When I saw this film, I was very shocked at how subversive the content was. While it was filmed in Poland during the Soviet-dominated era, the film focused on a fictional character's rise and fall in local government. Mateusz Birkut is an ordinary Polish bricklayer working on a massive government project. A film maker decides to stage a propaganda stunt to see if a new record for speed bricklaying could be set. Birkut agrees to give it a try along with his crew. Not only did they meet their goal but they exceeded it--and it was all captured on film to be shown to the masses. Overnight, Birkut becomes a minor celebrity and he is given a nice job working for local government. And, for some reason, over the years his name is just about completely forgotten.

Now, over 20 years later, a young film maker has stumbled upon Birkut's name and some of the newsreel footage but she is really curious how he went from hero to nobody so quickly. She spends most of the film reviewing old film clips and tracking down those who knew Birkut to find out WHY. However, repeatedly she is told to mind her own business and lots of roadblocks are thrown in her path. Finally, after exhaustive work and putting herself out on a limb politically, she finds out how the repressive government worked during the Stalin years--taking a hero and eventually jailing him as a political prisoner and then erasing memories of his existence. Repeatedly, she is warned to let the matter drop, as even in the post-Stalin era it wasn't exactly a free country. How this very critical film ever got made it beyond me but it's wonderfully made and captivating.

I first learned of Andrzej Wajda when he won an honorary Academy Award and made his acceptance speech in his native Polish. In the years since, I've watched some of his movies. I've finally seen his "Czlowiek z marmuru" ("Man of Marble" in English). It focuses on a filmmaker (Krystyna Janda) putting together a production about a man (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) who got held up as the paradigm of a heroic Stakhanovite but whose whereabouts are now unknown. Then of course arises the issue of how much she'll be allowed to focus on this man without angering the authorities.

It's safe to say that this movie presaged the rise of the Solidarity movement in its depiction of the workers. Wajda was already inclined to direct independently of the government's confines, and he became one of the most innovative directors of all, along the lines of Stanley Kubrick and Federico Fellini. In the end, this is one that you have to see. I hope to see more of Wajda's movies.

In 1976, a young woman in Krakow is making her diploma film, looking behind the scenes at the life of a 1950s bricklayer, Birkut, who was briefly a proletariat hero, at how that heroism was created, and what became of him. She gets hold of outtakes and censored footage and interviews the man's friends, ex-wife, and the filmmaker who made him a hero.

What is to be said about this film? Some say it is anti-communist, but is that really fair? At most, it could be said to be anti-Stalinist, which isn't really the same thing when you get down to it. And because one idealist has faded to obscurity, does that put a shadow over the whole movement? The idea is interesting and of course has some historical parallels, but I can't say it ever fully got my attention and would not be one of my favorite Polish films. I would much more have enjoyed an exposition of a real person rather than some fictional creation.