Topic Three - Reading Three
ANDRZEJ WAJDA: FILM LANGUAGE AND THE ARTIST'S TRUTH
One of the ironies in the development of East European cinema in the post-Stalin period is that a cultural medium officially considered to be a handmaiden of political and social ideology has given rise to so many innovations in aesthetic structure and style. Among the filmmakers whose pioneering work has gained international acclaim (a group which includes Yugoslavia's Makavejev, Czechoslovakia's Menzel, Forman, and Chytilova, Hungary's Jancso and Meszaros, and Poland's Kawalerowicz and Zanussi), the name of Andrzej Wajda looms large. He has made over twenty signif1cant films from 1955 to the present and has won numerous honors (including, most recently, the 1981 Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for best film--"Man of Iron"). Furthermore, using a diversity of stylistic approaches, Wajda has repeatedly pushed the norms of "socialist realist" art to their limits. It is against the background of these norms that his genius becomes most apparent. The official requirements for "socialist realist" film might be summarized as follows: (1) that reality be depicted not as such, but in terms of its "revolutionary development," i.e. that social reality be depicted not as it is, but with a substantial admixture of what is supposed to be according to official ideology; (2) that the films serve the explicit, immediate needs of socialist construction by fostering the appropriate attitudes; (3) that they be didactic, clear, and relatively simple; (4) that the films' assessment of the situation, past or present, be ultimately optimistic. Socialist realist films are typically elaborated along the rational logical lines of "classical narrative cinema": spatial and temporal linearity, with actions "driven" by character motivation--a chain of intentions, causes, and effects. Such intentions are seen to have class or ideological bases, which are often made verbally explicit in the films. Characters represent their value systems clearly, and conflicts are seen in unambiguous terms. The official socialist realist system--with its predictable conflicts, its negative types and positive heroes, and its progressive and optimistic resolutions, encouraged the production of grossly distorted representations of actual life and actual history. Documentary and "cinema verite" approaches (allowing the camera to record what actually is) were discouraged as vulgar "naturalism," and complex narrative structure and visual texture (including the techniques of symbolism and surrealism) were condemned as elitist formalism. But neither of these "divergent" directions in film art perished.
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They were kept alive in the State Film Schools, such as the one in Lodz in Poland. Here the best work of early Soviet filmmakers (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov) was available for study; work which was innovative, complex, symbolic, as well as documentary, in ways which the Soviet socialist-realist canon of the Stalin period was to forbid. Also, East European filmmakers could look back to their own native avant-garde and documentary traditions of the interwar period.
Wajda, in his long career, has drawn on both of these traditions, that of symbolism and that of documentary, in his generally successful efforts to convey truths about Polish national life--in spite of socialist realist constraints. His method has been to utilize the potentials of cinema language itself in order to make complex statements about the recent past and the present. Wajda's varied strategies are well illustrated in his most famous films: "Ashes and Diamonds" (1958), "Man of Marble" (1977) and "Man of Iron" (1981).
Ostensibly, "Ashes and Diamonds" is a film about the struggle between communists and anti-communists in post-war Poland. On the last day of World War II in Europe, two former members of the Home Army Resistance, Maciek and Andrzej (now in an anti-communist band) attempt to ambush and assassinate the local Communist Party First Secretary Szczuka, who has just returned to his provincial town from the Soviet Union. By mistake, they kill instead two innocent workers from a nearby cement factory. Szczuka and his deputy Podgorski come upon the tragedy. Szczuka tells the workers who have gathered around the bodies: "I'd be a bad Communist if I tried to comfort you as if you were children. The end of the war doesn't mean the end of our fight. The fight for Poland, the fight for what sort of country it's going to be, has only just started." (1)
That evening, in the town, Maciek and Andrzej discover their mistake and are instructed to rectify it. Maciek takes a room next to Szczuka's at the Hotel Monopol, where a banquet is to be held celebrating the end of the war, a banquet attended by members of various political factions now struggling and fawning to retain influence in the new political configuration dominated by the Communists. In its treatment of Szczuka the film stays close to the cliches typical for socialist realism. Szczuka is described as "a civil engineer, a Communist, an excellent organizer; a man who knows where he is going." The mayor of the town, Swiecki, tells the assembled gathering: "The historic victory of the Soviet Union has cleared the way for our march towards a glorious future. Another page in our history has turned over. For the first time in centuries, power belongs to the Polish people."
