Now and then
Seitz, Michael H.
MOVIES Now and then Michael H. Seitz Two of the most compelling films in current release are imports from countries where state financing has contributed to a recent flowering of feature films:...
...Although it is a long (160 minutes) and by no means simple film, it quickly became one of the greatest popular successes in Polish motion picture history, and may well have served as something of an inspiration...
...Enraged and grieving, Morant (Edward Woodward) led the Carbineers in pursuit of the assailants...
...Seven Boers were captured and summarily executed, and a German missionary who had been spying for them was also killed...
...Is it not customary in war to kill as many of the enemy as possible...
...The racism which was already quite apparent in Boer policy is totally ignored...
...To redress this situation, Beresford has made a film on the martyrdom of a legendary national folk hero, but at the same time he has questioned Australian acquiescence in British imperial adventures—in this case, the Boer War...
...MOVIES Now and then Michael H. Seitz Two of the most compelling films in current release are imports from countries where state financing has contributed to a recent flowering of feature films: Australia (Breaker Morant) and Poland (Man of Marble...
...Its strengths, however, are more dramatic and discursive than cinematic...
...People who are twenty today need to know and to understand why their parents are lying, why they are doing so many things they should not do...
...According to the shipworkers' newspaper, Solidarity, Man of Marble is "well known to every striking worker...
...Agnieszka (played with nervous intensity by Krystyna Janda) is making a television documentary for her diploma film...
...Man of Marble is the story of the efforts of a young contemporary film maker to reconstruct a truthful picture of Poland's Stalinist past, a past obscured by some twenty years of shifting propaganda...
...It is essentially a courtroom movie, intercut with flashbacks intended to establish the emotional and military context within which the killings occurred...
...Like the Green Berets in Vietnam, they often Michael ?. Seitz teaches film at Rutgers University and reviews films regularly for The Progressive...
...The implication is clear: Film maker and worker have joined forces, and the full story of Mateusz Birkut will eventually be told...
...The film works because it is well acted (Jack Thompson received the award for best supporting actor at last year's Cannes Festival), because it tells a good story, and because it poses complex moral questions: Should soldiers at war be judged by ordinary civilian rules...
...Much of the film is devoted to the trial by court-martial of Harry "Breaker" Morant—a well-educated, self-exiled Englishman, balladeer, and sometime war correspondent, who had earned his nickname as one of Australia's leading horse-breakers—and two fellow lieutenants in the Bushveldt Carbineers...
...The once lionized worker, a naive and genuinely idealistic socialist, had come to find himself increasingly at odds with the Party bureaucracy...
...Although the Carbineers had been under verbal orders to combat the Boer guerrillas with their own methods and to take no prisoners, the High Command decided, for reasons of state, to make scapegoats of the three Australian officers and try them for murder...
...This British unit, made up largely of Australians, had been specially formed to combat Boer guerrillas...
...The Australians," director Bruce Beresford notes, "have never really seen their history on the screen before...
...But this is not the end of the film...
...Her search takes her initially to the Museum of Art, where she uncovers a massive marble statue of Birkut (in the style of heroic Socialist Realism), lying in a restricted area of the museum's storage space, along with the statues of scores of other heroes no longer in favor...
...The films he has made during the last twenty years have been uneven, and have often been so thoroughly involved in the social problems and history of Poland that American audiences have found them difficult to understand...
...He informs her that his father is dead, but is at first unwilling to give her any further aid...
...One unconfirmed recollection of the original ending has Agnieszka eventually discovering a tombstone bearing the legend "Gdansk 1970"— which would certainly have suggested to Polish viewers that Birkut had died among the scores of strikers killed in that year's worker protests...
...Nobody forced me to do that work then...
...Toward the end of the film Morant comes to wonder if he has been fighting on the wrong side...
...I made this film," Wajda has declared, "for the young generation...
...The initial ending of the film, it is known, was censored by the Polish authorities...
...Agnieszka's trail of discovery ends with Birkut's apparent disappearance in the late 1950s...
