Almost 100 posts ago I reviewed Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Iron (1981; #180) and referenced its “thematic prequel,” the polish director’s Man of Marble (1977). I find now, having seen the film, that it is a prequel in the commonly accepted parlance, and not simply a grouping of related themes and tendencies with a recognizable title structure. The two films could not be more conventionally linked, and the protagonist of Man of Marble, Mateusz Birkut, is in fact the eventually reclusive father to the hero of Man of Iron, played by the same actor, Jerzy Radziwilowicz. Krystyna Janda appears here as well as Agnieszka, the tenacious media student whose presence I found confusing in the 1981 picture.
Her appearance is justified by the earlier film, as her story frames the rise to prominence of Birkut. In the contemporary 1977 of Man of Marble she is a film student, hoping to direct a thesis project on the life of a man whose marble statue lies in the basement of the Warsaw Museum. He is Mateusz Birkut, an educated bricklayer who was picked at the height of Stalinism by the soviet propaganda machine to star in a film about the glories of the housing worker. Through a series of flashbacks reminiscent of the structure of Citizen Kane (1941) Agnieszka searches for clues as to why Birkut, who briefly rose to the status of a national hero, faded into obscurity. In her inquiries, Agnieszka meets with the director – now an international star – whose film initially brought Birkut notoriety in the 1950s. The filmmaker debunks many of the publicly accepted truths that his documentary spawned. He reveals that, as a brick mason on a government housing project, Birkut was selected almost arbitrarily to “star” as a man who proposes and demonstrates a system of construction that allows a five man team to lay 28,000 bricks in a single eight hour session. Wajda intercuts elements of Agnieszka’s interview with the director with flashbacks to the filming of Birkut’s miraculous feat, balancing them well with the footage itself, shown to Agnieszka in a screening room. These scenes do much to reveal the manipulation of facts possible through filmmaking and serve in a way as Wajda’s commentary on his own art form: that truth is subject to what the camera sees.
Further interviews reveal that Birkut’s prominence as a national symbol after the release of the film gave way to an uneasy social conscience that caused him to question the communist leaders, although privately at first. After an accident prevented him from continuing on his publicity tour, his assigned political attaché began to detect a hesitance to cooperate with the pro-soviet propaganda mechanism, and suggested that his image be removed from public display.
As Agnieszka’s interviews begin to uncover more about Birkut’s post-censored life, her government funding for the movie is cut. An epilogue suggests, as Agnieszka confronts Birkut’s son (also played by Radziwilowicz here), that after years of political persecution the outspoken laborer was eliminated by the government. In a case of life imitating art, Man of Marble was censored by the pro-soviet Polish government for its own implications about their practices.
Much of Man of Marble is concerned with the concept of truth, and cinema’s ability to distort it. Often, seeing a film can alter our perceptions, regardless of whether the film is based in fact. Having seen this picture I’m not particularly inclined to alter my assessment of its squeal, but I do feel that comparison between them is warranted. I believe that Man of Marble is superior to Man of Iron, both technically and tonally. Where Man of Iron is a search for answers, Man of Marble seems to be much more concerned with the questions. Films about questions so often unite and intrigue us, while films about answers so often divide and enrage us. As I said, conventionally these films are linked, but one is of much higher quality, and I can’t help but liken their differences to those of the initial and most resent installments of the Indian Jones canon.
Language: Polish
Runtime: 165 Minutes
Available @Youtube.com
Grade: 2.5 Hats Off
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