February 17, 2017 - Wajda's 'Man of Marble' (at Polish Home)
Film host: Ryszard Kott Man of Marble (Polish: Człowiek z marmuru) is a 1976 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It chronicles the fall from grace of a fictional heroic Polish bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), who became the symbol of an over-achieving worker, in Nowa Huta, a new socialist city near Kraków. Agnieszka, played by Krystyna Janda in her first role, is a young filmmaker who is making her diploma film (a student graduation requirement) on Birkut, whose whereabouts seems to have been lost two decades later. The title refers to the propagandist marble statues made in Birkut's image. From the 2014 review by Philip French in The Guardian : [...] A major milestone in Polish cinema, Man of Marble comes from a period of political thaw, moderate affluence and agonised self-questioning between the end of hardline postwar Stalinism in the 1950s and the return of authoritarianism, which culminated in the imposition of martial law in 1981. Conte...