Prba materii aka Material Test (1981) Kazimierz Karabasz

The documentary filmmaker looks for answers to the following questions: “What are we like in 1981?, What are we looking for and what are we striving for?, What is our mood as citizens?”. He assumes that the whole society consists of individual attitudes. In order to analyze the situation thoroughly, Karabasz wants people from the Wola district to be the protagonists of his documentary. The film material is divided into three parts: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. The past of the working-class district could be seen in old photos of the employees of the former Norblin factory and the Wola gasworks. The present focuses on supply problems, waiting for a flat and a car, lack of motivation to act, a need for freedom. Alcoholism turns out to be a social disease, it destroys relationships in workplaces. Young workers from the vocational school complain about lack of respect and efficient tools. They also believe that their preparation for the profession is rather poor. A full-length documentary by Kazimierz Karabasz, a classic of the Polish school of documentary, creating the canon of documentary film for 50 years, the author of books devoted to his own method of observation and the skills of a documentary filmmaker: Cierpliwe oko (Warsaw, 1977), Odczytać czas (Łódź, 1999). The film is characteristic of Kazimierz Karabasz’s style, it combines various forms of documentary: street polls, photography, interviews, monologues with his own comments, and quotations from the following poems: Robotnicy by Władysław Broniewski, Poruszamy się… by Tadeusz Różewicz, and Modlitwa szarego człowieka by Rafał Wojaczek.