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Pru Chamberlayne reviews the film Marble" by Andrej Wajda, showing at CP headquarters in Szczecin, Poland, after 1970 workers Man of Marble offers an astonishing insight into the workings of the bureaucracy in Poland and into workers' responses to it.

These responses vary from resistance, to cooption into the bureaucracy and even personal breakdown.

It helps a great deal in under standing the film if you know that the ending-the visit to the cemetery showing clearly that the hero was killed in the 1971 uprising-has been cut.

Nevertheless it is hard to believe how the film was allowed to be made.

While there is a flourishing underground press in Poland, and relative cultural 'freedom' the film has undoubtedly only had extremely restricted showings there.

The political knowiedge it assumes shows however that it is aimed at Polish rather than Western audiences.

As a film within tilm it portrays two periods, the 1950s and the 1970s.;

The earlier period draws on a lot of documentary and other archive film-much of which can never have been publicly shown.

It shows the early stages of building the major steel town Nowa. Huta, the drafting in of peasant labour, thé appalling conditions, the machinations of the bureaucracy and amid the suffering-the tremendous achievement.

A young diploma student decides to makè a film of the Stakhanovite bricklayer Birkut, and to unravel the mystery of his fall from fame and his 'disappearance' The monumental statue based on him lies discarded in the locked recesses of the deserted state, museum amidst mediaeval treasures.

Propaganda film

With the cooperation of the television archivist she not only sees the 1950s propaganda film of him laying 30,000 bricks in 8 hours, but also many other old films and clippings which show a different picture.

It is only by dint of great London SES 19.11.79 Dear Comrades, In Socialist Press 174, in your report of the CDLM conference you wrote that, "an amendment from Workers Power calling for preparation for the demand of a General Strike against the Tories was accepted in outline"

Gierek daring and persistence that the film student, accompanied by an elderly cameraman and a sound assistant, manages to collect the information, mainly from Birkut's former associates, to reconstruct what actually happened.

Put-up job

In fact his Stakhanovite 'achievement' nearly killed him. It was a put up job initiated by a careerist film director and backed by the bureaucracy as a means of raising work norms.

He did rise to fame however and toured backward areas giving bricklaying demonstrations-always shadowed by the secret police.

In one village, however, he is passed a burning, acid-soaked brick which permanently injures his hands.

Both he and his more politically. conscious helpmate, (both of whom began their work careers by pelting and chasing off a bureaucrat with fish from the mud flats of Nova Huta in protest against inadequate rations) understand this worker's hostility. picket lines are defended by building units for physical defence, based on the pickets or occupations that exist, and by mobilising mass pickets of the local labour movement.

'The call for a general strike should form a central plank of the CDLM's work ar 1 propaganda." cinemas around the country.

Birkut throws himself into a drive for workers' housing and becomes a popular hero.

The security forces are worried and cause his helpmate to 'disappear"

Birkut wages relentless fight to trace him.

Even his efforts to appeal to his union branch are foiled by the bureaucracy.

In desperation he takes to drink, flings a burning brick through the door of the secret police and hands himself over.

His friend has already 'confessed' to being an agent.

Birkut himself begins by confessing, but then begins to ridicule the proceedings and renounces his capitulation.

In 1956 amidst the uprisings which brought Gomulka to power they are both rehabilitated.

Birkut even casts the first vote in the ballot staged to protests "Against all reliance on official price index 'threshold clauses'".

In the context of the Ford claim, which includes such a threshold agreement-the danger of vague calls for 'cost of living clauses' should be obvious.

Despite its acceptance the original slogan still appears in your page 4 text of the conference resolution. This is not our "Man of selected legitimise the Gomulka regime.

He retreats from a political fight saying 'one only has one country'. But he disappears.

The film director rose to fame and fortune on the lies and betrayals of his propaganda film.

Alcoholic wretch

Birkut's wife, who lives filmstar like in a chalet-style house with a restaurant owner, is, beneath the glitter, an alcoholic wretch, wracked with remorse and guilt for her abandonment and public denouncing of Birkut as a secret agent.

By contrast the scene with the film student's night porter father in their attractively furnished but tumbledown apartment shows him to be a straightforward and sincere man, sympathetic and perceptive.

The portrayal of modern The variation in wording to which comrade McSweeney objects appeared in our 200word summary of the conference on another page.

But in our defence we would point out that-if anything-a General Strike against the Tories' is a more comprehensive and satisfactory perspective than the restrictive demand for a general strike simply against the Tories' proposed anti-trade union laws."

If calling for a general strike against the Tones could be seen as "a call for a general election" surely one aimed simply at a single piece of legislation could amount to little more than a protest action designed to force Thatcher to retreat on it? Poland tends to be handled sardonically.

It is hard to tell whether the American brashness of the main character, the film student with her bizarre clothes and benaviour, using every sexist ploy in the book, is teasing, or a genuine fashion model of emancipated women in modern Lovely She is most intriguing. And lovely. Generally, the film luxuriates in the scenes of Western style living while also deprecating them.

The fate of the student*s film hangs in the balance at the end, as must the fate of 'Man of Marble' itself.

In the censored version Birkut's death is never explained. Nor is the pointed shot showing that his son works not in any old shipyard, but those at Gdansk, whose uprisings brought Gierek to activities of the C ing committee, on verbal quibbles practical struggle. DLM organisocussing less and more on That is our power in 1971.

This censorship also explains the imbalance in the film, and the lack of overt criticism of •the bureaucracy in the most recent period.

Certainly one of the many messages of this beautifully made and brilliant film is jopen the archives!' idea of the fight for in the working class.