Man of Marble

Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977) is Andrzej Wajda's political drama, available to watch online on iFILM. A film-school graduate sets out to make a portrait of a forgotten labor hero and ends up unearthing a whole decade of lies.

Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) chases the trail of Mateusz Birkut, a Nowa Huta bricklayer whom early-1950s propaganda turned into a Stakhanovite star. Her camera cuts through old newsreels, staged reports and the reluctant memories of people who knew him. The further she digs, the clearer it gets: the state raised this man for a poster, then quietly erased him once he stopped being useful. Jerzy Radziwiłowicz plays Birkut.

Wajda builds the film as an investigation inside an investigation, his denim-clad heroine pushing against the system as stubbornly as her subject once did. The project sat on a shelf for nearly fifteen years before censors let it reach the screen; it went on to take the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes and set up Wajda's Palme d'Or-winning Man of Iron. Janda's fierce, chain-smoking director became a landmark of Polish cinema. Stream Man of Marble (1977) online on iFILM.