‘Man of Marble’

Most of these films were shown in the West, although it was not until the late 1970s that Mr. Wajda’s work again received the worldwide critical attention that had welcomed his earliest work. This phase started with “Man of Marble,” which he completed in 1976 but which was kept from audiences abroad until a political thaw in Warsaw emboldened bureaucrats to issue it an export license in 1978.

In that film, a student filmmaker, memorably played by Krystyna Janda, is trying to find out what became of a bricklayer who in the Stalinist ’50s had won national fame for his enthusiastic productivity. After tracing the worker’s rise as a state-sanctioned hero, she uncovers his decline at the hands of the same government that once extolled him.

Mr. Wajda tells his story like a thriller: The truth emerges through the shifting Communist propaganda of two decades as depicted in interview after interview, newsreel after newsreel.

When “Man of Marble” was released in Poland, some three million people saw it in less than three months, and arguments about its content broke out all over the country. The Poles knew that the Communist government had censored the crucial final scene of the film and refused to allow its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival as an official entry. But it was shown there anyway, and it won the International Federation of Film Critics prize.

Reviewing the movie in The Times, Vincent Canby called it “a political epic, compassionate and as bitterly funny as a cartoon.”

‘Man of Iron’

As the disintegration of Communist rule accelerated in Poland, more quickly than in the other Soviet satellite states, Mr. Wajda played an active role as both an artist and a patriot. In 1981, when the Solidarity labor-union movement was mushrooming, Mr. Wajda released “Man of Iron,” his sequel to “Man of Marble.”