Man of Marble

Directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1977. The best and fiercest of Wajda’s ’70s political films, Man of Marble was stuck in development inferno for over a decade. Authorities greenlit the production in 1976, spurring Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski to update the script according to changed (which is to say liberalized) conditions of his present. Student director Agnieszka—Krystyna Janda in the first of four Wajda appearances—sets out to investigate the life of Mateusz Birkut, a Stakhanovite shock force worker in 1950s Nowa Huta who has since unceremoniously vanished. Newsreels, reenactment and absurdist fiction join forces in a bravado of critical cinema that obsessed masses at home and elsewhere. One fifth of Poland caught the 1977 theatrical release, while Jean-Luc Godard raved about Janda’s “critical eyes of freedom” in Cahiers du Cinéma . An inspired disassembly of myth, propaganda and media…