The Third Part of the Night

Snapshot

The Third Part of the Night (Trzecia część nocy) is Andrzej Żuławski's feature debut, a delirious war film that refuses the consolations of the genre. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland—drawn from the milieu of Lwów (present-day Lviv)—it follows Michał, who survives the massacre of his mother, wife, and son and drifts into a second, borrowed existence: he takes refuge as a "louse feeder" at a typhus-vaccine institute and attaches himself to a woman, Marta, who is the double of his dead wife. The film converts documented history—the real practice of feeding lice with one's own blood to produce vaccine, a job that also conferred protection from deportation—into a fever of doubling, repetition, and apocalyptic dread. Its title comes from the Book of Revelation (the sounding of the fourth angel, when "the third part" of sun, moon, and stars is struck), and that eschatological register governs everything: the picture is less a story about occupation than about a consciousness coming apart under it. Made when Żuławski was in his early thirties, the film announced a sensibility—hysterical, metaphysical, camera-forward—that would define his career and make him one of European cinema's most singular and least assimilable voices.

Industry & production

The film was produced within the Polish state film system of the early Gierek period, when a relative loosening of cultural policy briefly widened the space for authorial and unconventional work. Żuławski came to it not as an outsider but as a trained industry figure: he had studied filmmaking in France and served as assistant to Andrzej Wajda, the dominant figure of Polish cinema, on projects including Ashes and Everything for Sale. That apprenticeship placed him inside the Wajda orbit and the "film unit" (zespół) production structure through which Polish features were then developed and financed.

Crucially, the project was a family undertaking at the level of authorship. Żuławski co-wrote the screenplay with his father, the writer and diplomat Mirosław Żuławski, and the material is rooted in the elder Żuławski's own wartime experience in Lwów, including the world of Rudolf Weigl's typhus-research institute, where feeding lice was both scientific labor and a shield against the occupier. The autobiographical substrate gives the film's surrealism an unusual documentary anchor.

The debut's reception inside the system is best understood through what happened next. Żuławski's second feature, The Devil (Diabeł, 1972), was suppressed by the authorities, and the collision with censorship pushed him to relocate to France, where he made L'important c'est d'aimer before returning to Poland for the ill-fated On the Silver Globe. In that sense The Third Part of the Night stands at the threshold of a career defined by conflict with state cultural power. Because Polish cinema of the era operated outside a Western box-office model, no meaningful commercial-gross figures attach to the film, and any such numbers should be treated with suspicion.

Technology

The film was shot on 35mm color stock using the equipment standard to Polish state production of the period. There is no evidence of exotic or experimental hardware; its innovations are those of handling rather than apparatus. What distinguishes it technologically is the mobility of the camera—a restless, near-continuous handheld and crane-borne movement that presupposes lightweight rigs and an operating crew willing to sustain long, physically strenuous takes. The color palette leans toward desaturated, sickly institutional tones punctuated by reds, consistent with the stocks and processing available in Polish labs at the time. Any claim about specific camera bodies or lens sets would go beyond the reliable record.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematography, by Witold Sobociński—one of the major Polish cameramen of his generation—is the film's defining formal achievement. Sobociński's camera is almost never still: it circles, lunges, and reframes around the actors, refusing the stabilizing master shot and dissolving the boundary between observer and participant. This is the origin of what would become the signature "Żuławski camera," a roving subjectivity that seems to be caught up in the characters' panic rather than composing it from outside. The handheld idiom conveys both the chaos of occupation and Michał's disintegrating interiority; space becomes unreliable, corridors and rooms bleed into one another, and the viewer is denied a fixed vantage from which the horror could be safely surveyed.

Editing

The cutting reinforces the sense of a world that repeats and folds back on itself, matching the narrative's logic of doubling and recurrence. Sequences rhyme and echo—births, deaths, and the same face returning—so that montage becomes a vehicle for the film's metaphysics rather than merely its continuity. I do not have a confident attribution for the editor of record, and rather than invent one I note that the editing credit is a point on which the readily available account is thin; the effect, however, is unmistakably of a piece with the film's obsessive structure.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Żuławski stages action at a pitch of near-continuous crisis. Bodies are crowded, jostling, and frequently in violent or convulsive motion; performers speak over one another and move with an agitation that reads as expressionist rather than naturalistic. The institute where lice are fed on human skin supplies one of the film's central, literalized images—science and sacrifice fused into a single unsettling tableau. Trapdoors, thresholds, and passages recur as staging motifs, giving physical form to the film's sense of a reality riddled with hidden exits into other lives.

Sound

The soundscape is dense and destabilizing, layering overlapping voices, cries, and ambient dread beneath a score that abandons conventional dramatic underlining. Andrzej Korzyński's music—the beginning of a long collaboration with Żuławski that would run through The Devil, Possession, and On the Silver Globe—works in a modernist, unsettling register that intensifies the atmosphere of apocalypse rather than reassuring the viewer. The recitation from Revelation frames the film's aural world from the outset, setting scripture against the noise of catastrophe.

