Word: gdansk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dawn broke on the first day of the month, long lines of blue-uniformed militia, armed with lead-filled white truncheons, spread out along the deserted streets of the Polish seaport of Gdansk. During the past two years, supporters of the outlawed Solidarity trade union had turned the annual holiday celebration into a demonstration against the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. As they were last year, the authorities appeared thoroughly prepared to handle any attempt to disrupt the May Day parade...
...bystanders watching the parade only 200 yards from the official reviewing stand. Before security forces could decide how to react, he deftly slipped between the ranks of marching workers, accompanied by a phalanx of his followers. Then, as the local Communist Party leader and the police chief of Gdansk looked down from the tribunal in stunned disbelief, the cocky interloper flashed a V-for-victory sign. A visiting Soviet party leader failed to recognize him and returned his salute with a cheery wave. Shouted an astonished onlooker: "It's Lech! Walesa is here!" Indeed...
...recipient of the 64th Nobel Peace Prize. Lech Walesa, said Aarvik, had raised "a burning torch, a shining name" to humanity's enduring dreams of freedom. Walesa, leader of Solidarity, the outlawed Polish independent trade union, did not hear those words. He had stayed behind in Gdansk for fear that the government would not allow him back into Poland...
Walesa's wife Danuta made the trip, however, and after Aarvik spoke, she rose to deliver a 15-minute speech written by her husband. "On this solemn day, my place is among those with whom I have grown and to whom I belong, the workers of Gdansk," she read. "We crave for justice, and that is why we are so persistent in the struggle for our rights." After listening to a radio broadcast of the ceremony, Walesa declared, "We should use peaceful means to solve our problems...
...close fit between the story and Poland's current convulsions actually presents the film's greatest problem. One has the nagging sense that the image on the screen is Gdansk or Warsaw, retracted by Wajda's lens to look to Paris. And rather than heightening the film's urgency, this imparts the slightly bitter tests of propaganda, setting the viewer on the defensive. Wajda goes to far as to cast French actors at the Dantonist "indulgent" and poles as the hard line Jacobins such as Robespierre and St. Just, the film's real villain. Pszoniak even bears an unfortunate though...