Meanwhile, in the hotel's bar, Maciek meets Krystyna, a beautiful girl who works as a barmaid, and has a one night affair which almost deflects him from his purpose. In the course of this brief relationship, we see another side of Maciek: romantic, confused, defiant. Sensing the possibility of a more real emotional commitment, Maciek attempts to extricate himself from his
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terrorist obligations, but Andrzej's appeals to Maciek's sense of loyalty and to the memory of their dead comrades succeeds in holding Maciek to the cause. In the middle of the night, he shoots and kills Szczuka on the street. He bids farewell to Krystyna at dawn, but his escape is thwarted when he accidently runs into a detachment of soldiers. They wound him and, although he eludes them, he dies wandering over a vast garbage dump, finally falling and writhing in agony. It is almost a realized socialist realist metaphor: the egotistical selfish Maciek, member of a "neo-Fascist band," dies on the "trash heap of history." However, attention to the film's interconnected visual and verbal symbolic paradigms produces quite a different meaning.
The film's title "Ashes and Diamonds" is a key to the most important onexus of interconnections. It is elaborated by a verbal text which Maciek and Krystyna read from an old tombstone, a citation from a poem by Norwid:
"So often are you as a blazing torch,
With flakes of burning hemp falling about you;
Flaming, you know not if the flames freedom bring or death;
Consuming all that you most cherish;
If only ashes will be left and want,
Chaos and tempest shall engulf . . .
Or will the ashes hold the glory of a starlike diamond,
The morning star of everlasting triumph."
Flames, raylike showers (as of burning hemp) and a diamond emerging from fire are recurrent visual images in the film. When Maciek machine-guns the young factory worker who is attempting in vain to escape into a small chapel, we see a pattern of holes appear on the latter's back; flames shoot out of the holes, momentarily setting the victim's jacket ablaze. Twice Maciek lights Szczuka's cigarette for him as they pass one another casually in the hotel; they stand one on each side of the flame. When a waiter leaves a tray of vodka-filled shot glasses on the temporarily deserted bar, Maciek slides the seven glasses along the bar and begins to light them; as each glass catches fire he recites the name of a fallen Home Army comrade. Andrzej prevents him from lighting the last two glasses: "We are still alive," he says. Later, when Maciek and Krystyna burst into a small chapel in a bombed-out church, they come upon a small altar with two candles. Suddenly pulling aside the sheet, Maciek discovers the bodies of the two factory workers he killed earlier by mistake.
In the chapel also, rays emanate from Christ's head on a large fallen crucifix which swings upside-down between Maciek and Krystyna--water drips from the rays to the ground. Finally, when Maciek shoots Szczuka, the latter stumbles toward him and falls into his arms. As Maciek holds the
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dying Szczuka, a cluster of fireworks shoots up into the dark sky and then falls like a shower from an exploding star. Szczuka's body falls into a puddle--the star shower (reflected in the puddle) seems to fall upward like bubbles. There is then an immediate cut to Maciek in his hotel room; he splashes water on his face and it falls from him as droplets.
The effect of these visual parallels is to identify all of these characters as mutual victims and martyrs, particular incarnations of martyred Poland, superficially opposite but essentially the same: Maciek as well as Szczuka, the anti-communist Home Army fighters as well as the communist factory workers. This equivalence is reinforced by the shots involving parallel displacement on the screen of parallel characters. Szczuka, offered two brands of cigarettes by the hotel clerk, chooses American. Offered the same choice in an identical shot moments later, Maciek chooses Hungarian. The bodies of the factory worker victims lie side-by-side; the first shot of Szczuka and his deputy Podgorski shows them walking side by side. Maciek and Andrzej drink two shots of vodka in the deserted bar, talking about their fallen comrades in the Home Army, while in the background we hear a song about the Polish soldiers who fought with the British at Monte Casino in Italy. In a later sequence, Szczuka and Podgorski listen to an old record of Spanish Civil War songs, drinking two glasses of wine, and talking about their comrades who fell in Spain.
