In its review of the time, the New York Times called Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble ‘a Polish-style Citizen Kane’. On the face of it, this was an absurd comparison. One film was about a Polish bricklayer; the other a portrait of an immensely wealthy American newspaper tycoon. On closer scrutiny, however, the Kane comparison doesn’t seem quite so strange. Both films are determinedly self-reflexive affairs in which a journalist or filmmaker investigates the life of a character and, in doing so, reveals many of the tensions and contradictions existing in the society that formed him. Also, both have similar narrative structures, making heavy use of flashbacks and newsreel footage.
As Wajda explained in a 2013 interview, Man of Marble was originally conceived in the early 1960s. A group of filmmakers and scriptwriters had met up and were exchanging stories when one of them mentioned a newspaper article about Nowa Huta, a socialist model city built in the 1950s and much celebrated by government propagandists. The article referred to someone turning up for work at the city’s job centre; asked his profession, he said ‘bricklayer’. The job-centre officers told him there were no vacancies for bricklayers as the city was already built – all the available jobs were at the local steelworks. The man walked off. After he’d left, the job-centre officials were troubled because he had looked so familiar. Eventually they realised that he had once been a ‘model worker’ and one of the faces of the construction of Nowa Huta – a socialist hero. Now, he was a forgotten man.
The film that Wajda finally made in 1976 was very different from the one that he and screenwriter Aleksander Scibor-Rylski had first conceived more than a decade before. Back then, the government had prevented them from shooting. Only later, when the reformist Edward Gierek became first secretary, did the authorities relent. As Wajda recalls, they were keen to see themselves on screen and curious to revisit the heady days of the 1950s.
Man of Marble is a film of its period. In its contemporary 1970s scenes, we are in a world of denim, flares and booming synth music. Anyone expecting an austere Polish arthouse movie will be disconcerted by its opening scenes, which play like something out of ITV’s The Professionals. The most important change in the updating of the original project is the foregrounding of the role of Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), the headstrong young filmmaker who decides to make a documentary about Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a (fictional) heroic worker who famously laid more than 28,000 bricks during an eight-hour session.
Janda claimed that the inspiration for her character was the poet, songwriter and filmmaker Agnieszka Osiecka. She also talks of how her role was expanded during shooting until she became as much the protagonist as Birkut himself. ‘The role kept growing while we were shooting. It wasn’t written down.’ Wajda clearly intends her as an emblematic figure, representative of a new, younger generation ready to question the myths of Soviet socialism.
Man of Marble is a complex film that, seen decades later, has added layers of resonance. On its original release, Wajda was providing Polish audiences with an opportunity to look back at the 1950s. As he observes – and the censors couldn’t help but notice too – he was exposing a fundamental contradiction about the communist system in Poland. The film revealed how badly workers such as Birkut were treated by a state that was supposed to have their best interests at heart. Man of Marble is itself now part of the history it was dramatising. The film, as Wajda puts it, offered a preview of Solidarity: Birkut is a forerunner of the characters who stood up against the state during the heady days of the strikes at the Gdansk shipyard during the early 1980s (events dramatised in Wajda’s 1981 film Man of Iron).
Agnieszka Holland worked uncredited as an assistant director on the film, and the authorities were wary of her because of her family’s attritional relationship with the government. (Her father died in suspicious circumstances following a police interrogation.) Holland shot one of the most poignant scenes in the film: the black-and-white newsreel interview with the young Birkut in which he is shown looking shyly at the camera as he is asked for his name and details. It’s a scene that has the tenderness and intimacy of one of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s vox pop documentaries, and it exemplifies what makes Man of Marble so special, namely its human dimension. If you want an insight into Polish society of the 1970s, Wajda provides it, but his film works equally well as a character study of a naive and decent young man betrayed by a government that once fêted him as a hero.
Geoffrey Macnab, Sight and Sound, August 2014
A contemporary review
The most succinct way to describe Man of Marble is as an East European Citizen Kane. Thematically, Andrzej Wajda’s film is concerned with the mechanics of mythology: it explores the apparatus whereby a public image is created, modified and demolished, while simultaneously pursuing its own investigation into the reality behind the official myths. Like Kane, it is concerned with the power of the media to manipulate and even to manufacture truth; but where Welles was conducting a many-levelled enquiry into the power of the press, the medium with which Wajda is centrally concerned is that of the motion picture. His film, even more than Kane, becomes a technical demonstration of his subject matter: its virtuoso style has a total thematic relevance. And, as with Welles, the political sensitivity of Wajda’s theme has scarcely helped ingratiate him with those who control domestic film production.
Where Kane himself was an American archetype, essentially a self-made man and myth, Wajda’s hero is, as befits a socialist society, a pure product of the state. His Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) became a national hero during Poland’s post-war reconstruction. Immortalised in marble and on canvas, he became a union delegate but fell from favour in 1952, when condemned to prison after publicly defending the fellow-worker, Witek, accused of sabotage following the accident in which Birkut’s hands were irreparably burned. Released in 1956, the apparently rehabilitated Birkut had made a single (filmed) public appearance to plead for national unity in the 1957 elections before disappearing from sight. Some 20 years later, his fate arouses the insatiable curiosity of an ambitious young filmmaker, Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda). Initially camouflaged by her surface of Westernised sophistication, her basic ingenuousness will prove to be a quality which she and her elusive subject have in common.
