Andrzej Zulawski – Trzecia czesc nocy AKA The Third Part of The Night (1971)

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Like a lot of cult movie fans my first exposure to the work of Andrzej Zulawski came in the shape of his marvellous Possession. It is a film which mixes genius with the obscene and the metaphorical with the real, a truly distinctive apocalyptic film about heartbreak. His debut movie contains some of those qualities again, only this time the degree of biography in the drama is more pronounced as the story is drawn from his father’s memories of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Whilst remaining fairly faithful to his father’s original story, Zulawksi enjoys the parallels between the Nazi occupation and the position of Communist Poland in 1971 with its own censorship and oppression. He takes the almost unbelieveable stories of his father about Nazi Poland and uses some of these ideas as metaphors for the present. The Third Part of the Night is as passionate as Possession and as connected to the personal as that film but the explicit political dimension also makes it a more idealistic and biting statement. The film starts with a man, Michal, recuperating from illness in the countryside with his family. Returning from a walk in the woods, he sees four horsemen attacking his wife and child and is powerless to stop their killing. He returns to the city where he becomes part of the underground and is ambushed by the Gestapo. Wounded, he runs through a tenement building chased by the secret police who mistake another man for him and arrest him instead. The man’s wife turns out to be heavily pregnant and demands help with her labour from Michal which he gives because of his guilt for her husband’s arrest and the fact that she looks like his dead wife. He continues to visit her in the nunnery and earns money as a guinea pig in SS disease experiments, finally he seeks to free the man arrested in his place. This tale operates on the basic narrative level I have just explained but also as a film about guilt and oppression, and in Zulawski’s pure intent as an attempt to recover the past from the prevalent Communist re-writing of post world war two Poland.