The Third Part of the Night (1971) User Reviews (12)

Hypnotic piece of interpretive art

[tomgillespie2002 · 8/10 · 19 March 2011]

Remarkably, this was Polish director Andrzej Zulawski's debut feature. Coming from a family full of actors, directors, poets, writers, and general great thinkers, Zulawski strides into this film with confidence, focus and a craft that takes the majority of directors years to perfect. I was interested in this film after reading about the rather strange plot line, and having a keen interest in Polish cinema, notably the work of Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda. And I'm pleased my I followed my curiosity, as the film is a hypnotic and nightmarish piece of cinema that encourages discussion, interpretation and repeat viewings, something that I find with only a few films, especially straight after the first viewing.

The film begins in a remote countryside house in Nazi-occupied Poland, where Michal (Leszek Teleszynski) stays with his wife and children, until the Nazis come along a murder everyone while Michal lies hidden in the woods. He journeys back to Lwow where he joins the resistance, almost instantly being tracked down and almost murdered. He manages to escape when the pursuers mistake an innocent bystander wearing similar clothes to be him and shoot him dead. Michal comforts the dead man's wife, while noticing that the mysterious woman bears an uncanny resemblance to his own dead wife. Being a typhus sufferer, Michal decides to put his misfortune to use and earns money becoming a lice feeder, strapping small boxes full of the bloodsuckers down his legs to let them feed, which are later used to develop a vaccine.

What stems from the relatively normal opening scene can only be described as a chaotic descent into instability, as the story moves along slowly and confusingly. The decision to use the same actress (Malgorzata Braunek) to play multiple roles is never clearly explained or made clear. The obvious and initial reason would apparently be the inability of Michal to let go of his wife's death, seeing her everywhere, but as the film goes on, you wonder about the mental stability of our hero, or even ponder if this (or indeed the whole film) is just a product of his typhoid-addled brain. Scenes randomly blend into the next, and you have no idea where the film is going or will end up. It is truly a mentally tiring experience, and all the better for it.

Zulawski seems to be fascinated with lice and the feeding process that the film depicts. He films in close detail, with some effectively loose- hand held work, how the lice are packed together in a tiny box, with a mesh screen in place to allow the creatures to feed through. Later, during the vaccination process, we are treated to a microscope POV of the lice being carefully placed on a petri dish one by one, only to be torn open by a pair of tweezers to extract their infected blood. Do the lice represent our protagonist, or the nature of the human race? Or perhaps it's a commentary on the war and the destruction of the Nazi party? No answers are clear with the film, and is best enjoyed as an interpretive piece of art cinema. I use the word 'enjoy' loosely, as when the climax approaches, it almost becomes a piece of psychological horror, one that genuinely disturbs in a way that only a true artist can achieve.

It will not appeal to everybody, but no matter what your view or opinion, it will no doubt have a profound effect on the emotions and the brain, and will linger for a long time.

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Of Lice and Men

[allenrogerj · 8/10 · 5 August 2007]

The film begins with a young woman reading from the Book of Revelation. It returns to the same scene again and at the end; in the meantime the film's narration, a strange, hallucinatory circle around the Institute for research into lice in Lwow, the only Polish academic institution the Nazis left open in Poland in the second world war, centring on Michal, the putative father of the young woman's son, Michal's family and the Resistance, circling back to what brought Michal, Marta and his parents to a supposedly safe place. It isn't safe, of course; Michal's mother, Marta and his son are soon killed by German cavalrymen. The film moves back to earlier betrayals and forward to the deaths of Michal, his family and most of the film's characters. We learn- and see- more of the feeding habits of lice than we ever knew before and than most of us would ever want to know and learn more of the resemblances between humans and lice. It might be Michal's fantasy as he suffers from typhus; it might be "reality"; whatever it is this is an astonishing and hallucinatory film. Early Polish films looked at the physical aspects of war; this is about the psychology of it and the psychological effects.

