A major departure from the period pieces and highly composed films that Wajda made in the early 1970s, Man of Marble was a self-consciously contemporary work that was condemned by the authorities but hailed abroad as an "Eastern European Citizen Kane." Wajda channeled his aspirations for a renewed Polish cinema here through the fictional figure of a young woman filmmaker (Janda) whose diploma project focuses on Birkut, a forgotten worker-hero from the Stalinist era. A simple bricklayer from Stakhanover, the "man of marble," according to the film’s fiction, had been the propagandistic creation of a Polish director of an earlier era. In documenting Birkut’s fall from grace, the young director exposes the sham state of worker solidarity and political justice.