BD 61-64 The War Trilogy: Three Films by Andrzej Wajda

[j99]

I’m interested, because Ashes And Diamonds is fantastic. How do the other two films compare with it? In any case,I’ll probably pick up the set. It’s too tempting.

These are my thoughts from the other thread, but in short, I think Kanal is the trilogy’s highlight

Thanks, I’ll read this.

[j99]

Well it’s clear from your comments, I just have to see Kanal.

[therewillbeblus]

It's worth noting that even though it's not as well-regarded as Ashes and Diamonds, my affection for Kanal is not unique. I believe several other vocal members here have expressed it's either their favorite of the trilogy or at least on par with A+D. The first film is fine too, so you can feel secure in buying this set

[MichaelB]

I don't think it would be at all controversial to claim that if Wajda had only made Kanal, his permanent place in the Polish cinema pantheon would still be rock-solid.

Quite aside from its throat-grabbing immediacy as both a narrative and an immersive experience - and few previous WWII films had been quite so confrontationally visceral (given what the Poles had gone through only a dozen years earlier, Wajda wasn't ever minded to soft-pedal things) - it's the film that pretty much single-handedly put Polish cinema on the international map. It wasn't the first Polish film to play in competition at Cannes, but it was the first to win one of the big prizes (Special Jury), and it caused a sensation - not least because of the general ignorance about what had happened in Warsaw in 1944. (During the press conference, someone even asked writer Jerzy Stefan Stawiński where he got the idea to set a war film in a sewer, but Stawiński was writing directly from his own personal experience, and a fair number of other people who worked on the film on both sides of the camera had seen active combat - even the teenage Wajda had run dangerous errands as a Polish Home Army messenger.) It's an astonishing film, and there are indeed quite a few people who prefer it to Ashes and Diamonds, not least because it needs much less historical/political context to appreciate.

And A Generation is pretty damn good for a feature debut, especially one made under highly restrictive conditions in terms of both production resources and a compulsory Socialist Realist approach (which, amongst other things, compelled Wajda to libel the anti-Communist Home Army - not by name, but it's pretty clear which organisation is being smeared as a bunch of incompetent anti-Semites). And while Wajda comes up with some pretty inventive ways of getting around this - notably the key supporting character of Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar), who's clearly far closer to Wajda himself than the more conventionally "heroic" Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki) - he's visibly hamstrung in a way that's much less true of Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds. But its virtues are substantial too - right from the start, Wajda's highly distinctive, muscular visual style was obvious (he and cinematographer Jerzy Lipman were obsessed with Wellesian deep focus, then rarely encountered in Polish cinema), and the performances are superb.

[knives]

I’m interested, because Ashes And Diamonds is fantastic. How do the other two films compare with it? In any case,I’ll probably pick up the set. It’s too tempting.

These are my thoughts from the other thread, but in short, I think Kanal is the trilogy’s highlight

Ditto. I’m tempting to point it as his masterpiece, although I prefer The Promised Land and Innocent Sorcerers.

[Bikey]

WAJDA WAR TRILOGY price drop at Amazon UK - now just £34.88!

[Bikey]

DVD Compare review

[ikms]

Going through the set over three days and just now got to Ashes and Diamonds, and while dvdcompare states: "The greater popularity of the film meant that it was the recipient of solo Blu-ray editions from Arrow in 2011 from a 2K restoration and Criterion in 2021 from a 4K restoration. Second Run's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 pillarboxed widescreen version utilizes neither master, coming from a new Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF) 2K restoration. Criterion's and Second Run's transfers look pretty much the same – perhaps the Second Run is a smidge darker – but both beat out the older Arrow master in which the notch or so additional brightness means that highlights are slightly less detailed than they are in the other two masters. Either of the newer editions would do in terms of picture while the different extras might make one want to hold onto the solo edition as a supplement to this boxed set."

This is clearly not correct. I have the old Arrow disc here and the new Second Run is unfortunately using the exact same master and displays all-but-identical frames, even down to the same baked in problematic DNR, waxy faces, ringing around high contrast objects, frozen / swirling skies. In fact I would say the first two films in this set (though not perfect) trounce the third in video quality by avoiding the most egregious of these distractions which at times give it the hallmark of an up-scaled DVD. I don't have the Criterion but going from the reviews online and screen-caps it seems the 4K derived BD is near definitive, of course I had assumed the Second Run release coming a year later was specifically timed to take advantage of the new video source (now it seems more likely the lower licensing fees for Polish films). Audio-wise there are (the same) filtering issues, with tinny audio and a strange subwoofer engagement whenever characters are "thump thump thump"-ing across the landscape. Same as in the Arrow release FWIW.

It's not all bad, the commentaries, short films, and booklets are great... close, but not quite definitive.

[andyli]

Finally someone to confirm what I've suspected since the announcement. It's now looking very likely the Kanal 4k restoration was not utilized, either.