The concept of mutual martyrdom is reinforced by the images of Christ, of crosses, and of chapels (of which there are many). The film begins with a cross atop a chapel; Andrzej is unable to open the door of the small chapel for a little girl who is bearing flowers. The chapel door does open, however, under the weight of the murdered factory worker and he falls face down into the chapel, in front of a large crucifix. Later, Maciek is juxtaposed with an inverted and shattered Christ (cf. above). The various death wounds reinforce the allusions to Christ: the visible bullet holes, Maciek's wound in the stomach, blood soaking through the white sheet behind which he is hiding, but which covers him as a shroud.
Norwid's poem had expressed the hope that martyrdom might be transformed into salvation, that out of the flames might emerge a diamond. In the film, Krystyna (Christ) is symbolically that diamond. Her potential emergence out of the flame is expressed throughout the film by a visual pattern of light within darkness. Maciek first seeks Krystyna amidst the murky grey haze of the bar; she is very blonde, fair, and dressed in a white blouse. Shafts of light dominate the film's final sequence at the Hotel Monopol, as the light of dawn streams into the dark smoke-filled bar through a window. After the murder of Szczuka, the beam of light streams into Maciek's room as he hurriedly packs. In the bar, as the drunken members of various political factions prepare, in an act of supposed patriotism, to dance a badly-played Polonaise (the Oginski A-flat), Krystyna opens a window and the dawn light streams in, a solid beam which completely
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engulfs her in its radiance. She becomes completely invisible in the intense ray of light--the lost diamond. Even more significantly, at the end of the film Krystyna is drawn into the grotesque Polonaise (a funeral march now replaces the Oginski on the sound track); the hypocritical characters in their insincere alliances now parade in slow motion before the camera. The hope and dream of Norwid's diamond is engulfed in the smokey haze of the post-war hypocrisy and political opportunism. These symbolic shots which close "Ashes and Diamonds" are only the culmination of a series of paradigmatic associations which deliver a meaning entirely different, and much richer, than that which would be derived from the conventional plot alone.
In his long and brilliant career as a filmmaker, Wajda has continued to exploit the nature of film language, including its potentials as an evolving system of devices and genres, to "speak" the truth, in spite of the rules of socialist realism and the desires of the censors. In "Man of Marble" he crafted an expose of the cynicism of the Stalinist era in Poland and of the careerism and corruption which continue into the present. In "Man of Marble's" "present-tense" story, a young filmmaker named Agnieszka attempts to make a documentary about a shockworker hero of the 1950's, the champion bricklayer Wlateusz Birkut. Her objective is to answer the question: "Where is he now? What became of him after the early fifties when he won awards and medals for his prodigious efforts and was made into a hero?" Agnieszka's questions drive the narrative forward. To answer them, she (and the film viewer) plunge into the past, in the form of old films (documentaries about Birkut and the building of the industrial suburb of Nowa Huta; excerpts from newsreels; censored portions of old films) and in the form of interviews conducted by Agnieszka in the story's present with those who knew Birkut and worked with him. Although Birkut is Wajda's fictional creation, the documentary materials are "counterfeited" so well that an unsophisticated viewer could easily be fooled.
On a purely informational level, what Agnieszka extracts from the past is startling. Not because the essential shape of that past history is unknown to today's Poles, but rather because to see it displayed so directly on the screen (rather than through subtle hints) is a radical departure from even the liberalized artistic norms of Poland in the 1970s. Here is what Agnieszka gradually learns: the actual building of Nowa Huta was not a product of workers' romantic heroic efforts. It was a task which required exhausting labor under difficult conditions: primitive and dirty construction sites, makeshift workers' barracks, and inadequate food. Mateusz Birkut, champion bricklayer, hardly emerged spontaneously from this unromantic milieu. The idea for "creating" him came from an enterprising young film-maker, Burski, and was facilitated through the efforts of the Party chairman at the construction site, Jodla. In this endeavor both Jodla, and to a much greater degree Burski, are motivated by the advancement of their own careers. They devise a method whereby a single bricklayer, aided by six
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assistants and a system of carefully prepared stacks of bricks, can lay more than 20,000 bricks in a single work shift. Only then do they seek out a young, strong, naive, and idealistic worker to become their shockworker hero; they choose the bright-faced peasant Birkut. Birkut succeeds in the task and Burski records the carefully staged and choreographed event on film. To complete his documentary newsreel "Builders of Our Happiness," Burski exploits Birkut's relationship with a young cook and amateur gymnast at the site, Hanka Tomczyk. Burski's film celebrates the marriage of these two bright young stars (although they were not legally married) and their eventual settlement in the very apartments they have helped to build. "Builders of Our Happiness" launches Burski's career as a successful Polish filmmaker, and Mateusz Birkut's as an official culture hero.
