The Third Part of the Night

Andrzej Żuławski’s directorial feature debut was one of the most fervently discussed movies of the year 1971. Against the then Polish cinema it shocked with the original narrative structure, baroque-like splendor of the mise-en-scene and a daring blend of the brutal naturalism and phantasy. It has also brought the new reading of the occupation period, so much distant from what the Polish Film School proposed. In the ‘Third part of the night’ Żuławski pictured the ‘time of contempt’ deprived of the national mythology and political subtexts. In his perspective the occupation is, above all, ‘the period of deconstruction of the existing order and rules, the period of the deathly chaos, the period of creation of the new resistance, new laws, and new structure of being; the period of annihilation but also a test, because only those will survive who are able to carry the new burden of the epoch.’ For Żuławski the war is a pointless nightmare of almost apocalyptical dimensions. It is no coincidence that the loop opening and ending his picture is a quotation from the St.John’s Apocalypse.