[WHEN Andreszj Wajda went to the Lenin shipyards…]

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WHEN Andreszj Wajda went to the Lenin shipyards last summer with occupations and strikes sweeping across the entire coastline, one of the workers - faintly thinking that he recognised the film director - asked him whether he wasn't the creator of "Man of Marble"

Wajda replied he was, whereupon the worker, without further ado, suggested he continue the story in a new film to be called -"Man of Iron"

In a sense, the confidence of that worker that Wajda would be able to make such a film and furthermore that it would be shown in a Stalinist state is perhaps indicative of the mood of the entire Polish working class.

Enough was enough -they had come out on strike, they had occupied their factories, they had forced the government to the negotiating table and above all - they were going to win!

The story of how that determination amongst millions of workers was forged now had to be told.

Wajda's new film is dedicated to that struggle which has unfolded in Poland since 1968 - and the film is indeed worthy of the trust that was shown in the director by the shipyard worker.

Unlike Man of Marble' which portrays the dark and scarring period of Stalinist brutality with its fake and grotesque mythology of the Stakhanovite worker - the "shock worker" expending every ounce of muscle and energy to "build the Socialist Fatherland", «Man iron is a sulogy to the gravediggers that horrendous political system.

It is a mixture of drama, on-the-spot film of the momentous events of last summer in cans. and secret police film shot during the riots of December 1970.

Through Winkel, a TV reporter - a genial alcoholic blackmailed by the secret police to work for them -the stories different individuals are pieced together - to give an overview both of the political struggle of the previous 12 years - but also a profile of Maciek Tomczyk.

The irony here is of course that Wajda consciously uses that figure - the media reporter, a representative of the universally hated government-controlled (dis)information network - to bring out of clandestinity and obscurity the histories of a whole layer of Polish working class fighters.

Maciek Tomczyk represents the type of worker militant forged during the 1968 student disturbances, the Baltic uprisings, the by Alexis Carras massacres of December 1970 (which led to the fall of Gomulka) and the disturbances of Radom and Ursus in 1976.

Tomczyk is "the second line man" who maintained in him that flame of hatred against the regime - the cadre that built up the embryo organisations of the Polish working class - (the KSS [Social Defence Committee] is alluded to in the film as the Free Trade Union movement).

Tomczyk is that militant who would not be broken nOI bought off. As Agniezgka the woman he later marries says - "You stopped struggling for success and at once saved your integrity."

Within Tomczyk the character are compressed the personal tragedies of countless militants. Death, harassment at the hands of secret service creeps, unemployment, imprisonment, detention in psychiatric hospitals - these were the only constants in an otherwise uncertain existence.

Some of the most superb moments of the film are of the Gdansk occupation itself - as the camera weaves its way in and out of the massive crowds around the Lenin shipyards.

We witness interviews with housewives, old women outside, denouncing the bureaucracy - their privileges, their well-fed stomachs, with workers demanding new trade unions - with "new people elected by the workers to negotiate."

And we see the negotiations — Lech Walesa talking with Jagielski - Solidarnose radical Gwiadza warning the Prime Minister that "We don't want • a country coerced into unity by the police truncheons.

And we see the final historic moment when the Gdansk Agreement is signed in front of thousands of workers with Jagielski -in a desperate move to preserve some l of the bureaucracy's tattered clothing - hollowly declaring:

"There are neither winners nor losers victors or vanquished."

But the polite applause belies the fact that there are winners; the Polish workers and militants like Maciek Tomczyk whose sheer determination and dedication have led the Polish working class at last out of the long cold night of Stalinist oppression. THE Labour Campaign TEE GAY ution branch to invite