of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Both eulogise large scale spectacle, with Olympia in particular celebrating the human body as it undergoes the rigour of sports disciplines. Both celebrate victory, superiority, dominance.

Riefenstahl lived to the ripe old age of 101, claiming over the years that she was an artist who happened to fall in with the Third Reich by dint of birthplace and time; she didn’t really understand what that regime was doing and simply got on with making the films that she made under their patronage.

There have been documentaries about her before, yet what makes this one different is that… [read the rest at Reform magazine…]

[Read my alternative review on this site…]

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Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ashes And Diamonds
(Popiół I Diament)

Director – Andrzej Wajda – 1958 – Poland – Cert. 12 – 103m

*****

Two resistance fighters attempt to assassinate a Communist Party official on the last day of the Second World War – plays at the Phoenix Cinema East Finchley in conjunction with the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival at 18:00 on Sunday, March 19th, also on Blu-ray as part of Wajda’s War Trilogy

Made over a decade after not only the historical setting for the events it depicts in 1945 but also the Jerzy Andrzejewski novel on which it is based which was written in 1947 and published in 1948, this condenses that novel’s two weeks into a mere – 24 hours the last day of the Second World War and the evening and night of the victory celebrations that follow plus the subsequent early dawn.

The war is over and the Nazis defeated, but Poland still finds itself the subject of conflict as opposing factions vie for power. On the one hand is the official Party trying to get everything working again and on the other members of the resistance determined to stop them.

The older Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) and the younger Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) carry out an ordered assassination on Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzeżyński).… Read the rest