During the Second World War the Weigl Institute, led by Polish biologist Rudolf Weigl, employed Poles, including Jews, resistance fighters and intellectuals, using their blood to produce vaccine for epidemic typhus. This involved injecting lice with human blood and infecting the lice with epidemic typhus.
Writer-director Andrzej Żuławski used father Miroslaw’s stories of the Institute for Trzecią część nocy and drew upon Roman Polanski’s filmmaking style.
Protagonist Michal emerges from a coma and is surprised to find himself at home; his wife Helena’s coldness further suggests that the couple is estranged. Michal goes for a walk, taking their young son at Helena’s (it will shortly seem prescient) suggestion, but the boy departs, (it will shortly seem presciently) returning to the house, where four German horsemen of the Nazi apocalypse, one of whom rides right into the house, slaughters mother and son, along with another family member, as witnessed by a rushing-back Michal, who thus finds himself in a waking nightmare. Now working for the Underground (more vengefully perhaps than out of political conviction), just as suddenly Michal is chased by the police, who kill someone else in his place, bringing him to help deliver the murdered man’s infant (in stunning closeup on the delivery—a smuggled-in bit of documentary), triggering precise, material flashes of Michal’s wife and newborn son: fractured resurrections. Indeed, Michal’s consciousness hangs betwixt Christian hope and Nazi horror, and flights up and down flights of stairs underscore the confused nature of a dream correlative to German echoes in Żuławski’s own Communist day.
The film is grisly, exact, yet full of dreamlike shifts—and a discombobulating low, upwardly tilted camera. The final image of blood-ravenous lice clarifies the extent to which Michal’s existence (like ours) is contaminated by the past.
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THE THIRD PART OF NIGHT (Andrzej Żuławski, 1971)
By grunesDuring the Second World War the Weigl Institute, led by Polish biologist Rudolf Weigl, employed Poles, including Jews, resistance fighters and intellectuals, using their blood to produce vaccine for epidemic typhus. This involved injecting lice with human blood and infecting the lice with epidemic typhus.
Writer-director Andrzej Żuławski used father Miroslaw’s stories of the Institute for Trzecią część nocy and drew upon Roman Polanski’s filmmaking style.
Protagonist Michal emerges from a coma and is surprised to find himself at home; his wife Helena’s coldness further suggests that the couple is estranged. Michal goes for a walk, taking their young son at Helena’s (it will shortly seem prescient) suggestion, but the boy departs, (it will shortly seem presciently) returning to the house, where four German horsemen of the Nazi apocalypse, one of whom rides right into the house, slaughters mother and son, along with another family member, as witnessed by a rushing-back Michal, who thus finds himself in a waking nightmare. Now working for the Underground (more vengefully perhaps than out of political conviction), just as suddenly Michal is chased by the police, who kill someone else in his place, bringing him to help deliver the murdered man’s infant (in stunning closeup on the delivery—a smuggled-in bit of documentary), triggering precise, material flashes of Michal’s wife and newborn son: fractured resurrections. Indeed, Michal’s consciousness hangs betwixt Christian hope and Nazi horror, and flights up and down flights of stairs underscore the confused nature of a dream correlative to German echoes in Żuławski’s own Communist day.
The film is grisly, exact, yet full of dreamlike shifts—and a discombobulating low, upwardly tilted camera. The final image of blood-ravenous lice clarifies the extent to which Michal’s existence (like ours) is contaminated by the past.
Tags: east european cinema
This entry was posted on July 16, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.