Birkut's image and his record are displayed on huge propaganda posters; he becomes a "model" for socialist realist painting and sculpture; he appears at State functions; and he and his team are sent to other sites to teach their revolutionary bricklaying techniques. However, Birkut's efforts are not viewed favorably by all workers. Obviously, many see the creation of "shockworkers" merely as a ploy to aid in the increasing of workers' production norms. At the village of Zabinka-Mala, the workers conspire to place in the rows of prepared bricks one which is red hot. Birkut, working with automatic speed, picks up the hot brick and his hands are severely burned; his bricklaying days are ended.
It is only at this point in the story that Birkut begins to emerge as an actual rather than merely a propaganda hero. He becomes active in workers' committees and uses his reknown to badger the authorities about improving living conditions for workers. When his friend Witek is framed and arrested as the saboteur who passed the hot brick, Birkut carries his campaign to have Witek exonerated all the way to the central administration in Warsaw. When he is put off with admonitions to "trust the Party," he returns home and attempts to make a speech at a local workers' meeting, condemning the injustice. But the microphone is unplugged and Birket is drowned out by the singing of a Party hymn. Disheartened and disillusioned, Birkut ends a drunken spree by hurling a brick through the glass door of the State Security office and marching in to be arrested himself. Agnieszka learns only a few things about Birkut's life beyond this point: both Birkut and his friend Witek are tried in 1952 as industrial "wreckers" and spies and convicted; released from prison in 1956, Birkut attempts to rejoin his wife Hanka, but finds that she has become the mistress of a restaurant manager in the resort town of Zakopane. He declines the manager's offer that he stay on as a front man for their operations in black-market liquor. In "Man of Marble's" final sequences, Agnieszka learns from Birkut's "illegitimate" son Maciek Tomczyk that Mateusz Birkut died during the army's suppression of the workers' demonstrations in Gdansk in 1970.
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In "Man of Marble," Wajda does not convey Birkut's story as a continuous or chronological narrative; in fact, there are many radically different modes of narration, many versions which claim to be the truth. Here Wajda's brilliant manipulation of film language and film genre comes into play, as various sources purport to represent reality: two different kinds of documentary footage (newsreels in which Birkut appears more-or-less by chance, and Burski's pseudo-documentary "Builders of Our Happiness"); Agnieszka's interviews with those who knew Birkut; and censored archival footage of Birkut, which has been removed from newsreels. The character Mateusz Birkut is, of course, fictional, but Wajda creates his films within the larger film (the documentaries and newsreels) using not only actors, but also footage from actual documentaries and newsreels of the early l950s, involving authentic speeches, demonstrations, and political figures such as the then-Party leader Bierut. Wajda "matches" actual footage from documentaries and the Polish newsreels (Polska Kronika Filmowa) with his newly created "fictional" documentary material so skillfully as to make all of this material look authentic. (A typical example: Hanka Tomczyk, a "fictional" character in the story, presents a bouquet of flowers to the actual Party leader Bierut. In one shot we see a woman presenting a bouquet to the actual Bierut, who is facing the camera; next, in an identically toned "reverse" shot we see, as it were from over Bierut's shoulder, Hanka Tomczyk's face as she presents the flowers. Thus, Wajda matches to the newsreel his own fictional creation.)
The effect of the film's structure is to address another, equally important, theme: the ability of the film medium to recreate "reality" on its own terms, to create its own version of history--i.e. to falsify history, even while using evidently documentary materials. What Wajda does in "Man of Marble" exposes the clever strategies of filmic fabrication. He even shows (in the story) how a filmmaker like himself was drawn into the process and implicated in the operation of the propaganda apparatus. It is this message which motivates the ordering of the early segments of "Man of Marble."