Surreal take on Nazi occupied Poland

[rbbdagge · 7/10 · 14 October 2017]

The film jumps between time-lines and characters in a somewhat confusing manner with dead figures re-appearing throughout the film, so trying to give a detailed story-line is somewhat pointless. The dialogue is extreme and sometimes absurd, but that only adds to the atmosphere of a character being eaten by lice and perhaps in a fever. The lice thing is based on fact - Polish resistance fighters were happy to put themselves forward for scientific experimentation with lice (in an effort to eradicate typhoid), as no German soldiers would go near them if their cards said that they were involved in the programme. The lice in any case are a symbol of war - people sucking the blood out of each other etc. A chaotic and incoherent film, but amazing first-time direction from Zuwavski. It is all filmed in hand-held camera (usual stuff now, but extremely unusual back in the early 70's), so there is a lot of movement. The film was made in Krakow and the city looks nothing like is now - an empty desolate filthy city of dilapidated grey building. Very Kafka-esque indeed, with stark bleak colours. I liked the film for atmosphere and cinematics, but many will not if they concentrate on the story and often somewhat obscure dialogue.The film was a big thing when it came out in Poland with huge queues to see it by the public - it has lost its relevance today and looks VERY dated (ie. as does all Polish 1970s cinema), but is still an interesting view.

Death and schizophrenia

[raul-4 · 10/10 · 14 January 2004]

Having seen two other movies by Zulawski, that forgotten artist, I'm starting to distinguish a style, some themes and his conception of human emotions. He doesn't care to develop a clear story, he has a way of surprising us continually through the exploitation of the characters which cover all the range of emotions. He can take any human and expose them to supernatural occurrences until they goes mad; they live in a constant nightmare. His actors occasionally go in a real trance and purge themselves of all emotions, crying and laughing simultaneously. It seems as if he is dissecting humans and beneath all that flesh and terror there lies a spirit, alone and in darkness.

Near the end someone cites the Apocalypse, and goes something like this: and then they will search for death and they won't find it. And that seems as the center point to the movies I've seen. In a way you can say he believes in an eternal return of the soul, but what he longs for is tranquility in death and so life to him is just a terrible passing, and so it is occasionally for many.

About the movie, well, it can be mistaken for some supernatural horror flick, some will be repelled by the style others will embrace it. But to me his movies are more of the overall experience and the way they linger in our subconscious as an infernal palace which we try to discredit and judge unreal, but which we inhabit.

Life at the bottom of a chasm

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 10/10 · 5 July 2009]

The Third part of the night is set in Poland during the second world war, which, as you will probably know, was infested by the plague of Nazism, and latterly equipollent Communism. The film starts with a quotation from Revelations Chapter VIII, which delineates the havoc that will be wreaked upon the earth when the Big Guy decides it's time to wrap everything up. There are seven trumpets being blown, the first four we are told about, and they wreak chaotic damage to earth, generally in thirds: a third of the rivers are turned to wormwood, one third of ships destroyed... Anyway the fourth trumpet makes it so that for a third part of the night the moon and stars will not shine, so that's basically what the German occupation of Poland is, the Third Part of the Night.

Most of the film is set in the city of Lwow, which was then part of Poland, but now has been made part of Ukraine and is called Lviv. That was Joe Stalin's doing, part of his Polish Holocaust.

The film starts though in the countryside with a violent act that is a quotation of the violence at the start of Menilmontant if I have seen things correctly. Michal the main character, a ghost-faced unibrowed typhus sufferer loses his family and returns to Lwow, where he attempts to become part of the resistance. It turns out that the resistance centers around a research institute. The folks there exist to feed lice. The way it works is that you put a strap around your bare leg and slot in these matchbox size containers full of lice that feed from your blood through a wire mesh. These lice are used to breed typhus, and the vaccine is then prepared from their guts. One guy gets home from work, strips naked and starts scratching himself and whimpering. Not the most pleasant scene. Involving yourself in this process gave you great papers though, because the Germans took one look at your papers, and were then scared of catching typhus from you and so left you well alone.

After losing his wife, Michal comes across a woman who looks exactly like her (a plot device Zulawski also uses in La Femme Publique). It's not clear why this device is used, but it could be a misogynist motif, ie. he's incapable of seeing the woman for who she is, he may also be having a traumatic hallucination, which would mean that there is a woman but she doesn't look like his wife. This *hallucination* of a movie is mainly anchored around this plot, providing some sort of bearing for the viewer.

You won't see a normal moment in the entire movie, everything is topsy turvy, every scene is either in a shattered building, or of a normal building full of shattered people. It's a nightmarish movie, like a dance of death. Dance is an appropriate word because the film uses hand-held camera a lot (though Zulawski in an interview has stated that the cameraman he found had a very steady hand, and he was obviously proud to find him), and the shot dances around, with some circular shots, zooms you never see coming, really it's very alive.