[tenia]

I compared the 3 Ashes and Diamonds discs for my review of the set in January and yes, it's clear what is really what : https://testsbluray.com/2023/01/14/test ... r-trilogy/

The soundtrack is also clearly the same source than the Arrow disc.

Despite not using the 4k restoration, I found Kanal to be the best looking title in the set. A Generation's 2k restoration often has a filtered look with frozen grain, though it is looking much better than Ashes and Diamonds.
(This explains why my coverage may look less enthusiast about this release than other reviews)

[EddieLarkin]

How's the sound on the Criterion?

[tenia]

As I recall, it's a bit better.

[yoloswegmaster]

It's definitely misleading to advertise these masters as being "new 2K restorations" when the masters are at least a decade old and newer masters exist for at least 2 of the 3 titles. I'm going to presume that the cost to license the newer masters would have been too high despite licensing costs going down, so they decided to just use the older masters. On that note, does anyone have the Criterion blu for Ashes? I'm interested in seeing if they did their own 4K restoration of if they just licensed it from the rightsholder.

[tenia]

It's definitely misleading to advertise these masters as being "new 2K restorations" when the masters are at least a decade old and newer masters exist for at least 2 of the 3 titles.

Part of my issues with the PQ on this set is coming from this. Not being able, for whatever reason, to licence the newer masters happens. But while I was ready to watch 2K restorations that were different (ie a neutral stance) from the 4K ones but at least relatively recent, I wasn't prepared to just get the old Ashes and Diamonds DNRed to death one, a master already poorly received at the time a decade ago.

That's actually what perplexes me most : looking again at the boxset backcover blurb, it says "new 2K restorations from the WDIF", and this one definitely isn't, and no mention is made about it on the master (plus, again : a A/B comparison with the Arrow BD reveals it's the same source). So I wonder if it's something that should have been corrected on the backcover but wasn't, or if Second Run thought they were getting something newer anyway for Ashes and Diamonds and didn't realise (and, seemingly, they're not the only ones who didn't) they were given an older already-released HD master instead.

[Bikey]

"[This] UK Blu-ray set from late 2023 from Second Run offers the richest rewards with all three titles in immaculate restorations with a welcome batch of substantial extras. [...]
The biggest reason extras-wise to upgrade here (or dive in for the first time) is the audio commentaries provided for each film by producer and film historian Michael Brooke, who delivers what amounts to an engaging crash course in postwar Polish cinema and Wajda's ascendance as a director. The organization and delivery here are marvellous"

Mondo Digital

[MichaelB]

This year's big writing project—or Q1 2026's big writing project, anyway—is taking the form of two reasonably hefty Substack posts per weekday trawling through as close to Andrzej Wajda's entire output as I can muster (all the features and a surprising amount of the television), starting on New Year's Day and finishing on March 6th, Wajda's actual centenary. (The weekends are taken up with viewing new stuff and writing; handily, Substack lets me pre-schedule posts so I can largely forget about them during the week.)

I'm not doing separate announcements here for individual posts, as there'll be nearly a hundred all told, but I have been quietly updating this master list in the dedicated Wajda thread, and now that I've covered all three films in the 1950s war trilogy I thought that the entries for A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds might be worth highlighting here. Oh, and I also tackled the four 1950s shorts, three of which are in Second Run's box.

The idea is that every day I'll be posting about an individual film (or television project) at 9pm GMT, and as a run-up at 3pm I'll post something contextually related, whether about compulsory Socialist Realism (which dictated the tone and content of A Generation and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kanal), the Polish film unit system, Polish cinema's first big creative explosion in the late 1950s, and today—in a piece of blatant but I hope forgivable self-indulgence—a behind-the-scenes clip-illustrated glimpse into how I went about planning and recording my three Wajda war trilogy commentaries back to back.

As a bonus, the latter concludes with a snippet of my aborted Man of Marble commentary, wherein I sketched out the first fifteen minutes or so back in 2014 before chickening out; I thought that making what would then have been my commentary debut over a film as long and contextually complex as that would have been a tad ambitious, to put it mildly. (Although my research then found its way into a 5,000-word booklet essay, so it didn't go to waste.)

[AidanKing]

This sounds like a fantastic resource: thanks very much!

I wonder if BFI/Bloomsbury might be interested in publishing a version of the posts as a book, but I imagine you have already considered that.

[MichaelB]

To be honest, I'm not interested in going down that route—although I certainly will be getting back in the Wajda saddle before too long; I've just been swamped with work, including multiple commentary commissions (a dream one came through only a couple of hours ago), so I've reluctantly had to rethink my original schedule.

[AidanKing]

This sounds very interesting indeed: I imagine we will learn what those commentaries will be for in due course.

[MichaelB]

They're for East German, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak films, none of them announced yet.

[AidanKing]

I hope 'The Ashes' is the Polish one, but it's probably unlikely given the issues of length, BBFC costs and so on.

[MichaelB]

It’s not.