The film begins with a collage of actual documentary footage from the late 1940s and early 1950s, including "counterfeit" sequences in which the as-yet-unidentified Birkut appears-all of this accompanies "Man of Marble"'s opening credits. We, as viewers, are unsure of the significance or even the precise nature of what has flashed by so quickly (only after seeing the entire film might we surmise that the opening sequence was Agnieszka's suppressed film about Birkut or footage for that film). In subsequent "present-tense" scenes we learn of Agnieszka's project, watch her argue with the TV studio director about its appropriateness, and see her "lie" her way into a museum's closed-off storage area for Stalinist art to record on film a huge monumental statue of Birkut. The next segment of the film addresses the nature of "filmed reality" directly and explicitly. Agnieszka goes to the film archive to
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view films of Birkut unearthed for her by an archivist who at first is skeptical about Agnieszka's project but later becomes her ally.
The first footage which Agnieszka sees is from a film entitled "Birth of a City." We see "cinema verite" footage of the construction site at Nowa Huta: bulldozers clearing flowering bushes from a hillside; the generally primitive conditions of work; mud and ramshackle barracks; even a mild protest demonstration is recorded on the film (the workers protest their meagre lunch ration of one small fish by clamoring for better food and pelting Party officials with the fish; among the workers are Birkut and his friend Witek). Agnieszka learns that this film was the first effort of the young film school graduate, Burski. In this way, Wajda represents the efforts of young film-makers in the early years of the Communist regime to record in their documentaries an unadorned reality--as it was, free from ideological preconceptions. However, as the film archivist tells Agnieszka, Burski's film was not deemed appropriate by those who controlled the arts, and his film-directing career was in danger of coming to a rapid end.
Next, Agnieszka sees the work which redeemed Burski's career, "Builders of Our Happiness" (Wajda's name appears on the credits of this film as Assistant Director; Wajda, here as elsewhere, links his own actual career to that of the fictional Burski). Builders shows workers sallying forth from their villages and boarding trains to arrive in Nowa Huta. An impressive model of the industrial suburb is displayed. Shots of the construction site and the workers barracks are much cleaner looking now. In those barracks, we see Mateusz Birkut lying on a cot studying from a book. A shot of a classroom follows, and then one of the workers' sports club, where Birkut meets Hanka Tomczyk; next we see the visit of President Bierut to the construction site.
All of this leads up to the central sequence. Birkut and his team at work against the clock, laying 30,500 bricks in a single work shift. This sequence closes with a shot of the smiling, triumphant Birkut as he descends the scaffolding after completing his feat. The film continues with a celebratory sequence, an encomium as it were: Birkut elected a Workers' Delegate; Birkut as a model for socialist realist art (he poses for the statue we have seen Agnieszka "unearth" earlier); Birkut at the opening of the Second National Art Exhibit (heroic socialist realist works are counterposed to the "degenerate" sculpture of Henry Moore); a large parade and demonstration features Mateusz and Hanka as well as posters of Bierut and Stalin. We also see our young hero and heroine moving into their new apartment, "their own handiwork," and return for final shots of the large demonstration and gymnastics exhibition in which Hanka participates.
After "Builders of Our Happiness," Agnieszka views one additional piece of footage; a sequence she herself has discovered in an old newsreel. It shows the wall of a workers' apartment building covered with banners several stories high honoring various shockworkers. But the one depicting Birkut is
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being hauled down and replaced. "Any idea why?" she asks the archivist. "I don't know. Saint's lives are not my department," answers the latter dryly. Through the character of the archivist, Wajda explicitly labels the typical socialist realist documentary he has so skillfully recreated as a monumental, worshipful, fairy tale.
Having juxtaposed a "cinema verite" view of the building of Nowa Huta (Burski's "Birth of a City") with the socialist realist paean (Burski's "Builders of Our Happiness"), Wajda turns his attention to revealing how films like the latter were made. For this, he has Agnieszka track down Burski, who (now in his fifties) has become Poland's premier director and is just returning from a foreign film festival where he has won yet another prize (once again, the resemblance to Wajda's own biography is striking). Agnieszka charms Burski into giving an interview and he reveals to her how "Builders" was made: how he dreamed up the idea in order to save his career; how Jodla was convinced that the film would make his construction project famous; how the bricks were set up in advance; how the bricklayers were groomed and shaved by barbers brought in from Krakow; how the crowds and "extras" were assembled. The whole enterprise is capped by an incident which is emblematic: at the end of the record-breaking shift, Birkut nearly collapses as he stumbles down the scaffolding. Burski makes the exhausted Birkut repeat this descent, complete with upright bearing, a tired but undaunted smile, and a wave of the hand--so that it can be captured properly for the camera.