What really is the Zulawski strength though is directing actors, he managed to coax scenes of incredible intensity out of Malgorzata Braunek (as Michal's wife) and Jerzy Golinski (Michal's father). I've seen almost nothing like it, though another Polish film springs to mind, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Mother Joan of the Angels. The actors handed themselves over to Zulawski, giving them his complete trust, Braunek in particular in one scene at the institute connected with some deep innermost primal emotions.

The cellar shots at the institute are the bleakest shots you're likely to see in cinema, and remind me only of paintings, and bizarrely of the shots of test chambers in Alien 4.

The only big stumbling block for most people I believe would be the music, which is very out-of-place jazz (three quarters of the way between mellifluence and dissonance), and has taken me a while to get used to.

Amazing cinematic velocity

[fred-83 · 7/10 · 4 August 2007]

Just watched the excellent Second Run DVD release of this film, and I was not disappointed. He must be one of the most underrated directors alive at the moment. In each of his movies (I have only seen two others) he manages to create an amazing cinematic velocity, you are not sure about the meaning and of the plot twists, but you are defenseless against the intensity of the camera-work, editing, performances and staging. He uses film in the way I usually find most interesting, to convey dream states and give fragmented views into other worlds, in that sense he is like Bergman when he was at his best. I can't help comparing the two since Bergmans recent passing and my seeing this film happened almost simultaneously...Watching this film is like experiencing someones nightmare, based in a gritty reality but at the same time far removed from it, and also managing to convey political issues in a non-realistic way. Which is the way I prefer, not ramming it down the audiences throats, but keeping it in the subtext for you to explore if you want.

I have watched into the void and it's filled with lice.

[MidoriFiore · 8/10 · 16 May 2016]

I have watched into the void and it's filled with lice. The Third Part of the Night has been described as many things, but HORROR is the one word that makes justice to it. The one thing mostly remotely like it are the Silent Hills games and Come and See. At first I could not tell that the film was set in WWII, but when it became apparent to me, the riddle of the film also became apparent. Most of the film is actually a rather straightforward film, but the way the events are realized it becomes a surreal vision of the end of the world. I have trouble describing it other than a disturbing nightmare about the end of time. A furious debut of a filmmaker, possessed by the Gods of film, who summon a town beyond space, time and hope.

"Putting your hands in the vortex"

[chaos-rampant · 24 November 2015]

I don't like to treat movies as simply fictions to pass the night, that way lies the habit of simply partaking of culture. The whole point is that we're roped in life by forces that have significance for us - and if film is to be a truthful reflection, it will devise ways to portray this pull, turn it into something we can see.

This is how I welcome Zulawski. It's not because of what he has to say or because themes might be important, here Polish life under Nazi horrors. Similarly I don't reject him because stories are muddled or the acting is hysteric. I welcome him because he can use the eye of the camera to rope forces that move us.

On the surface this is a glimpse of anguished life during WWII, but not the mock historical type that seeks to enshrine bygone events in pious ceremony. This is one that speaks very much about anxiety that haunts the soul now in this very life, rending the air with dread and confusion. Horror that is very much present and didn't go away with the war but still lingers. He would rail - more or less covertly - against a repressive Soviet regime in later films as well.

So he's angry with god that won't manifest, he shouts dejection at a broken state of things, everything he would become known for is already present here, fully formed as template. But no answer can be found in the mind that despairs and clamors and none would suffice to explain anything. No his power is that he can show these things truthfully for what they are, confusion as confusion, ignorance as ignorance. So of course the narrative becomes oblique, muddled, sense takes flight and we're left with fragments.

He's still striving to burst forth here, not yet channeling madness through the eye to alter how we see. That would come to him in due time. But everything you need to know about him you'll see in the very beginning of this first film.

A man's wife and child are taken from their house one day and murdered in the yard; evil that swoops over this world and wrecks lives. He joins the resistance and immediately people are chasing after him and shooting to kill him, agents of that evil.

So he hides in an apartment building and by a chance turn of fate, police arrest someone else in his place, someone with the same color of coat who was going up the stairs to a pregnant wife. In a stunning turn he helps the wife give birth, becoming the husband who was taken away.

Jancso and Tarkovsky were previous masters of the floating eye who could maintain equanimity in the face of horror and misfortune; he is ruptured by it, splintered in selves. But it's still the same deep roar from the engines of consciousness that propels him.

A film I can appreciate and almost admire, but not necessarily enjoy.