Performance

Performance here is the deliberate opposite of restraint. Żuławski demanded—and would demand throughout his career—an extremity of emotional expenditure that pushes actors to the edge of hysteria, and the film is an early manifesto for that method. Małgorzata Braunek, then Żuławski's wife, carries the film's central conceit in a dual role as the murdered wife Helena and her double Marta, the doubling made flesh in a single performer. Leszek Teleszyński's Michał is a study in dissociation, a man performing a life that is not his own. The acting style—raw, sweat-soaked, verging on breakdown—is inseparable from the film's meaning: the occupation is rendered as a psychic state, and the actors' bodies are its instrument.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's mode is subjective and oneiric rather than linear. It begins with a recognizable historical situation—wartime atrocity—and then slides into a dream-logic in which events double, faces repeat, and cause and effect give way to recurrence and prophecy. This is not conventional surrealism-as-decoration but a structural principle: the second half of Michał's life rhymes with the first, so that grief and guilt manifest as literal repetition. The dramatic engine is less "what will happen" than "why is it happening again," and the Revelation epigraph reframes the whole as a vision of the end. The result is a narrative that keeps its historical referent—the real horror of occupied Poland—while insisting that trauma cannot be told as a straight story.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a war drama with strong horror inflection, the film sits athwart all three categories. It has the occupation setting and moral gravity of the Polish war film, but none of its heroic or documentary composure; it has the dread and doubling of horror, but no monster save history and the divided self. It belongs more comfortably to a European art-cinema lineage of the surreal and the metaphysical than to any national war-film cycle. Within Żuławski's own body of work it inaugurates a personal genre—call it metaphysical hysteria—that recurs across his filmography, reaching its most famous expression in Possession (1981), where a broken marriage becomes literal horror.

Authorship & method

The Third Part of the Night is a director's film in the strongest sense, and it establishes the terms of Żuławski's authorship: total emotional extremity, a camera bound to subjective states, and a willingness to treat metaphysics and history as the same problem. The method—actors driven to exhaustion, scenes staged at a scream, reality kept permanently unstable—would remain constant across radically different subjects and countries. His key collaborators here prefigure the pattern of his career: cinematographer Witold Sobociński, whose mobile camera set the template later cameramen would extend; composer Andrzej Korzyński, the beginning of a career-long partnership; and co-writer Mirosław Żuławski, the director's father, whose lived wartime experience supplied the material. The editing partnership is less firmly documented, and I decline to name a collaborator I cannot verify. What is clear is that the film's authorship is doubled at its root—father and son, memory and invention—which is itself thematically apt for a work obsessed with duplication.

Movement / national cinema

The film emerges from Polish cinema after the era of the Polish Film School (Wajda, Munk) and before the late-1970s "cinema of moral anxiety." Żuławski fits awkwardly into any of these currents. He shares the Polish preoccupation with the war and national trauma, but treats it through an expressionist, quasi-religious lens closer to the European avant-garde than to the sober realism or romantic historicism of his countrymen. His subsequent flight to France also makes him a transnational figure, one whose "national cinema" is split between Poland and French art-house production. The film is thus best read as Polish in its material and its wounds, but idiosyncratic—almost solitary—in its idiom.

Era / period

Produced in the early 1970s during the comparative cultural thaw of the early Gierek years, the film benefited from a moment when unconventional authorial work could still be financed within the state system. That window was narrow: the near-simultaneous suppression of The Devil demonstrates how quickly the tolerance closed. The film therefore belongs to a brief, charged interval in Polish cinema—open enough to permit a debut this radical, repressive enough to drive its maker abroad within a year or two. Its apocalyptic mood can be read against that political weather without reducing the film to allegory.

Themes

The governing themes are doubling and repetition; guilt and survival; faith and apocalypse; and the annihilation of the individual under occupation. The doppelgänger—one actress as both dead wife and living stranger—embodies the idea that a life can be lost and then uncannily repeated, that mourning is a form of recurrence. The louse-feeding institute fuses self-sacrifice with parasitism and makes the giving of one's own blood a literal price of survival. The Revelation frame casts private catastrophe as cosmic, so that one man's grief and the end of the world become the same event. Underlying all of it is a meditation on complicity and continuity: whether it is possible to go on living, and in what borrowed shape, after witnessing the unbearable.

Reception, canon & influence

Contemporary reception must be read through the constrained Polish critical culture of the early 1970s, and the film's early reputation was quickly overtaken by the scandal of The Devil's banning and Żuławski's departure. For years his work was more legend than availability, and The Third Part of the Night circulated as the difficult, brilliant debut of a director better known abroad for Possession. Its canonical standing was substantially built later, through restoration and home-video reappraisal, which allowed critics and cinephiles to recognize it as a fully formed statement of a major sensibility rather than mere juvenilia.

Looking backward, the film's influences are legible: the Polish war-cinema tradition it both inherits and violates; a European current of surrealism and metaphysical horror; and, most concretely, the biographical testimony of Mirosław Żuławski and the real history of Weigl's institute, which ground the phantasmagoria in fact. Looking forward, its clearest legacy is internal—it is the seedbed of Żuławski's entire method, and its restless camera, extremity of performance, and fusion of the domestic with the apocalyptic recur throughout his films and culminate in Possession. Beyond his own work, Żuławski has become a touchstone for a strain of intense, physically demanding, emotionally maximalist filmmaking, and admiring directors and critics have repeatedly returned to him. I would be cautious about asserting specific, documented lines of influence from this particular debut onto named later filmmakers; what can be said with confidence is that the film established the visual and emotional grammar that made "Żuławskian" a recognizable adjective, and that its cult reappraisal has secured it a firm place in the canon of European art cinema.