MAN OF MARBLE Movie Review

Czlowiek z Marmur

In Poland in the mid-1970s, a young filmmaker (Krystyna Janda) sets out to make a documentary about a bricklayer (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) who, because of his exceptional skill, once gained popularity with other workers. The bricklayer became a champion for workers’ rights and was the subject of many newsreels and much media attention. The filmmaker—who has chosen this worker's history as the subject of her graduate project for film school—uncovers his story in reels of locked-away and suppressed film, which show the bricklayer's rise to hero's status being officially sanctioned by the government, followed by the same bricklayer's descent into “non-personhood” when that same government found him getting a bit too influential. Andrej Wajda's gripping and bitterly satirical Man of Marble is structured like an epic and paced like a thriller; the ugly truth about state-sanctioned heroes unravels interview by interview, reel by reel, and culminates in a powerful indictment of Poland's communist regime as a police state. Needless to say, Man of Marble was not seen in Poland in its complete form (the ending was considerably more upbeat) but it sank in nonetheless. Just five years later, Wajda would more specifically chronicle the rise of the Solidarity movement in his sequel, Man of Iron. Lech Walesa, Solidarity's own real-life hero, appeared in that film as himself.

NEXT STOP … Man of Iron, Tito and Me, Z

1976 160m/C PL Krystyna Janda, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Jacek Lomnicki, Krystyna Zachwa-towicz; D: Andrzej Wajda; W: Aleksander Scibor-Rylski; M: Andrezej Korzynski. VHS NYF, FCT