Andrzej Wajda interviews Lech Walesa in "Walesa: Man of Hope"

From archive: February 20, 2014

Andrzej Wadja's new film Walesa: Man of Hope is a biography poised between critical historiography and hagiography. It presents Walesa as canny but arrogant and seemingly uneducated except by his experience, and it poses the question, who is the real hero, Walesa himself as Solidarity's leader or the social movement of which he was a part? With the closing scene, Wajda abandons all efforts at a critical perspective, which in any case were during the previous two hours entirely focused on questions of biography, the larger setting of the conflict between the state apparatus and its functionaries and the striking workers having been simplified into obviousness. The film ends with Walesa appearing to speak before an adulatory US Congress and saying something about freedom. By invoking the central ideolegeme of the United States and its empire, which appropriated the consequences of the workers' revolution in Poland as constituting its own triumph in the Cold War, an ideologeme that, notwithstanding its real if limited truth, is usually wielded in an empty and cynical manner (for instance, in attacking third world movements for socialism and national liberation in the name of countering the power of the USSR), Wajda plays into the hands of a regime that he like many Eastern Europeans understandably prefer, perhaps because the Poles were effectively occupied by the Russians, unlike, for example, the people of Vietnam or Chile. Communism was not ended by a great man, neither Walesa nor Pope John Paul nor Gorbachev nor Reagan, but by the struggles of Polish workers, and later the peoples of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. The great comic irony is that in a self-proclaimed worker's state it was workers who brought about change. But this film has too much to say about one man and not enough about history and politics. Though Walesa says at least one very interesting thing in his interview with Oriana Fallaci: he became an activist because all his life he has been angry, and his anger gave him the ability to master all kinds of situations and to be a leader.