Word: walesa
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...Carpenter Center this weekend, Center Screen presents the truly remarkable film, Workers '80. Chronicling the crucial negotiations in Gdansk in August 1980, this documentary makes fascinating use of facial expressions counterpoised with the tense bargaining sessions. Watch Lech Walesa outmaneuver slick party bureaucrats. Any brief exploration of the themes does not do justice to the movement or the movie. Just...
...stress on the homogenized man, fill their frames with crowds, great agglomerations shot from above, or from behind as they cheer some arm-waving uniformed leader. If individuals appear, they represent stereotypes--broad smiles, broader biceps. But the camera in Workers '80 singles out men. Some have the handome Walesa look, bushy mustaches, broad shoulders; some are bignosed, homely, dirty, or dumb-looking; for the most part, just people. Workers standing, arms folded, listening to the negotiations over public address systems. Workers knelling to receive communion. Workers smoking cigarettes, drinking, eating dinner, or looking bored...
...demonstrate Solidarity's good faith, Walesa repeated his call for an end to Poland's current welter of strikes. Earlier in the week, he had persuaded the 120,000-member chapter in Tarnobrzeg Province to end a ten-day walkout, but approximately 160,000 workers remained idle throughout the country...
...Solidarity's radical factions won the day. The commission declared that Walesa's negotiations had been a "positive step," but it refused to help in reining in the strikers. Then the commission set a three-month deadline for success in the forthcoming negotiations with Jaruzelski and threatened to call a general strike if there were no satisfactory results by that time. Walesa's main victory was to obtain an endorsement of a statement that Solidarity would be ready to "make concessions and seek compromises justified by the supreme good of Polish society...
...Walesa and Jaruzelski increasingly face the problem of being hamstrung by their hard-line factions. The severity of the challenge to their respective authorities may sharpen when government-union talks begin, possibly as early as the end of this week, over such Solidarity demands as democratic local elections, worker self-management, and a socio-economic council to monitor the country's industrial performance. The moderate instincts of Walesa and Jaruzelski, as well as those of Poland's Roman Catholic Church, will once again be tested...