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Something of the same sort of problem exists with "[Janusz Korczak]." Mr. [Andrzej Wajda] has been quoted as saying that he wanted to make this film because "Jewish themes in Polish culture have been virtually banned for 20 years."
Claude Lanzmann, director of the epic Holocaust film "Shoah," has questioned why "Korczak" omits any mention of passive Polish assistance to the Nazis during the occupation.
"Korczak" is not a great film, but it shouldn't be condemned for not being something else entirely. Korczak Directed by Andrzej Wajda; written (in Polish with English subtitles) by Agnieszka Holland; director of photography, Robby Muller; edited by Ewa Smal; music by Wojciech Kilar; production designer, Allan Starski; produced by Regina Ziegler, Janusz Morgenstern and Daniel Toscan du Plantier; released by New Yorker Films . At Lincoln Plaza Cinema, Broadway at 63d St., in Manhattan. Running time: 113 minutes. This film has no rating. Korczak . . . [Wojtek Pszoniak] Stefa . . . Ewa Dalkowska Heniek . . . Piotr Kozlowski Estera . . . Marzena Trybala Szloma . . . Wojcieh Klata Abramek . . . Adam Siemion
Much like the man it honors, Andrzej Wajda's "Korczak" maintains a steely surface tranquillity in the face of unspeakable events. From time to time, the Polish film suddenly speaks out in anger, then catches itself, as if children might be listening.
"Korczak," which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza, is a rigorously plain black-and-white movie about a remarkable, probably very complex personality.
He is Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), born Henryk Goldszmit, the Polish-Jewish doctor and educator who devoted his life to the care, study and improvement of the lot of children. In the years between the two world wars, Korczak wrote, lectured, conducted a popular radio program and sponsored a magazine put together entirely by children.
More important, he opened a home for Jewish orphans in Warsaw where he could put into practice his theories relating to children's rights. He died at Treblinka along with members of his staff and 200 children from his orphanage, which had been moved into the ghetto in 1940.
Korczak was clearly some kind of saint.
Mr. Wajda, being all too aware that dramatized saintliness tends to be upstaged by melodrama and sentimental speculation, has chosen to make a film so self-effacing that "Korczak" plays more like a synopsis of a life than a revelation of it.
The scale of the movie is properly small, the focus is short. In a succession of mini-tableaux, the facts of the man's life are presented without editorial comment:
The explanation for his adoption of the name Korczak, the loss of his job as a broadcaster in 1936 because of "pressures," his increasing difficulties in keeping up the children's home during the Nazi Occupation and, finally, his decision to remain with the children when deportation came.
Yet the modesty of Mr. Wajda's approach is more effective in theory than in practice. "Korczak" can't qualify as anti-dramatic or minimal art. It deals in generalities that are completely conventional. It looks like an authorized biography.
Korczak is played soberly by Wojtek Pszoniak, who was so fine as Robespierre in Mr. Wajda's "Danton." Korczak's only distinguishing features are his nobility and his occasional losses of temper, as when he attempts to stop a German soldier who is beating an innocent man (which, of course, amounts to more nobility).
Nobody else in the movie is characterized even to that limited extent.
What's missing from "Korczak" is a sense of the context in which it was made. Several of Mr. Wajda's earlier films have not traveled well, mostly because they have dealt with aspects of the Polish political scene that were beyond the ken of most Americans.
Something of the same sort of problem exists with "Korczak." Mr. Wajda has been quoted as saying that he wanted to make this film because "Jewish themes in Polish culture have been virtually banned for 20 years."
This must explain, in part, why he has treated the subject with such high-mindedness and reverence that "Korczak" seems to have no life of its own.
Even so, Mr. Wajda was severely criticized at last year's Cannes International Film Festival for the sequence that ends "Korczak."
In the film's first and last burst of cinematic imagination, Mr. Wajda watches the train transporting Korczak and the children to Treblinka. Suddenly the last boxcar becomes unhooked. It slows to a halt. The doors open and the children tumble out into the sunshine of an idyllic meadow. Free at last.
This dreamy, quite magical moment almost justifies the flat tone of all that has gone before. Though critics in Israel have praised the ending, others have seen it as an attempt to mitigate the horror of the "Final Solution."
Claude Lanzmann, director of the epic Holocaust film "Shoah," has questioned why "Korczak" omits any mention of passive Polish assistance to the Nazis during the occupation.
"Korczak" is not a great film, but it shouldn't be condemned for not being something else entirely. Korczak Directed by Andrzej Wajda; written (in Polish with English subtitles) by Agnieszka Holland; director of photography, Robby Muller; edited by Ewa Smal; music by Wojciech Kilar; production designer, Allan Starski; produced by Regina Ziegler, Janusz Morgenstern and Daniel Toscan du Plantier; released by New Yorker Films . At Lincoln Plaza Cinema, Broadway at 63d St., in Manhattan. Running time: 113 minutes. This film has no rating. Korczak . . . Wojtek Pszoniak Stefa . . . Ewa Dalkowska Heniek . . . Piotr Kozlowski Estera . . . Marzena Trybala Szloma . . . Wojcieh Klata Abramek . . . Adam Siemion
Wojtek Pszoniak with an orphan. (New Yorker Films)
Copyright New York Times Company Apr 12, 1991