Andrjez Wajda—Man of Celluloid
By Miguel Pendás

When the Motion Picture Academy announced in 2000 that it would be presenting a special Oscar to Andrzej Wajda March 26, it marked a high point of recognition for this giant of modern cinema. Coincidentally, his latest film, Pan Tadeusz, is setting box office records in his native Poland. He is now getting the recognition he deserves, but in the United States, it was the San Francisco International Film Festival that first recognized the merits of this remarkable man.

The first SFIFF in 1957 showed Wajda’s second feature, Kanal. Even though Wajda has never been able to attend, we have shown ten of his films, more than those of nearly any other filmmaker.

It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during that explosive period of Polish history that produced the uprisings in Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard and the birth of the Solidarity movement, that Wajda had his greatest success. It was as if his films expressed the feelings of an entire nation. Man of Marble tells a story about a young film student who sets out to make a documentary about a bricklayer who had been declared a "hero" in the 1950s under Stalin for setting superhuman work quotas. A statue of him was erected. By the ’70s he had disappeared, become a "nonperson."

"This Polish film, certainly among the strongest Film Festival entries this year," wrote Walter Addiego in the Examiner, "is a kind of historical detective story, with many ironic parallels to Citizen Kane." George Williams of the Sacramento Bee called it "a brightly suspenseful film," and declared Wajda’s "masterful camerawork a joy to watch." In the Chronicle, Judy Stone called it "a corruscating examination of injustice in the ’50s and opportunism in the ’70s." As Wajda sees it, the proletarian superman conjured up by Stalin’s Socialist Realism is a fake—a statue, not a man.

In 1981, the Festival screened Man of Iron, his telling of the story of the origins of the Solidarity movement, to enthusiastic audiences.

Wajda has made humanist films about political and social upheavals, and was even elected to the Polish senate, without himself ever becoming an ideologue. Speaking at an university in the U.S. in 1981, he said, "Someone once asked me a naive question. It’s a question often asked of very old writers: Do you feel that you’ve helped to make history? My answer is this: I don’t know whether I helped make it. I know I didn’t stand with my hands folded. I didn’t look on indifferently as history was being made."