Throughout "Man of Marble," Wajda utilizes the structures described above. "Cinema verite" sequences capture events as they are, haphazardly and without ideological censorship (e.g. a later sequence of an older Birkut, now back in his village after release from prison, leading his village in casting votes for the Gomulka regime--although obviously without particular enthusiasm). Other sequences are clearly fabricated along socialist realist lines: for example, the sequence of Witek's trial for industrial sabotage. Witek and three co-defendants openly admit to being part of a Western espionage ring trying to wreck Poland's socialist economy. The carefully staged trial sequence is, however, ruined by Birkut's behavior when he is called as a witness against Witek. Birkut, who himself has been arrested in connection with the brick-throwing assault on the police station (he is indicted as the leader of another spy ring, code-named "Gypsy Band"), testifies that his operation and that headed by Witek were in close collaboration, and that he knew in advance about the hot brick which crippled his hands. This assertion is so obvious in its intent to make a mockery of "voluntary confessions" (so popular during this Stalinist period) that it encourages Witek to publicly recant his own confession. Witek's sudden outburst ruins the carefully staged trial (it is being filmed for the newsreels). This is what makes the film sequence unusable for its intended "socialist realist" purpose; the archivist discovers this censored footage at a crucial point in Agnieszka's search.
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Within "Man of Marble," the "cinema verite" and socialist realist documentary pieces are always in black and white. On the contrary, the recollections of the eyewitnesses whom Agnieszka interviews are always in color and in a style associated with Western cinema (dynamic compositions, more camera movement, use of "zooms" and other lens effects). These color flashback sequences are purely fictional; such fictional sequences, with which we are very familiar in narrative cinema, involve a "suspension of disbelief." What we see is regarded not as being through the eye of any actual camera, but rather through an omniscient, interpretive "author's" eye--here obviously Wajda's own. (This is the aesthetic position of Western cinema, exemplified by such critical terminology as the "auteur" theory). However, Wajda so places his fictionally-treated segments within "Man of Marble" that they are accorded greater truth value than either type of documentary footage.
Thus, the fictionally-treated flashback of Burski's actual making of "Builders of Our Happiness" logically usurps the previous "documentary" views of the Nowa Huta construction project, showing how these documentaries were made. The fictional creation of an artist of truth is shown to be more true than any "documents."
As in "Ashes and Diamonds," Wajda adds his own stylistic marks as author-filmmaker: the heightening of certain features (particular objects, shapes, or visual compositions) and their elevation through repeated occurrence to the status of symbolic paradigms. In "Man of Marble," several symbolic objects and images are used to signify the decline of Birkut's "official" political behavior and the increasing intensity of his moral rebellion. Birkut's record-breaking feat was officially symbolized by "the last brick," awarded to him as a trophy. Later, at the point when his rejection of the Party becomes explicit, Birkut wraps the prize brick in paper and hurls it through the glass door of the police station. In an immediately preceding sequence, Birkut uses another award (a prize watch) to pay for his drinking bout at the "Three Fish" tavern. The linkage with fish is an oblique reference to Christian lore and might be seen to signify the ascendancy of Christian ethics over Communist political morality: the underfed workers protest by throwing fish, and Birkut recruits his "Gypsy Band" of social outcasts at the "Three Fish." Later, at Witek's trial, the brick, the fish, and the espionage ring code-named "Gypsy Band" are all cited as evidence of Birkut's political heresy and rebellion (the political rebellion is thus linked to a religious and moral one by Wajda's symbolic paradigms).
