Strike, this is cinema in its element. Pour sand in the works till it really grates. Leave officials high and dry, helpless without rigid orders. React spontaneously to unexpected, dangerous situations as the action movies have shown us again and again.



Katharina Thalbach as Agnieszka and Dominique Horwitz as Kazimierz. All photos courtesy of PROVOBIS

This too is the stuff of director Volker Schlöndorff's dreams, it was something that has emerged repeatedly in his films, to a certain degree, and one senses it again here, when he films the origins of Solidarnosc, the Polish strike movement which – 25 years ago – instilled fear into socialism, and played a decisive role in destroying the Warsaw Pact and the Berlin Wall. One can feel Schlöndorff coming to life on this revolutionary terrain, in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, among welders and crane operators, in the return to the 60s and 70s. The story he tells is not that of Lech Walesa, the world-famous icon of the struggle, but of the unknown working heroes – like crane operator Anna Walentynowicz.



Andrzej Chyra as electrician Lech Walesa.

Her struggle has the most humble beginnings with her long walk to the canteen. Off she marches at the start of the break, but by the time she gets to the soup pots it's time to resume working again. She has to take a stand, but this is mostly about self-help. So the soup comes to the workers. One day there is a fire, which costs many welders their lives. The management refuses to pay pensions to the widows, the men were to blame they say, drinking on the job. Anna fights for the pension payments, a grass-roots movement, with no ideological orientation, no doctrine. When Anna gets fired, the strike begins.



Katharina Thalbach plays Anna as the epitome of a tough, energetic, level-headed woman. A single mum who struggles with reading, as robust as she is sensitive. She has a beautiful little love and marriage story with Dominique Horwitz. These two are the German stars in the midst of a Polish cast. Lech Walesa comes over as a procrastinator by comparison. But Andrzej Wajda, the great old master of Polish cinema, said on watching the film that Andrzej Chyra had played him just right. "The living Lech," he averred – you could feel the joy that people found so infectious at the time. Walesa has since been accused of having betrayed the revolution.



Maybe only a German could make a film about these events, the oracles say, now that the film has been screened in Poland. Anna Walentynowicz recognised herself in her screen character, fulminated against the film and the way Schlöndorff had treated her – no real contact, no script, just a series of empty promises. Schlöndorff for his part was nonplussed by her reaction, but he has changed the name of the woman in the film to Agnieszka Koslowska. He didn't want to make a docu-drama, he says, but a heroic ballad. And this is where the problem lies, the straightforwardness of his storytelling, the result of his intense engagement. We encountered this in "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum." And it's just as vexing here, because it lacks the moments of inconsistency on which cinema - which never renounces its Brechtian tradition - thrives.




During the shoot: fire at the Lenin Shipyard

What does come over fantastically, however, is Schlöndorff's fascination for the physical: the steel and fire and the cranes which crawl along the workshop rooftops like huge insects. All of this comes as a huge relief in these days of special-effect overload. Schlöndorff films enthusiasm, a Gdansk symphony. And at these moments he comes very close to the origins of cinema, somewhere between Eisenstein, Vertov and 'Modern Times'."

*

"Strajk - die Heldin von Danzig" (Strike). Germany/ Poland 2007 – 104 mins.

Fritz Göttler is a film critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

This article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on March 8, 2007.

Translation: lp