Le cinéma polonais, de l'après-guerre à Solidarnosc Retrospectives 2003

The Third Part of the Night

Trzecia Czesc Nocy

Andrzej Zulawski

Poland

1972 Fiction 1h46

Michal's mother, wife and son were killed in front of him by the Germans. It's only by chance that he and his father are still alive. Michal tries to contact the resistance. Fleeing the Germans, he hides in an apartment where he helps a woman give birth. The woman strangely resembles his dead wife...

With : Malgorzata Braunek, Leszek Teleszynski, Jan Nowicki
Screenplay : Miroslaw, Andrzej Zulawski
Music : Andrzej Korzynski

Production : PRF Zespoly Filmowe-Wektor, WFD
Distribution: Jeck Films

Andrzej Zulawski (1940) studied at the IDHEC in 1957, and got his start as assistant-director to Andrzej Wajda. The author of several scripts and novels, he directed his first feature-length film in 1972, The Devil, a baroque and bloody overview of 18th century Poland, a film banned by the censors until 1988. In 1972, he directed the adaptation of one of his father Miroslaw Zulawski's, short stories, The Third Part of the Night, his first film made under Wajda's "Unit X" production unit. The film begins with a time during the Occupation when the bodies of certain people were employed to breed fleas in order to make a vaccine against typhus. "The book and its adaptation for the screen are extraordinary works where reality and nightmare go hand in hand. The values of mankind are crushed by triumphant barbarity (B. Michaleck).