Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

tenshi_ippikiookami Ironic, tongue-in-cheek, smart and a tad too long, "Man of Marble" is a good movie that can't help being a little bit too much in love with itself, on top of being unable to know where to stop, thus ending being a little bit repetitive.Agnieszka, a university student doing her diploma film, decides to investigate in the past of long forgotten hero of the people Birkut. Her search brings her to discover a lot about a man that was put in a pedestal to then be forgotten and erased from the history of the nation.Wajda does not use a lot of subtlety in this film, but who needs it when the script is smart enough, the direction top notch, with some great shots and a pace that is sometimes close to an action movie, and there is really good acting (in particular our hero, Agnieszka, played with a lot of sass and confidence by Krystyna Janda). The score and the use of locations is also great.However, the movie clocks at over two hours and a half, and the ideas behind the movie: the use of unknown people by the ones in power as little more than toys, destroying lives and dreams without a second of remorse, the difficulty to fight the system or the way paranoia extends everywhere in some regimes become undone by repetition and by a story that starts to spin on its wheels around the 1 hour and a half mark.It is totally worth checking though. Just be sure to have enough time (you may want to have some breaks).

gavin6942 In 1976, a young woman in Krakow is making her diploma film, looking behind the scenes at the life of a 1950s bricklayer, Birkut, who was briefly a proletariat hero, at how that heroism was created, and what became of him. She gets hold of outtakes and censored footage and interviews the man's friends, ex-wife, and the filmmaker who made him a hero.What is to be said about this film? Some say it is anti-communist, but is that really fair? At most, it could be said to be anti-Stalinist, which isn't really the same thing when you get down to it. And because one idealist has faded to obscurity, does that put a shadow over the whole movement? The idea is interesting and of course has some historical parallels, but I can't say it ever fully got my attention and would not be one of my favorite Polish films. I would much more have enjoyed an exposition of a real person rather than some fictional creation.

bandw I came to this film after having watched Wajda's "Ashes and Diamonds," which I consider to be one of the finest films I have seen. However, "Man of Marble" was just too quirky for me, leaving me a bit perplexed. The story concerns a young film student, known here only as Agnieszka, who decides to produce a documentary on one Mateusz Birkut as her graduation project. Birkut was an idealistic bricklayer who rose to the status of post-WWII hero by way of displaying superior efficiency and strength. His innovation of how to use a small team to accomplish improved production came to be so well recognized that he would tour the country setting up such teams. The film time-slices from the 1970s, when Agnieszka is making her film, to previous times, all the way back to mock documentary footage of Birkut in the 1950s. The presentation is anything but flattering to the Communist Party and it is astounding the Wajda was able to get this made in a time when the Communists were still in power in Poland. The story must be autobiographical to some extent, since we see Agnieszka encountering political opposition to her digging too deeply into the past trying to reconstruct Birkut's life and figure out why he essentially dropped from the scene after having been so highly visible; there is also a famous film director in the movie whom we get to know well.There are many scenes that had the quality of a dream, but yet seemed like they were supposed to be taken for real. For example, one scene has Burkit's friend Witek going into a small office of a party boss and, when Burkit enters the office some time later there is no sign of Witek. If this were to be taken as some sort of Kafkaesque event, then Burkit would have made no remark on the mysterious disappearance, but he express the surprise that any normal person would have. I did not know what to make of such scenes. Agnieszka's facial expressions and body movements are often quite odd, bordering on the bizarre, and they accentuated the feeling of unreality I had that became increasingly more pronounced as the movie progressed.The collage of Agnieszka's interviews, mock documentary footage, scenes from Burkit's life, scenes from Agnieszka's own life, and an inappropriate musical score did not coalesce for me.

Daniel Hayes So many film students have wasted their time trying to study "Kane" as a character study and as a satire. But it wasn't really either of those things, but an experiment in depth for the camera and narrative structures. The frequent comparison between that film and this one makes a lot of sense superficially; the newsreel footage, the interviewees made up to look 20 years older.But Agniezcka is making a film, rather than a piece for a newspaper: journalism vs. art, capitalism vs. socialism. Although the journalists in "Kane" said otherwise, they were never seeing "who he was" rather "what he was like" ie. his behaviour, how others perceived him etc. Here we have something broader, examining a man confronting society, confronting his friends, and confronting himself all at the same time. Newspaper journalism tells us what something is like. Good documentary strives to really define what or who something was.This is a highly intelligent structure, moreso than his previous works and moreso even than "Kane." As a meditation on film-making, it moves gracefully from the shots captured by Agniezcka's cinematographer, and the shots of Wajda himself, forcing us to draw parallels.It's a shame Wajda remains largely unknown. Perhaps the up-coming Criterion set of his "War Trilogy" will change that.4 out of 5 - An excellent film