Birkut's fresh physiognomy and increasingly assertive bearing as the story progresses are matched by Agnieszka, physically as well as thematically. As Birkut presses his defense of Witek with a series of authorities, so Agnieszka, long-legged and dressed in jeans, marches into battle against the television director who wants to stop her project. Very characteristic is a repeated shot of Agnieszka striding down the long corridor of the television studio only to be intercepted by the director, who admonishes her for
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dealing with sensitive material and ultimately tells her that her project must be abandoned. This determined march is photographed with deep focus, so that the corridor appears to be a long tunnel leading out of the duplicitous past. It occurs at the end of the film as a symbol of the ongoing struggle for truth, and gives the film a surreal rather than a realistically motivated closure. Agnieszka returns to the television studio from Gdansk, where she has located Birkut's son Maciek Tomczyk and learned of the circumstances of Birkut's death. The film cuts suddenly, without logical elucidation, from the Gdansk sequences to a shot of Agnieszka and the young Tomczyk striding assertively through the long corridor of the television studio (as if to imply that together they will force the authorities to speak the truth). This last shot continues for several minutes as the film's closing credits roll by: the corridor becomes impossibly, unrealistically, long, as Agnieszka and Maciek break through several sets of double doors. Since Maciek Tomczyk is played by the same actor who played Birkut in the earlier sequences (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), Wajda achieves here a symbolic unification of his idealistic, energetic, principled young protagonists and asserts their ultimate triumph over the morally corrupt hierarchies and bureaucracies of the Party.
In the 1981 sequel "Man of Iron," Wajda creates a moving tribute to the workers who died in clashes with the police and army in Gdansk in 1970 (a tribute which gains special poignancy in the light of the martial law imposed at the end of 1981). He also chronicles the growth of the dissident democratic movement at the Gdansk shipyards and its moment of triumph in the recognition of Solidarity in the summer of 1980. Using actual documentary footage of the strikers, their leaders (including Lech Walesa), and of the major Party figures who negotiated with the strikers, Wajda deftly blends this material with a continuation of the fictional stories of Agnieszka and Maciek Tomczyk. In a bold stroke, Wajda convinced two of the leading figures in the actual historical events then taking place (Walesa and First Party Secretary of Gdansk Fiszbach) to participate as actors in segments of the fictional story! (Something which has never, to my knowledge, been done in film before.) Early in "Man of Iron," we see documentary footage of Walesa speaking to the assembled shipyard workers; later, he appears in the sequence of Maciek and Agnieszka's church wedding, "democratically" giving each of them a flower and offering, as their "witness," to help them if they have trouble in years to come. In the film's triumphant finale, Maciek (who, in the fictional story, is also one of the strike's principal leaders) is seen embracing Walesa as the latter walks to the podium to sign the historic document recognizing the free union. Fiszbach (who appears early in the film making an actual television speech in which he asserts that the Gdansk workers are not antisocialist or counter-revolutionary) is later interviewed in a television studio sequence which includes some of the fictional characters in the film.
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In "Man of Iron" Wajda also cleverly "turns" the plot and characters of "Man of Marble" so that he can tell the story of the student and labor demonstrations in Gdansk in 1968 and 1970 and of the subsequent growth of a free underground labor movement. We learn how Mateusz Birkut becomes a shipyard worker in Gdansk, where his "illegitimate" son Maciek Tomczyk is an engineering student. During the student strike of 1968, Birkut refuses to help organize the workers in a sympathy strike (he feels the students are merely facilitating a meaningless "palace coup"). Maciek, in anger over the workers' refusal, two years later stands aloof while workers march in the streets of Gdansk, where they face police clubs, tanks, and bullets. In despair over the turn of events, Mateusz Birkut walks into a hail of bullets to his death.
The tragic absence of solidarity between workers and intellectuals, which results in his own father's death, is the first step in forging the "man of iron," Maciek Tomczyk. In his student dormitory, he smashes a television set (!) on which Gierek is speaking. He is committed to a mental institution and upon release gives up his studies to become a welder at the shipyards. We then see him as an underground labor organizer and activist, conducting symbolic protests, arrested for putting up illegal posters, fired from a series of jobs. It is at this point that the events which form the story of "Man of Iron" link up with those of "Man of Marble." Agnieszka finds Maciek in Gdansk and brings him to Warsaw to convince the television director to allow her to complete her film (here Wajda uses the same shot which provided the finale of "Man of Marble"). Instead; the project is entirely shelved and when Agnieszka insists she will make the film anyway, some way, she is expelled. She returns to Gdansk with Maciek, helps him set up a photographic exhibit commemorating the police repression of 1970, gives up her career as a film-maker to become an underground political activist, and ultimately marries Maciek. The film traces their tribulations together: arrests, searches, harassment by the secret police--but ends with their moment of triumph during the stirring events of the summer of 1980.
