Testament

By R.S.

MAN OF IRON

Directed by Andrzej Wajda

Screenplay by Aleksander Scibor-Rylski

There is a haunting and prophetic moment at the end of Man of Iron. The 1980 strike at the Gdansk shipyards, the strike that established Solidarity as a political force in Poland and a moral force throughout the world, has been won by the union. But as the workers celebrate, a bureaucrat wheels up in his chauffeur-driven car, rolls down the window and tells the journalist who is the film's central character that nothing has actually changed, the union's gains can be erased any time the government chooses to assert its full police-state powers.

It is a measure of Director Wajda's rigorous honesty and uncanny courage that he chose to close the film on this note. It is a measure of the force of recent events that only now, somewhat belatedly, can Man of Iron be seen, outside of Poland, for what it is: cinema's great moral testament in the year just past.

To be sure, it won first prize at last spring's Cannes festival; but it suffered somewhat in comparison with the film to which it is a sequel, Wajda's Man of Marble. And, in truth, it is not so fine a work as that delicately ironic story of a working man who is exploited, punished and finally broken by the shiftings of the Communist Party line in the first decades of the postwar era. Man of Iron takes up the story of that man's son and his emergence as a significant secondary figure in Solidarity. It is history in a hurry, filmed only months after the events at Gdansk, and awkwardly incorporating in its fictional (if archetypal) tale newsreel footage of incidents that could not be recreated.

Man of Iron also suffers in comparison because its structure is so similar to the earlier film's, again employing as the foreground observer a radio and television journalist (Marian Opania) piecing together a story by interviewing witnesses. Their recollections are much less interestingly ambiguous than those uncovered in Man of Marble, and the man they are talking to is a less spirited character than the young woman film maker who performed his function in Marble.

Still, the new film completes Wajda's political history of modern Poland, and his alcoholic newsman ordered to employ his reportorial license in order to spy on Solidarity for the state security apparatus becomes, in the end, a poignant figure. Decency and principle are at war with the gnawing fear of reprisal within him. Worth knowing, too, is Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), the man whose story the journalist pieces together, a citizen moved from inchoate adolescent anger to revolutionary ardor by a decade's unfulfilled agitation. There may be iron in Tomczyk's soul, but it is not impermeable to softer, more human sentiments. Indeed, it is Wajda's capacity to retain man as the measure, no matter how large the scale of events he is seeking to illuminate, that distinguishes his work and prevents it from becoming mere agitprop.

Among the many candles that have been lighted in honor of the free Polish spirit, Man of Marble and Man of Iron seem to be the least likely to gutter out as time goes on. It is possible, in fact, that these films of Wajda's (who last week was still reported under arrest in Poland, along with other artists and intellectuals) may become perpetual flames in the perpetual struggle against tyranny.

--R.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.