Starring: Krystyna Janda, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, Tadeusz Łomnicki
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Wajda’s story follows film student Agnieszka as she researches the life of Mateusz Birkut for her diploma project. Birkut is the fictional equivalent of the workers who were lauded in the Stalinist era for their quota-busting efforts in the factories, fields and building sites of the Soviet Bloc – the heroes of the Stakhanovite movement. Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) remembers him as an over-achieving bricklayer involved in the construction of Nowa Huta whose dedication was propagandised with marble statues in the 1950s, but wonders what became of him.
Krystyna Janda portrays the dauntless heroine in a big screen debut full of empathy that reveals her theatrical education. Her character was probably inspired by then-young film director Agnieszka Holland and is a tribute to the ethics and style of a new generation of Polish directors that included names such as Kieślowski, Zanussi and Holland herself.
On another level Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) deals with the optimism of the pre-Gomułka era with its blind faith in social competition and, more generally, Stalinism. In the early 1950s the destabilizing impact of Stakhanovism on social cohesion and the envy and tension it created among workers were ignored. Birkut is finally disenchanted, as is Agnieszka. She tracks the discarded hero to the Gdańsk shipyards, only to discover that he has died two years earlier.
Wajda the clairvoyant smells a turning point in Poland’s history. He connects the fate of the Stalinist-era workers of Nowa Huta with the struggles of their sons and daughters in the shipyards 20 years later. It is startling that such an overtly political film got past the censors of the time, at least until you hear that the script had been in development limbo since 1962.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on May 23, 2011