What was this movie?
 

I saw the movie at a university film series in the early 80s. I was just learning to broaden my tastes, and saw a weird foreign film.

It was about the last days of some heroic communist revolutionaries. Black and white, subtitled. I remember one scene in a bar where one man bitterly names each of their dead comrades and lights a glass of liquor for each name. The movie ended by going into full surrealism, with a white horse walking through a formal state dance in a ballroom. Ambassadors and countesses just waltzed around the horse. Our hero gets gunned down by police in the street.

I once asked a film instructor about it, and he said that the horse in the ballroom was a moderately famous scene, but he couldn't remember the name of the movie. :(

I'm almost positive that it's Andrzej Wajda's "Ashes and Diamonds".

Sounds like something from the Czech New Wave of the '60s, but the horse scene isn't ringing a bell. Maybe the phenomenal Ucho (The Ear) by Karel Kachyna. It had something like a ballroom scene, but I don't remember a horse. Anyway, the film wasn't actually released until the late '80s, after being suppressed by the government at the time of its production.

Edit: me12321 is right, but I don't remember those scenes.

Pretty sure it's Eisenstein's Akademy Polizei 3.

I think that's it. The essay on the Criterion site refers to both the lighting glasses of vodka and the white horse.

http://www.criterion.com/asp/release...&section=essay

It makes me want to see the movie again, and maybe understand it this time.

You rock!

I saw a few "cool" commi movies but have no any recollection of that scene.

will criterion be releasing this?