LA 3ème PARTIE DE LA NUIT

English description

English title : THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT Original Title : TRZECIA CZESC NOCY Directed by : Andrzej Zulawski With : Malgorzata Braunek, Jan Nowicki, Jerzy Golinski, Anna Milewska Poland, 1972, PAL, 4/3 - 106 mn zone 2, color, mono Original Version with French subtitles World War II Poland: a man gets a second chance. Michal's wife and child are killed by German soldiers, but in a nearby town he discovers and stays with a woman in labour who looks just like his dead wife. A complex and surreal work, the film is obsessed with the distinctions between love as self-preservation and self-sacrifice. But it's just as much the hallucinations of a dying man. Images of death are everywhere: endless corridors, figures framed in doorways (and later in coffins), a couple gunned down in bed. Not an easy film to come to terms with because of its cerebral nature and its self-consciousness; a haunting first feature, all the same. THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT is a film by Andrzej Zulawski, the enfant terrible of Polish Cinema. It is also a film about the "Polish experience", but one made by a filmmaker too young to remember the War. It was made in 1971, before the so-called Polish "cinema of moral concern" of Holland, Kieslowski and Zanussi. It is based (in part) on the life of Zulawski's father, Miroslaw, during the Second World War. It is perhaps the first (and probably the last) film about Weigl Institute in Lwow. But above all else, it is the debut film of one of cinema's true visionaries. Zulawski is one of the true mavericks of European cinema and his wild, imaginative and unique films have won awards at many international film festivals over the years. A nightmarish and surreal masterpiece, THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT is his highly influential debut feature film. Set during the time of the Nazi-occupation of Poland and rich with multilayered symbolism and apocalyptic imagery, it shows one of Europe's most uncompromising and visionary directors at his best.