“The Man of Iron” and Men of Power in Poland

Abstract

Ostensibly, “The Man of Iron” is a film about a successful strike, the culmination of ten years of hope and struggle, an act of solidarity among workers who have understood that the only guarantee of their material well-being and their freedom is the union, an autonomous power of their own. It is a film about a strike and, midway, director Andrzej Wajda turns it into a classical flick, a banal love story seen so many times before, with scenes of a train station, wrapped in blue mist, where a mother takes her child, wrapped in red blankets, away from the intruding repression. One enters the climate of Gorky's Mother, of “Adelein 31,” of “Norma Jean.”Several Polish and French reviewers did not like this sentimental injection of private life, accusing the film of formal inconsistency, but I find the formalism of the strike film as profoundly ironic as the event itself: the strike of workers against the society where the working class was supposed to hold power, the strike against a party which claimed to represent them turned out to be just a strike like other strikes of workers against the power of capital and the state.And the ending–one of the endings–is equally romantic: the hero and his woman reunited after she is freed from prison by the victory of strikers, the protagonist in the closing monologue turning to the generation of his father to report the accomplishment of the task.