As in "Man of Marble," Wajda's film narration is neither direct nor chronological. Mirroring the structure of the earlier work, Wajda uses as vehicle a filmmaker and television reporter, Winkiel, who is given the job of gathering material for a film on Maciek Tomczyk. Only Winkiel is not a young idealist like Agnieszka; he is a weak-willed "hack" who, although he helped in an earlier effort to make a story about Birkut, is now a cynical alcoholic, easily bullied and manipulated by the secret police. The task he is given is to gather documentary material for a smear campaign against Tomcyzk.
Thus, it is through Winkiel's eyes that we witness the historic events of 1980, and through his interviews with Maciek's former student friend (now a television technician), his coworkers in the free labor union movement, and his wife Agnieszka (now being "detained" by the police) that we piece
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together the flashback stories. The documentary events of the film's present tense (the summer of 1980) are cut into the film as Winkiel encounters them, sometimes by chance. Documentary footage from the past is introduced by the former student, now a television technician, who is sympathetic to Maciek's cause. He is somehow (and Wajda was somehow) in possession of actual footage of the workers' demonstrations and police brutality in Gdansk in 1970.
Whereas we were made to see that the "documentary" films in "Man of Marble," representing official documentaries and newsreels, distorted events by including material out of context and staging rather than recording history, the more extensive documentary footage in "Man of Iron" asserts its accuracy and truth. Wajda, unlike the fictional Burski who created "Builders of Our Happiness," makes no effort to mask the construction of his film. A written title at the outset announces that the film's main story is fictional, although documentary footage has been used in many places. Nor does Wajda attempt to hide the fiction-to-documentary match cuts. The fictional segments (including those with Walesa) are presented in smooth-textured, sharp, color images; the actual documentary footage, although also in color, has images which are very grainy. Besides, the contemporary events themselves (e.g. the workers' discussions with the Communist Party negotiating team or Walesa's speeches) are so well-known to Polish audiences that there is little possibility of confusing fact with fiction. However, the film's fiction is received by audiences as having high truth value by its honest integration with filmic traces of actual history. It is as if Wajda has said: here is an attempt to reflect the typical personal stories of struggle which accompanied the great historic confrontation of recent months.
The story of Winkiel's journey is also a mirroring of a real transformation. The weak and cynical fence-sitter is transformed by what he witnesses into a courageous artist who dares to proclaim the truth. Having gained admittance to the shipyards--and as the historical confrontation nears its climax--Winkiel calls the television executive who is his employer (actually also a secret police operative) to formally "resign" from the project. Winkiel's transformation has been prefigured minutes earlier in a sequence where Wajda employs his powerful methods of symbolic underscoring. Winkiel is summoned to meet his secret police contact in a gymnasium filled with hanging dummies (which the police use to train for beating demonstrators with truncheons). As Winkiel is threatened with his own former misdeeds, he breaks into a rage, grabs a club, and begins to savagely and uncontrollably beat one of the dummies. The sequence recalls and amplifies the documentary footage of police beating prisoners during the riots in Gdansk in 1970. We witness Winkiel's emotional realization that to accede to his "employers" demands is to become an accomplice in all of the violence to humanity perpetrated by the state, and we sense that Winkeil's transformation is near. Wajda's symbolic paradigms, so important in his work from the outset, are employed with great power again here.
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It is almost a cliche in the history of narrative film that such films are "supposed" to represent reality and reflect truth. Throughout his career, Wajda has explored the subtle complexities of that artistic process.
Epilogue. Wajda has frequently remarked upon the special role of the artist in Polish culture: the political conscience of a nation during long periods when politics could not be openly and honestly discussed. He has also noted that Polish artists have fulfilled themselves not only in their art but in their participation in history. As this article goes to press in February 1982, Andrzej Wajda (one of the first to be detained when martial law was declared) has violated the "terms" of his release by signing an open letter from more than 100 Polish intellectuals and artists petitioning the Polish parliament for an end to martial law and the release of interned members of Solidarity.
NOTE
1. This, and all subsequent citations, are taken from the English translation of the filmscript: "Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal, A Generation: Three Films by Andrzej Wajda" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
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