Cinema
Compromises
Ted Whitehead
Man of Marble (Academy One) It is hard to imagine a Western film with a 'T.J' certificate being labelled as 'controversial'. Yet this is the label attached to Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble, first shown unofficially at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and now released here. No sex, no violence — and controversial? It may seem so to the Polish authorities but hardly to us, since it presents exactly that image of Poland usually peddled by the Western press: material comfort purchased at the price of moral degradation, artistic integrity perverted by socialist dogma, heroic individuals betrayed by a craven proletariat and hounded by a corrupt oligarchy. The difference between Wajda's vision of his country and that portrayed in Tim Garton Ash's recent article in the Spectator is that Wajda offers no liberal renaissance and barely mentions Catholicism: But Wajda has, I understand, been trying to make his film since 1962, and I can't help suspecting that it would have been both more accurate and certainly more controversial a decade ago, as it is essentially asking whether the reforms and recantations of 1956 produced any change — and giving a pretty pessimistic answer, The Man of Marble is Mateus Birkut, a Peasant who arrives at the building site of Nova Huta, a vast steel plant, eager to work for the reconstruction of his country in the early Fifties, Stakhanovite to the core, but a i political innocent, he sees nothing wrong n agreeing to try to break the existing record for bricklaying in order to provide a propaganda film for a visiting director, Burski. The record broken, he becomes a hero of labour, and is shunted from one plant to another to stimulate production, until a less zealous worker passes him a hot brick that burns his hands so badly he has to give up the job.
As idealistic as ever, Birkut devotes him self to community work until a friend of his, Witek, is falsely accused of being a spy. Birkut appeals without success both to the a. uthorities and to fellow trade unionists, ignoring the advice of his wife Hanka and of a sympathetic Party agent. Eventually .he makes such a nuisance of himself that, like Witek, he lands up in prison. Released in 1956, he refused to toe the Party line — and from this point it's downhill all the way for him, We discover this history via the investiga tions of a contemporary film student who Wants to do a documentary fOr her diploma on the subject of the rise and fall of a !ocialist hero. In effect she assembles a Where are they now?' from interviews, bits Of old newsreel and propaganda film and censored sequences from the archives. It emerges that Witek is now thriving as the manager of a steelworks, the wife is an alc.oholic and the Party agent is managing a strip club: all have sold out, except Birkut — and he's dead.
When the film school producer indig nantly cancels her project, she invokes the help of Birkut's son; and the two march on the film school with a resolute stride that seems to demand a brass band. Wajda's Optimistic image of individual heroism looks as hollow as any of the earlier images of socialist solidarity. He also seems to be questioning his own position as Poland's leading director by comparing the uncompromising young student with the middle aged Burski — now rich, celebrated and utterly compromised. Despite the brave concluding gesture, the weight of evidence suggests an underlying mood of 'Let us endure and see injustice done.' Although the film is far too long, it held me for most of the time thanks to Wajda's intricate manipulation of time sequences and gradual narrative development, and to some fine performances, particularly by Jerzy Radziwilowicz as Birkut and by Krys tyna Janda as the sort of student director who doesn't give a damn about getting her man but will stop at nothing to get her film.
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