Starring: Leszek Teleszyński, Małgorzata Braunek, Jan Nowicki

Directed by: Andrzej Żuławski

As an cinematic auteur, Andrzej Żuławski did not pass through a larval stage and proved to be a fully-formed butterfly from the very beginning. Żuławski’s poetics were already fully developed and effective in his directorial debut.

Shaken but favourably impressed by the release of Trzecia część nocy (The Third Part of the Night, 1971), Andrzej Wajda commented: ″We saw the war with our own eyes. He could only see it with the eyes of his soul″. Anti-hero Michał (Leszek Teleszyński) doesn’t resemble the war heroes and martyrs that populate the cinema of the Polish Film School, but the audience can still appreciate his stoical capacity to not lose his mind as the story evolves.

After the murder of his wife Marta (Małgorzata Braunek), and his daughter, Michał becomes a resistance fighter and decides to look after the spouse of a doppelgänger partisan (also played by Braunek) who has been shot at his place. Michał also gives his blood to feed leeches used to produce typhus vaccine for the Wehrmacht, an experience recounted by Żuławski’s father, who lived in Lviv during the German invasion.

In The Third Part of the Night the clinic is not an oppressive institution, but rather a shelter from the senseless chaos of the war. The stylized and crude violence in the film is in tune with the mood of the Executions series painted by Andrzej Wróblewski in the late 1940s. Żuławski’s debut stands out as a flamboyant and obscure masterpiece of Polish cinema that is almost unknown outside Europe.

Originally published by The Krakow Post on March 1, 2013