...Excited by the material which she has managed to turn up, Agnieszka shows it to her producer and his superiors...
...The credits for one celebrated work of the latter sort, in fact, list Andrzej Wajda as assistant director...
...In the version now in release, Agnieszka follows a trail that leads to the shipyards of Gdansk, where she locates Birkut's son...
...found themselves operating behind enemy lines, and adjusted to the situation by adopting unconventional tactics...
...Who ought to be held responsible for military "atrocities" carried out under general orders...
...Indeed, for all that we see of South Africa, there is not the slightest hint that the British-Boer conflict was being played out in a land whose only truly indigenous population—the majority of its inhabitants— is black...
...Despite the warnings of the producer that much of her material is "classified," she tries to retrace the life story of one Mateusz Birkut, a model worker—a bricklayer—much celebrated as a Stakhanovite hero in the early 1950s...
...In comparison to the English, the Boers appear here as indigenous freedom fighters...
...Breaker Morant is a rather conservatively made film which relies less on visual imagination than on verbal argument...
...Unwilling to exploit his past fame or return to the public life, Birkut went off without leaving a trace, submerging himself in the working Polish masses...
...But in other respects it is a unique and originally conceived work...
...This is strong stuff...
...Encouraged, however, by her father, she resumes the search for the last trace of Mateusz Birkut on her own...
...There was some fear, furthermore, that outrage over the incident might impede peace negotiations...
...Although made in 1977, Man of Marble is a work of extraordinary timeliness...
...She then proceeds to uncover the basic facts of Birkut's life by interviewing those who knew and worked with him and by ferreting out from the archives every bit of newsreel footage in which her subject appeared...
...After all, the German government had protested the deaths, and the British did not want to give their continental cousins a pretext for intervening in South Africa...
...At the trial, the accused are brilliantly defended by a small-town Australian solicitor (played by Jack Thompson), who, in the course of his defense, brings up many of the major issues raised again in our time in the My Lai investigation and the trial of Lieutenant Calley...
...and why, from time to time, you learn that the parents have done beautiful things of which the young ones have never heard...
...In 1950," Wajda has admitted, "I went as assistant' director to the same Howa Huta steelworks to make a film like the excerpts found in Man of Marble...
...Finally, frustrated and disillusioned, he went on a binge and threw a brick through the office window of the secret police...
...I find it somewhat disturbing, however, that in doing so he also tends, perhaps unintentionally, to oversimplify and glorify the Boer cause...
...Although he may not have been able to make a film on the events of 1970, Wajda's determination to confront recent Polish history has not been thwarted: In the film's final shot Agnieszka strides with Birkut's son down the corridor of the television building...
...He is best known in this country for his World War II trilogy made in the 1950s (A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds...
...To her shock and anger, she is told that what she has put together is inadequate and quite uninteresting, and that no further money will be made available for the project...
...Quite dissimilar in style and content, both films reflect a profound interest in national history and a desire to reexamine past myths and heroes in the light of the present...
...In its formal structure, Man of Marble owes much to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane...
...The film is set in 1901, when the British war against the Boers in South Africa had deteriorated into bitter guerrilla warfare...
...Wajda thus includes himself in his condemnation of those who for one reason or another sold out during the Stalinist era and contributed to the creation of a deformed image of Polish reality...
...Although he claims it was not his specific intention, Beresford has made a film whose thrust is both anti-British and anti-imperialist...
...Andrzej Wajda is Poland's foremost film director...
...The group's commander, who was also Morant's close friend, had been drawn into an ambush, killed, and mutilated...
...Breaker Morant remains a forceful and revealing work, but its failure even to suggest a broader historical perspective makes it appear coldly myopic...
...It is also a work of great complexity, insight, and imagination—and is uncannily prophetic of the recent worker uprising in Gdansk...
...Wajda includes here some black-and-white documentary sequences drawn from actual deposits in the Polish Newsreel Library, as well as a Wajda-made pseudo-documentary— which flicks from truth to propaganda...
Vol. 45 • March 1981 • No. 3
