Andrzej Zulawski’s Forbidden Fever Dreams

“Zulawski’s 1971 debut feature, The Third Part of the Night, shares a striking number of themes with the later Possession: both are riddled with doppelgangers and inexplicable events, set in grey stairwells and bleak apartments, and concerned with the absurdities and deceptions of love and faith in a bitterly divided society.”

The Polish director Andrzej Zulawski (1940 – 2016) is probably best known in the UK for his 1981 thriller Possession, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill. The film sparked both controversy and acclaim, winning Adjani a Best Actress award at Cannes but also ending up on the infamous ‘video nasties’ list in 1983. Sadly, most of Zulawski’s other films have been far less widely distributed, making Eureka’s 2023 Blu-ray boxset of his work a very welcome release.

The recent set comprises of the three films Zulawski made in Poland during the 1970s (although, thanks to circumstances which will be discussed in due course, two of them did not actually see the light of day until the late 1980s); presented on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK from new 4K restorations, with updated subtitles approved by the director before his passing. The transfers used for the works are stunning, with On the Silver Globe looking particularly dazzling.

The first is Zulawski’s 1971 debut feature, The Third Part of the Night. The story was inspired in part by the World War II experiences of his father, Miroslaw, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay. However, any notions of a standard wartime thriller are swiftly dispensed with as the hallucinatory tale sinks ever deeper into discombobulating mayhem and madness. It shares a striking number of themes with the later Possession: both are riddled with doppelgangers and inexplicable events, set in grey stairwells and bleak apartments, and concerned with the absurdities and deceptions of love and faith in a bitterly divided society.

Despite this, the plot’s most bizarre element is actually its most realistic, as apparently residents of Lviv really were employed as lice feeders during the Nazi occupation, giving their blood to the insects to help create typhus vaccines. If the film could be summed up by one image, it would be the close-up shots of the tiny cages of lice, glutted scarlet from their feeding – grotesque, yet possessed of a perverse beauty and fascination.

The 18th century setting of Zulawski’s next work, The Devil (1972), in no way impedes his characteristically frenzied approach. The past is shown to be brutal, earthy, and cruel – a far cry from the tepid quaintness that infects most British period dramas. Tonally, it exists somewhere between the somnambulant strangeness of Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976) and Ken Russell’s deliriously disturbing The Devils (1971). The story opens with a jaw-dropping sequence as troops storm a convent which has been converted into a makeshift infirmary and jail. From there, it spirals out into a series of oblique encounters, bloody murders, incest, and betrayal, all slyly instigated by a snivelling Satan called The Stranger (Wojciech Pszoniak).

The film is by turns exhilarating, horrifying, obscure, and exhausting, but always packs an uncomfortably powerful punch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it drew the wrath of both the church and the communist government, and it was consequently banned in Poland until 1987. Officially, this was due to its sex and violence, but it was almost certainly also restricted because of the implicit parallels it draws between the violent political divisions of the 1790s and the contemporary repressions of life behind the Iron Curtain.

The final film in the set is the remarkable On the Silver Globe. A wildly ambitious science-fiction epic based on The Lunar Trilogy by the director’s great uncle Jerzy Zulawski, the majority of the production dates from 1975-77. Unfortunately, the film once again angered the government, who this time shut it down before it was even completed, leaving approximately a fifth of the intended story unfilmed. The surviving footage was eventually reconstructed with narration from Andrzej Zulawski himself bridging the gaps in the narrative, finally receiving a cinematic release in 1988.

While the director’s voice-over describes the salvaged work as a “shred of a film,” it remains bewitching, bewildering, and brilliant, with its incompleteness only adding a further layer of fascination. Simply put, it is astonishing – a vibrant and genuinely otherworldly visual feast that looks and sounds like nothing else. While its tale of humans colonising a new planet is ultimately bleak, it is never anything less than thrilling to watch, burning itself into the retina despite its unavoidably fragmented nature.

All three films feature astoundingly kinetic cinematography, courtesy of Witold Sobocinski, Maciej Kijowski, and Andrzej Jaroszewicz respectively. The casts are universally superb, hurling themselves into their parts with an intensity that may leave sensitive viewers worried for the wellbeing of the performers. The scores by Andrzej Korzynski also deserve a mention, moving from incongruous electric guitars and percussion in The Third Part of the Night and The Devil to full-on electronics for On the Silver Globe, culminating in the surging synth theme that brings the latter to an unexpectedly anthemic close.