THE “SOLIDARITY DIPTYCH”

In which Wajda first explored a past which his country was trying to escape,

and then gave a glimpse of the future his country was trying to create.

Acclaimed Polish director Andrzej Wajda discusses two of his most influential films in a special edition of City Cinematheque hosted by CUNY TV’s Jerry Carlson. With the cooperation of the Polish Cultural Institute of New York, Carlson traveled to the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing in Warsaw to meet with the director of these stirring portrayals of recent Polish history. The famous film diptych with new interviews on each film is being shown in honor of the Solidarity movement, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2005. Accompanying Carlson, and serving as interpreter, was his CUNY colleague, Professor Andrzej Krakowski, himself a former student of Andrzej Wajda at the Lodz Film School.

“MAN OF MARBLE”

1977, Poland, 160 min., color and b&w, drama, in Polish with English subtitles

Dir.: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Krystyna Janda, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Jacek Lomnicki.

Surreptitiously shown out of competition as a Surprise Film, it won the

1978 FIPRESCI Award at Cannes

Andrzej Wajda got the germ of the idea for his film in 1962 from a small newspaper item about a bricklayer who was initially refused a job at the new steel mill outside of Krakow until someone recognized him as a celebrated but now forgotten lead-laborer (Stakhanovite) from 12 years before. But Wajda made the mistake of publishing the initial draft of the script by Aleksander Scibor-Rylski in a cultural weekly – a seeming victory over censorship – only to have the script banned for over a decade. “What was the main complaint against Scibor’s text?” writes Wajda: “It was the fact that it attacked the system of leadership of labor, which was considered the cornerstone of communism. That is why, at various levels of Party control, I was asked: ‘What will you give people if you deprive them of faith in the leadership of labor?’ ”

It was not until well after the shipyard strikes of 1970, the killings, and the replacement of Gomulka by Gierek that the subtler shifts in political control afforded a window of opportunity for Wajda to make his film. Agnieszka, a woman film student in 1976 Poland, played with vigor by Krystyna Janda, embarks on a documentary about a bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut, who had been groomed and exploited as a “lead-laborer”, or Stakhanovite, in the Stalinist ’50s in accordance with a policy intended to inspire greater worker output. He is played with utterly convincing authenticity by Jerzy Radziwilowicz. The film’s structure recalls that of Citizen Kane, complete with cleverly created period newsreels, as the filmmaker tracks down the history of the worker hero’s rise and fall – and reconstructs in the process a panorama of the whole history of Poland from the Stalinist 50s to the mid 70s.

The Party was so nervous about the film that they arranged for only Party members to attend the premiere, lest there be applause. But according to Wajda, they applauded enthusiastically, seeing it “ – what a surprise! – as a pro-Gierek film.” The film was lambasted by establishment critics, but letters came in to Wajda from ordinary citizens thanking him for what to them was an unaccustomed window of truth on the screen. A well-known independent writer, reviewing the film in a semi-independent journal (Wiez, May-June 1977), wrote of his shock of recognition as he watched the film, and closed with the line, “So, are we facing a renaissance of Polish film? Perhaps not only of film?” But the censors deleted those two lines…as they did a closing sequence of the film, in a cemetery where Agnieszka looks in vain for the grave of the worker-hero Birkut, killed in the 1970 crackdown. But Wajda saved the sequence and used it to open Man of Iron.

“MAN OF IRON”

1981, Poland, 152 min., color, drama, in Polish with English subtitles

Dir.: Andrzej Wajda.

Cast: Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Krystyna Janda, Marian Opania, Wieslawa Kosmalska.

Winner of the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival 1981

British Film Critics’ Award, London Film Festival 1981

Oscar nominee as Best Foreign Film 1982

As President of the Association of Filmmakers, which had been officially authorized to record historic events like the August 1980 Gdansk shipyard strikes for archival purposes, Andrzej Wajda visited the shipyards, aware that a documentary crew was already at work there (on a film that would be called Workers ’80, as an echo of Kieslowski’s much earlier documentary, Workers ’71). “The workers’ guard at the gate recognized me at once, and on my way to the meeting room, one of the shipyard workers said: ‘Why don’t you make a film about us?’ ‘What kind of film?’ asked Wajda.’ ‘Man of Iron’ he answered without hesitation. I had never made a film to order, but I could not ignore this call.”

Under the liberalized policies successfully demanded by the workers in their negotiations with the government, Wajda managed to begin shooting the film in January 1981, much of it in and around the shipyards, with two of the leaders of the August strikes, Lech Walesa and the crane-operator Anna Walentynowicz, playing themselves in a scene in which Agnieszka, the filmmaker from Man of Marble, and now a pro-democracy activist, marries the son of that film’s labor hero, Birkut. The story here focuses on a down-and-out television journalist, Winkel, who has been asked by the government to try to dig up some scandal on the strike leaders, especially Maciek Tomczyk, son of Birkut, who had been killed in 1970. As in Man of Marble, archival footage recaps the history of Polish protests as they are recalled in the journalist’s interviews. Winkel’s dormant conscience begins to awaken as he gradually opens up to the humanity and sound purpose of the striking workers, heightening the pain of having to chose between conscience and his secure job.

When Man of Iron was finished by June, it faced a huge list of cuts demanded by the Ministry of Culture and Arts, but Wajda managed to get a weakened regime to settle for just one. In its recommendation that the film be granted a “First Category artistic rating”, it is interesting to read how the Commission for the Assessment of Cinematic Feature Films tries to rationalize an approval that under “normal” circumstances it would have had no inclination to grant: “The decided majority of the Commission’s members underlined the fact that the ideological significance of the film – in the context of the post-August period and of the current situation in the country – assists emotionally in the efforts to renew social-political life.” The irony, of course, is that social-political life in Poland had already been spectacularly renewed with the legalization of the independent trade union movement, Solidarity. And Wajda got his film virtually intact to Cannes, where it won the Golden Palm. But by December 1981 the tanks rolled back in to restore order. By the time Man of Iron won a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination, Poland was under martial law, with a total blackout on communication.