Any implication that Wajda, by endorsing the stylistic preferences of his aggressive heroine (‘Hand-held shots. Wide-angle lens. You’ve seen the latest American films, haven’t you?’), is also suggesting that there’s more truth and less manipulation with a mobile camera is neatly scotched within the film itself. The wide-angle shots of Burski’s jet taxi-ing in to land are, as well as a political comment on the Americanisation of one of the film’s more flagrant opportunists, also a timely demonstration of the ease with which the camera can inflate the significance of neutral events.
In emphasising that the ars longa maxim is particularly inapplicable to ‘official’ art, Wajda is, of course, also commenting on the ephemeral nature of political truths. His film explores the inextricable relationship between styles and politics, not merely through its own aesthetic but also through its treatment of time in relation to individuals. Many of his characters are juxtaposed with images of themselves 20 years before. The disgraced Witek is now a steel plant technocrat (whose works’ helicopter justifies a stunning aerial shot); the party spy from the 1950s is rediscovered recruiting girls for nationalised striptease; the gymnast heroine whom Birkut married is revealed drinking herself to death (like the second Mrs Kane) in black market luxury. Only the dead or the very young appear immune from the opportunism that advances with age and blurs the clear lines of early character. Despite this, the final sequence of Agnieszka and Birkut’s son marching along the TV corridors to liberate the newly suppressed truth marks Man of Marble as an ultimately optimistic film.
Jan Dawson, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1979
Man of Marble Człowiek z Marmuru
Director: Andrzej Wajda
©: Film Polski
Production Company: Zespol Filmowy ‘X’
Producer: Andrzej Wajda
Production Manager: Barbara Pec-Slesicka
Production Assistants: Andrzej Smulski, Elzbieta Kozlowska, Alina Klobukowska, Janusz Dziumowicz, Waldemar Król
Assistant Directors: Krystyna Grochowicz, Witold Holtz, Leszek Tarnowski,
Magdalena Stelmaszczyk, Agnieszka Holland *
Screenplay: Aleksander Scibor-Rylski
Dramaturge: Boleslaw Michalek *
Director of Photography: Edward Klosinski
Assistant Camera: Jacek Lomnicki, Jan Ossowski, Jerzy Tomczuk
Stills Photography: Renata Pajchel
Editors: Halina Prugar, Maria Kalicinska
Art Directors: Allan Starski, Wojciech Majda
Set Decorator: Maria Osiecka-Kuminek
Costume Designers: Lidia Rzeszewska, Wieslawa Konopelska
Make-up: Anna Adamek, Iwona Kaminska
Laboratory: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych w Warszawie
Music: Andrzej Korzynski
Additional Music/Songs: Jerzy Gerta *, Zdzislaw Gozdawy *, Alfred Gradstein *, Andrzej Nowikow *, Franciszka Palki *, Kazimierz Serocki *, Waclaw Stepni *, Tadeusz Sygietynski *, Wladyslaw Szpilman *
Vocal Group: Ali Babki
Music Consultant: Malgorzata Jaworska
Sound: Piotr Zawadzki
Cast
Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Mateusz Birkut)
Krystyna Janda (Agnieszka)
Michal Tarkowski (Wincenty Witek)
Piotr Cieslak (Michalak)
Wieslaw Wójcik (Party Secretary Jodla)
Krystyna Zachwatowicz (Hanka Tomczyk)
Tadeusz Lomnicki (Jerzy Burski, the director)
Jacek Lomnicki (young Jerzy Burski)
Magda Teresa Wójcik (editor)
Boguslaw Sobczuk (TV producer)
Leonard Zajaczkowski (cameraman)
Jacek Domanski (sound man)
Zdzislaw Kozien (Agnieszka’s father)
Irena Laskowska (museum employee)
Wieslaw Drzewicz (owner of the ‘Ostoia’)
Ewa Zietek (secretary)
E. Borkowska, A. Graziewicz, E. Karwanski, S. Kornacka, H. Lapinski, J. Moniak, I. Oberska, Z. Ploszaj, J. Roland, M. Rayzacher, G. Skurski, D. Stalinska, Z. Szymbroski, M. Swigon, K. Wolanska, A. Wykretowicz, Mieczyslaw Grabka, Andrzej Seweryn (narrators)
Kazimierz Kaczor (colonel) *
Poland 1976©
161 mins
Digital (restoration)
*Uncredited
Restored by Yakumama
With thanks to
Marlena Łukasiak, Michał Oleszczyk, Jędrzej Sabliński
Presented with the ICA and Ciné Lumière, who will also be hosting screenings of Wajda’s works in February and March
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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