Man of Marble
- Jerzy Radziwilowicz Mateusz Birkut / Maciej Tomczyk
- Krystyna Janda: Agnieszka
- Tadeusz Łomnicki: Jerzy Burski
- Jacek Łomnicki: The young Burski
- Michał Tarkovsky: Wincenty Witek
- Piotr Cieślak: Michalak
- Wieslaw Wojcik: Jodła
- Krystyna Zachwatowicz: Hanka Tomczyk
- Magda Teresa Wojcik: editor
- Bogusław Sobczuk: TV editor
- Leonard Zajączkowski: Cameraman
Man of Marble is a Polish film from the year 1977.
Action
The young film student Agnieszka want to turn her diploma film about the working class heroes of the 1950s. When researching it encounters in a museum archive on marble statues from this period. One of these statues they particularly fascinated. It represents the mason Mateusz Birkut dar. First, they can show film clips from the television archives. The director Jerzy Burski had created two documentaries in the 1950s about Birkut. She is looking at the now famous film director and talks to him about Birkut. He tells her the story of the shooting made by a mason record in the construction of Nowa Huta. Together with the party secretary Jodła Burski had the young Mateusz Birkut Maurer and his team selected and prepared to handle 28,000 bricks within a layer. The record succeeds. Birkut processed over 30,000 stones and becomes the new hero of the work. He goes on now and, together with his colleague Wincenty Witek Masons throughout the country its new economic principle of operation before. In one of these screenings an attempt is made on his life. It burns to both hands and can no longer work as a bricklayer now.
Birkuts friend Witek is suspected and arrested the assassination. Birkut strives to secure the release of his friend, because he is convinced that this is innocent. In this endeavor, the convinced Communist loses faith in the system. He is eventually summoned as a witness of the trial of Witek and it comes to honest settlement with the state. Birkut comes then for four years in prison. When he is released again, although he is rehabilitated, his girlfriend Hanka, however, has left him. Hanka is now working as a waitress in a cafe in Zakopane. Documentary filmmaker Agnieszka investigated Hanka on in Zakopane and is guided on the track of their son Mateusz and Hanka. As Agnieszka shows off her previous material in Warsaw, her ending of the film will be denied. She gets no more footage and the camera is removed from it. Resigned, the young woman withdraws from her father. However, they can convince them that they told him at least for the story to end. You should make Mateusz Birkut identify and lead a conversation with him. To this end, she goes to Gdansk. There, works on the Lenin Shipyard Maciej Tomczyk, Birkuts son. She learns from him that his father had already died. Together with Maciej she returns to television to Warsaw.
Background
The screenplay by Aleksander Ścibor - Rylski was already at the beginning of the 1960s. It was however rejected by the Polish censorship after reading the script. The figure of the Polish writer Agnieszka Agnieszka is Osiecka modeled, the Ścibor and Wajda had met as a young film student. Only in the 1970s, the script was released.
The film tells his story to multiple, nested levels. For original documentary excerpts of Polish newsreel have Andrzej Wajda and cameraman Edward Kłosiński added rotated scenes with the main character in the same style in black and white. The scenes with the documentary filmmaker Agnieszka are in color, as are the flashbacks to the fifties that accompany the stories of their respondents. The production design created Allan Starski. Since the blocks of flats in Nowa Huta were already blackened in the 1970s, he was outside of Nowa Huta new sites arise. For the later scenes, some houses were wiped from residents and the film crew in Nowa Huta, so that they looked like new.
The film premiered on February 25, 1977 in Poland. The film initially received but not released for export. However, the French distributor of Andrzej Wajda organized an unannounced screening of the film during the Cannes Film Festival in 1978. However, he could not participate in the competition for the Palme so. Nevertheless, the film was awarded by an independent jury.
Reviews
" A very demanding film, without hatred and malice staged, despite more revealing questions of a certain sadness. "
" " Man of Marble " is at all its levels a masterpiece: a key political film, as a passionate drama of a search, as a reflection on the cinema. It is a masterpiece, because these films in the film not unrelated co-exist, but are mutually dependent and penetrate. "
Awards
- Cannes Film Festival 1978: FIPRESCI Prize
- Polish Film Festival 1977: Critics Award