Tonight at CSUN we saw Andrzej Wajda's "Man Of Marble" (1977), another epic work running 164 minutes. Wadja is again using the storytelling format of "a film within a film", as he did in "Everything For Sale" which I reviewed a few weeks ago. In "Marble" a young documentary filmmaker, working in the present time (1976), is out to make her mark, and she chooses as her subject a bricklayer who had become a national Communist hero in Poland in the 1950s. She becomes aware of him when she and her crew happen upon a clandestine statue hidden away in the basement of a museum, where she is looking for old propaganda and newsreel footage. She is intrigued by the statue - the "Man Of Marble" - and she inquires to the museum director about what, or who, it represents. This sets her off on a quest to discover the story behind the formerly famous bricklayer, and also to see if she can find him 25 years later.
This is an anti-communist movie of a high order, and it is a wonder that Wajda was even able to get it made, considering that it came at the height of the Cold War. But then, he was Polish, and the Poles - as we have seen - were not as easily controlled by the Soviets as some of their other sattelites. Wajda went "in their face" with this movie, and though it was apparently banned by Polish censors, it nevertheless made it all the way to Cannes, and ultimately won a prize there.
I have to interject to confess once again that in my twenties I thought communism was "cool". I didn't follow it, and I didn't study it. It was just a reactionary opinion on my part, because I couldn't stand Reagan. So I thought, "well okay then........communism". But again, it was not something I thought much about. My politics in those days were centered on America.
But anyway, it took a long time for me to realize just how horrible the Communist Regime was, as it was headed up by the former Soviet Union. And it has been the films made by artists oppressed under that system - as opposed to American propaganda - that showed me the truth. In Wadja's films, you might wish you were in Hell as opposed to the barren muddy landscapes chosen as the sites for the massive and horribly depressing steel factories and the accompanying "worker's cities" that were erected in conjunction with one another. That whole way of thinking, of reducing people to worker ants, is so depressing - especially in a country where the Sun doesn't seem to shine - that it's just about unfathomable.
And where in the world, and under what kind of mind-controlled system, would a statue be made in honor of a bricklayer?
But wait a minute. Shouldn't there be statues to honor ordinary working people? Maybe a statue in honor of schoolteachers, or nurses, or firemen and policemen, or even garbagemen. And what about bricklayers? Why shouldn't they all have statues in their honor?
Of course they should, if the statue is put in place for honorable reasons. But as we saw in the Communist era, statues were erected as propaganda, as Iconography. In this case, the statue of the bricklayer is created to put forth a myth; that the bricklayer in question can work at a heroic pace. He is even filmed, in old newsreels, building walls and apartment foundations at a superhuman pace. These films were then distributed and shown to the workers as the new standard of what they were expected to achieve. The whole idea of communism seemed to be about factory workers and production, and hive thinking. But as Wajda shows, the workers weren't as dumb as all that. They knew how bad their situation was. And the bricklayer who has been made into a Hero Of The Proletariat sees through the lie also. He knows that he has created an impossible work standard for others to live up to. Communism under the Marxist theory was supposed to create a workers' paradise, but instead it created a wasteland of smoke-belching factories worked by virtual slaves, who - if they rebelled - were jailed or worse.
So we see, in flashbacks, the story of the bricklayer as he goes from manufactured "hero" to jailed rebel. And all of this is viewed through the lens of the modern 1976 documentarian as she works to complete her film.
It's quite a story, one that many critics and commentators are comparing to "Citizen Kane". I do not get that reference myself, because the man never becomes a world-beater or head of an empire. He rises to become a worker-hero with a nice apartment and that is it. But as far as his story is concerned, it makes for a great movie. I noted that last week's Wajda film, "The Promised Land", was a masterpiece even at almost three hours in length, and it was because it had no fat, no extraneous material.
In comparison, "Man Of Marble", almost as lengthy a film, was very good but not a masterpiece because it went on too long. Wajda should have ditched a lot of the "film-within-a-film" stuff, because it detracted from the main story. He should have simply bookended it, and had the modern day documentarian appear at the beginning and then again at the end of the film. Instead, by incorporating her search for the real bricklayer, a quarter century later, I thought he distracted from a very compelling story and made the film run on way too long as a result.
Very few movies should run over two hours in my opinion, and if you are gonna make a movie that is almost three hours long, you have to make absolutely sure you are moving it forward with every frame.
Two Thumbs Up nonetheless for "Man Of Marble". It's another Wajda Epic, except in this case he could have cut out most of the filmmaker stuff and just told the story of the bricklayer. Had he done so, he'd have had a two hour masterpiece.
Elizabeth, if you are reading, I saw the post about your friend Addison. She really got to the heart of what she wanted to say, and I mention it because you yourself haven't posted a lot these days, and so when you reference a post like that, I take note of it because it means something.
Her post was very personal and had to do with family dysfunction and the search for love, which were things I wrote about in my review of "A Nos Amours" last night. That may be a coincidence, but anyhow, your friend is a survivor of family dysfunction, as I am and as so many of us are, and she has apparently found her way through it, which is beautiful because that can always be the end result for anyone who has not been subjected to terrible abuse or anything like that. I am talking just about living through family conflict, which can be bad enough. I could write a book about it, and I once wanted to when I was about 25 or so, but I became a survivor too, and I was lucky enough to reconcile with my folks in the last years of their lives, and what I learned is that - in most cases - everybody loves everybody, despite what has occurred in the past.
Love is what counts, and love is the bedrock that underlies any overlaying period of trouble. Always remember that in your life, that love is your foundation. If you have trouble in any way, or a history of family dysfunction, those things are only distortions or abberant layers on top of the foundation of love.
The real test of this is if you feel love inside yourself, or if you feel a need to love or express love in some way, to another person or simply out into the world at large. If you feel that surge of love inside of you, even if you feel it as a longing in a melancholy way, then you know that you have a foundation of love in your life, and that the same foundation exists in others close to you, including your family members.
I don't know if you meant that post to be connected to me, because we don't communicate like we used to, but if you did mean it for me, then I say "Thank You" because it was not only right on the money but it also had a lot of details in it that were very beautiful.
Even though you aren't on FB much these days, I am still thinking about you and am always right here. And as in the past, I will respond whenever you feel like posting.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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