Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Third Part of the Night
1972 · Andrzej Żuławski · The Third Part of the Night on Sightlines
Start with the skin. In an institute in occupied Lwów, people sit while lice feed on them. This really happened. The insects were raised on human blood to make typhus vaccine, and the job of feeding them also protected the feeder from deportation. Andrzej Żuławski wrote The Third Part of the Night with his father, Mirosław, who lived through that world in Lwów, and they put this practice at the center of the film. A man gives his blood to hold off a plague and to stay alive. Keep that picture in mind while you watch. The film keeps coming back to the same deal: life paid for in blood, and a life that belongs to someone else worn like a borrowed coat.
The film opens with Michał (Leszek Teleszyński) witnessing the murder of his mother, his wife and his small son. Żuławski puts this at the start, where another film would have built toward it. Everything after it is a second life that Michał drifts into without choosing it. He becomes a louse feeder. He meets Marta, who has his dead wife's face, because Małgorzata Braunek plays both women. And the film, which began as a recognizable war story, starts repeating itself.
Here Gilles Deleuze is useful. In his two books on cinema he describes a break in how films work. In classical cinema a character takes in a situation and acts to change it. Deleuze calls this the movement-image, and the war film runs on it. Polish cinema had its own great version. Andrzej Wajda, whom Żuławski served as an assistant, made Ashes and Diamonds, with its doomed romantic hero and deep-focus expressionist compositions. That hero's acts still mattered, even when they killed him. Deleuze argued that after the war this circuit broke. Characters found themselves in situations they could no longer answer, and they turned into seers instead of agents. He called this the crisis of the action-image.
Michał is one of these seers. He survives, but survival gives him nothing to do. He doesn't avenge anyone and he doesn't steer events. He endures, and he looks. The question that drives the film is not what he will do next. It is why everything keeps happening again. This lens is worth using because it explains why the film feels so wrong as a war film. Żuławski isn't failing at the genre. He is recording the moment its engine stalls, and he takes Wajda's syntax with him while he does it.
What replaces the engine? Deleuze's best-known answer is the crystal-image. In a crystal, the present moment is fused with a virtual double of itself, a memory or a dream or a reflection, so tightly that you can't say which is which. Mirrors are the textbook case. Żuławski's mirror is a woman. When Michał looks at Marta he sees Helena. When we look at Braunek we see both of them at once, and the film never lets the double casting turn into a trick we can see through. This past doesn't arrive as a flashback with a date on it. It stands in the room, alive, and it has a life of its own. Bergman's Persona gave Żuławski the two women whose faces merge. The Third Part of the Night puts that merging into one body.
The editing works the same way. Sequences rhyme with each other. Births, deaths and the same returning face echo across the film, so the cuts carry the film's metaphysics as well as its story. You can feel the debt to Last Year at Marienbad, with its repetition-with-variation and its refusal to say which images are real, remembered or imagined. You can also feel The Saragossa Manuscript, Polish cinema's own maze of stories nested inside dreams. Żuławski joins that game to the occupation. That pairing is new, and it changes the stakes. Repetition here is what grief looks like when it won't stay in the past.
Then there is the camera, and this is Żuławski's real invention, made with the cinematographer Witold Sobociński. It almost never stops. It circles the actors, lunges at them, reframes around them, and refuses the steady master shot that would let us look on from safety. Deleuze, borrowing from Pasolini, describes a camera that films a character's way of seeing and at the same time makes us feel its own presence, like a second, uneasy consciousness in the scene. He calls this the dicisign. Sobociński's camera seems caught up in the panic instead of composing it. Corridors and rooms bleed into each other. Trapdoors and thresholds keep turning up, as though reality were full of hidden exits into other lives. Watch for them.
The bodies are the last piece. Deleuze wrote about a cinema of the body, where posture, fatigue and convulsion carry time and thought more than dialogue does. Żuławski pushes his actors to the edge of hysteria. They crowd and jostle and talk over one another, and they sweat. Andrzej Wajda's Kanał had already staged war as a claustrophobic descent. Żuławski keeps that state of crisis going far past the point of breakdown, so the occupation turns into a state of mind, and the actors' bodies are where we see it. Bergman's Hour of the Wolf showed a mind coming apart as literal apparitions. Żuławski applies that to history.
Under all of it is something Deleuze calls the originary world. A concrete setting, here a vaccine laboratory with its schedules and papers, cracks open onto something older and rawer underneath: blood, vermin, appetite, sacrifice. The title points the same way. It comes from Revelation, when the fourth angel sounds and a third part of the sun, moon and stars is struck, and the film opens with that passage being read aloud over the noise of catastrophe. Andrzej Korzyński's modernist score, the start of a long partnership with Żuławski, offers no comfort.
Why does it matter? Because the film never lets go of history. The lice and the blood are documented fact. Yet it insists that trauma can't be told as a straight story. It found a way to stay faithful to what happened while letting the telling come apart, and it launched a filmmaker who kept working in that register, through The Devil and on to Possession, where a broken marriage becomes literal horror.
So when you watch it, follow the faces. Each time one comes back, ask yourself whether you are seeing a memory, a substitute or a second chance. The film won't tell you, and the grief is in that refusal.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Michał witnesses the massacre of his family at the outset and cannot answer it with action; he drifts into a borrowed life, and the film's drive becomes 'why is it happening again' instead of 'what will happen', detonating the action-based syntax of Wajda's Polish war film
- the seer (voyant) — Teleszyński's Michał as a study in dissociation, a man performing a life that is not his own, who endures and watches instead of acting
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Małgorzata Braunek's dual role as the murdered wife Helena and her double Marta: the past made present in one face, actual and virtual indiscernible, in the Persona-derived doppelgänger structure
- dicisign (free indirect camera) — Sobociński's near-continuous handheld and crane-borne camera circles and lunges around the actors and seems caught up in their panic, refusing the stable master shot; the camera's own presence is felt alongside the characters' perception
- cinema of the body — Performance driven to hysteria and exhaustion, with crowded, jostling, convulsive bodies and overlapping speech; the occupation rendered as a psychic state with the actors' bodies as its instrument
- originary world — The typhus institute, where lice are fed on human skin, a concrete scientific milieu that opens onto blood, vermin and sacrifice, framed by the apocalyptic recitation from Revelation