[exzanya · 6/10 · 11 August 2020]

A film which very much captures what a nightmare feels like; The film does a superb job of really immersing you into the moody and horrifying world and sends you on a confusing 'adventure' alongside Michal. It features some really amazing camera work, some of the best I have seen. But a lot of the religious and philosophical dialogue and themes just didn't click with me, and at times it can seem rather 'silly'. And the ending music seems almost insulting, like "look, we gotcha!" (Cue cool rock music)

A human mind's descension into madness

[yugesh-karnati · 8/10 · 30 January 2024]

Just give me a movie with the name 'Andrzej Zulawski' attached to it and I can bet my money that the movie is going to be a once in a life time experience for you! I can't believe that his very first full length feature film deals with subjects like 'Surrealism', 'Existentialism', 'Dopplegangers', 'Borderline Psychedelic', 'Allegories' etc., Without a doubt Zulawski is one of the greatest filmmaker's that ever walked the earth and I'm so honoured and glad that I get to see his works and admire them.

Like my in depth analysis on his movie 'Possession' I'm going to do the same with this and let you know my take on 'The Third Part of the Night'.

Plot: The movie starts with Helena (played by Malgorzata Braunek) reading from the book of Revelations to her husband Michal (played by Leszek Teleszynski), who's slowly gaining consciousness from being ill for the past six weeks and later upon the request of his wife goes out on a walk with his son Lukasz and his father, who's waiting outside the house refusing to meet his wife. While taking a walk and discussing with his father on his wife's behaviour on why she did what she did, his son, Lukasz strays away from him and runs towards his mother who's awaiting the impending apocalypse at the house. When Michal hears the gun shots, he runs towards his family but by that time it's already too late and his entire family gets slaughtered. Feeling devastated and guilty he decides to join the resistance with the help of one of his friends but at his first meeting the gestapo kills his go between man and starts chasing him. During his escape he hides at an apartment where coincidentally he see another man wearing the same trench coat and the police catches him thinking him to be the person that they were chasing. Michal stays silent during the period but the other person's wife(Marta) who's pregnant, not knowing what happened, tries to explain the gestapo but they just arrest him and take him away for questioning. Seeing this she gets into a panic attack and goes into labour and asks Michal who's standing at the sidelines while watching the whole incident, to help her with the delivery. Michal to his surprise notices that Marta is a doppelgänger of his dead wife Helena and starts to atone for his sins and his guilt for his dead family by helping Marta and her new born baby. In the process Michal succumbs to his own reality, reliving his past which is surreal, horrifying and borderline psychedelic. Let's delve into the mind of Michal and try to understand in detail why he sees what he sees and what exactly Zulawski is trying to convey us.

Doppelgängers: My understanding is that in reality there are no Doppelgängers in this movie. It's just Michal's mind playing tricks on him because of the horrifying event that happened at the start with his family. He sees his wife in Marta because of the guilt that he couldn't save his family and that he survived and he thinks that he got a second chance (to be precise, a 'miracle' in his own words) to take care of his family by employing himself in the development of vaccine for typhus by letting the lice feed on him.

Now the question arises why only Marta but why not in other women can Michal see his wife Helena? Like for example in 'Sister Kalra' or 'The Lice Breeder' etc., ?: To answer this, its because of the events that transcribed around Marta which duplicates his wife Helena's from the past. Zulawski has shown us those events in a non chronological order by showing us his past right after he encounters a similar event in his present. For example when he meets Marta for the first time and delivers her baby, he immediately recalls how he met Helena and the talk surrounding the birth of Lukasz, where Michal says he's not ready to be a father but only this time he wants the course of events to be changed by being ready when he claims the baby to be Marta's, her husband's and his. Similar events like how he became the 'lice-feeder' in his past upon Helena's request and how he turned out to be one in the present on his own will, how he replaced Helena's first husband and felt guilty about it and how he replaced Marta's in the present without any guilt, how Marta and her new born baby end up at the same attic where Michal had lived with Helena and Lukasz in the past while trying to hide from the gestapo, how Helena's first husband surrenders himself to the Germans and how his sister Klara does the same in the present etc., all these events tells us that Michal is reliving his past but only this time he's the one in the driver's seat trying to change the course of history, which he couldn't do in the end by succumbing to his own reality.

