The Third Part of the Night
The Third Part of the Night | |
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Directed by | Andrzej Żuławski |
Written by | Andrzej Żuławski Mirosław Żuławski |
Starring | Małgorzata Braunek Leszek Teleszyński Jan Nowicki |
Cinematography | Witold Sobociński |
Edited by | Halina Prugar-Ketling |
Music by | Andrzej Korzyński |
Production company | Polski State Film |
Release dates |
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Running time | 105 minutes |
Country | Poland |
Language | Polish |
The Third Part of the Night (
Plot
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The film is set during the occupation of Poland during World War II. The young man Michal witnesses German Nazi soldiers slaughter his wife, son and mother at their villa. Michal and his father avoid death by hiding in a nearby forest, from where they see the murders.
Michal decides to join the resistance but before his first meeting, the
Later when in his bed, a mysterious masked man visit him and talks about deals they did before the war, gives Michal a book and tells him about a prophecy before saying he himself is fleeing to
After having delivered rations to the mother again, the toy horse appears in the dark corner but without the boy on it this time. Instead the boy appears before him at the job at the hospital, telling him "there is no you and me anymore". The same day he goes on a nightly mission for a friend and sees a man get shot. Next day, Michal sees the man who he earlier saw through the window in the roundup, now free. The free man then lies down next to the woman with a baby, crying, as she wakes up and sees him. They are shortly afterwards shot through a window by someone. Michal enters the hospital's labs and through his microscope he picks apart lice that have fed on his blood during the lice-feeding typhus experiments. After meeting with the resistance members, he is with the woman he helped with the childbirth, when the boy again appears from the darkness in the corner of the room and walks into another room where there is also a man and a woman. In the next sequence Michal and the woman whom he helped give birth are seen again, now naked in a bed, when his wife appears out of the same darkness and walks up to them. Michal says to the vision of his wife: "I have been finding you again", and she replies: "yes, in other people who aren’t us", and he lies back down next to the other woman as the wife also says: "I, who am leaving you, feel reconciled with you now". As Michal look over the bed he sees a crack in the floor and under it the corpse of an old woman in a coffin surrounded by candles lies facing up straight towards him.
Another roundup of people takes place and the nun he talked to earlier willingly enters one of the Germans' trucks of prisoners. After leaving for a planned mission, Michal is pulled away in the last second by a woman who says that it's a trap, and they watch the other resistance members dragged out from a house by the Germans, and arrested, beaten, shot, etc., on the street. Michal goes to his father's place and there sees a painting on the wall resembling the boy from the shadows. After leaving, the father sets fire to his violin notes on the floor, repeating a Latin prayer while going up in the fiery inferno. Michal goes to the hospital to end the misery of a man mistaken for him and tortured, who smiles at him. A nurse walks in and shouts in fear when seeing Michal in the room and as he runs out, chased by people, he finds himself running through a long basement corridor, and at the end he sees a stretcher with a body on. He pulls the cover off and see the dead body looks exactly like himself. He is shocked, and a shot is heard and Michal is hit in the neck and falls bloody down some stairs, sees a familiar looking woman get pushed into what looks like a lobby, then crawls backwards in terror, finding himself in a corridor with rows of Gestapo cells, with the lifeless body of a tortured prisoner in a chair in each cell, he stumbles in panic into his family villa where it all began, with the three bodies of his family next to each other on the main entrance floor. A biblical verse is heard spoken by a woman in a nearby room who is putting on make-up and when she turns, leaving the room, she looks like Michal's wife, and as she recites a verse about death, the
Cast
- Małgorzata Braunek – Marta
- Leszek Teleszyński – Michał
- Michał Grudziński – Marian
- Jan Nowicki – Jan
- Marek Walczewski – Rozenkranc
- Jerzy Goliński – Michal's father
- Anna Milewska – Sister Klara
Background
The story was inspired by the experiences of Zulawski's father
Production
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The film was shot in 1970 in Krakow but the locations were selected to resemble Lwow, by then called Lviv and situated in the Ukraine.[1]
Release
The Third Part of the Night debuted at the 1971
Home media
The film was released for the first time on DVD by Second Run on March 19, 2007.[4]
Reception
Critical response
Variety said "Zulawski is certainly a man to watch when he marshals and assimilates his influences more thoroughly", and remarked: "the film may try to say a bit too much, and sometimes its allusions remain too personal. But, overall, it has a grim but incisive insight into a time of terror when any order seems illusory and man becomes almost like the lice he works with in the laboratory."
Awards
The Andrzej Munk Award for Best Debut (Poland, 1971)
Honorary Diploma (
The Grand Prize at the Koszalin Film Festival (Poland, 1973)
References
- ^ a b "Andrzej Żuławski: "Trzecią część nocy"". www.lwow.home.pl (in Polish). Retrieved 2019-09-08.
- ^ a b Moskowitz, Gene (1971-09-22). "Trzeczej Czesci Nocy". Variety.
- ^ "Trzecia Czesc Nocy". filmpolski.pl (in Polish). Retrieved 2019-09-08.
- ^ "Trzecia Czesc Nocy (1971) - Andrzej Zulawski". Allmovie.com. AllMovie. Retrieved 15 June 2018.
- ^ "The Third Part of the Night, directed by Andrzej Zulawski". Time Out.com. Time Out London. Retrieved 1 November 2018.
- ^ Fischer, Russ (2016-02-19). "The Essentials: The 5 Best Andrzej Zulawski Films". IndieWire. Retrieved 2019-09-08.
- ^ Siclier, Jacques (1999-05-17). "Méthaphysique de la Pologne". Le Monde.
- ^ Sachs, Ben (16 November 2017). "A young Pole battles Nazis and madness in The Third Part of the Night". Chicago Reader.com. Ben Sachs. Retrieved 15 June 2018.