Metaphors surrounding Lice and other elements:

1. Concept of Lice: During my research I came to know that Zulawski's father, Miroslaw Zulawski used to work as lice feeder in the Typhus research institute during the World War II, so in a way he portrayed the sufferings of his own family during the World War II with the concept of Lice feeders and breeders. So people would take extreme measures to avoid getting into the van and going to concentration camps by getting themselves a permit as lice feeders though they dislike doing it and consider it to be a life degrading. Michal who is one of the feeders tries to create a vaccine by donating his infected blood which in a way he's trying to be human to his oppressors when they brought down chaos upon him. He suffers physically and psychologically the same way Helena's first husband did.

2. A Blind resistance by literally a blind leader.

3. Conversation with his father when he asks him what is more important ? "The things people sacrifice for each other or the things they share and want to save?" to which his father responds to by saying "To save? Nothing can be saved" and Michal trying to do both by sacrificing himself and saving Marta's husband in the end.

Ending: During the final sequence when Michal tries to save Marta's husband, he gets scared when he sees Helena's first husband in his place and tries to escape from the hospital only to find himself at a corner with a sheet covering the body on a stretcher and when he removes the sheet he finds the body to be himself and suddenly his reality starts to crumble taking us to his house in the country where the four horsemen awaits to unleash the apocalypse outside the house while Marta braids her hair similar to what Helena did at the beginning of the movie awaiting her death. I guess what Zulawski tried to explain us is that regardless of Michal's second attempt to save the family by changing the course of history he found himself at the same place where he did at the beginning of the movie, no matter what he did.

This is not your typical world war holocaust movie where we see soldiers killing hundreds of people and planes dropping bombs on cities etc., this is a movie where we see how a human mind descends into madness amongst the chaos surrounding him and Zulawski has picked one character named Michal, dissected his mind and showed his thoughts, now just multiply it with a million and look at the thoughts of each individual on how they've faced the surrealistic nature of the world around them amidst this chaos, the image itself is really a horrifying one!!

There can be n number of thoughts on the interpretation of different aspects of this movie especially the ending sequence because I'm not sure whether Michal's dead or not and if he is whether he's dead at his house in the country? Or at the hospital? And the director just portrayed us with his after thoughts while he slowly descents into limbo regardless of where is ?

Bizarre, hysterical, confronting, nightmarish

[Groverdox · 7/10 · 20 May 2016]

Andrzej Zulawski's first feature film, "The Third Part of the Night", is not as talky as his later films, but is just as impenetrable. It features a man whose family is murdered by Nazis at the beginning of the movie, who then runs away, helps deliver a baby in a graphic sequence, apparently poses (or actually becomes) an insurance salesman, haunts a hospital where he has strange talks with an obscure nurse, and ends up volunteering for a program where he is vaccinated against typhus and is munched on by lice to help doctors find a cure.

I really lost the plot after that, but the ending does have him finding himself, or a doppelganger, in a hospital bed.

We are used to dialogue to provide exposition and reveal aspects of character. The dialogue in this movie only confuses the watcher further. The movie feels rough and wild, with violence and ugliness and insanity coming out of nowhere. It was also revolutionary for its use of hand-held camera, putting you in this world, and making you feel even more disorientated.

This is not why I watch films...

[Coventry · 25 July 2022]

For only the second or third time in my IMDB "career", I'm submitting a user-comment that isn't accompanied by a rating. It's not a statement, it's simply because I honestly wouldn't know what rating I could give to "The Third Part of the Night". This obviously is a remarkable, hauntingly surreal, and intelligent debut feature (from the same man who would later make the even more confusing and incomprehensibly popular "Possession" in 1981) that made a severe impact on me. That would mean a high rating, but I honestly can't give a good score to a film that I literally had to struggle myself through from shortly after the start until the very end. This isn't why I watch films. I love strangeness, surrealism, experimental stuff, and shocking footage, but I always need a minimum of entertainment value and tangibleness. There's none of that, for sure.

The first 10-15 minutes promising a captivating albeit emotionally exhausting drama/thriller. A Polish man loses his wife and child following an attack of German soldiers, but he almost seems to get a "second chance" when he ends up in the flat of a woman in labor who looks exactly like his murdered wife. From there onwards, I admit, not a lot of things made any sense to me. Medical experiments with lice, a protagonist torn between preservation and self-sacrifice, and endless amounts of images & symbolism of horrible death. And you can't afford to revert your attention for even a second, because the film is extremely talkative, and I depended on the English subtitles as don't understand Polish. As I said already, exhausting.