No other filmmaker fuses hysteria and contemplation like Andrzej Zulawski. The director is most often represented by his 1981 film “Possession,” an emotionally fraught breakup movie in which a tentacled monster is part of a love triangle. That film has recently enjoyed a critical upswing after years as a cult favorite. He made only twelve features between 1971 and 2000, but those movies are remarkably consistent explorations of a core set of ideas about love, honestly and responsibility, the interrelated nature of personal and political lives, and the many transcendent and often terrifying ways in which emotions burst through any barrier as lives collide.
WATCH: New Trailer For ‘Cosmos,’ Andrzej Zulawski’s First Film In 15 Years
Just hours after the announcement that “Cosmos,” his thirteenth feature and his first in fifteen years, had secured U.S. distribution, Andrzej Zulawski died due to a battle with cancer. He was 75. What was briefly a reason to celebrate the director’s return to the screen is now a chance to look back at an uncompromising and adventurous career. Zulawski once said, “I don’t make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.” Unlike many artists who proclaim their iconoclasm, Zulawski’s films demonstrate not just a willingness but a fierce, even perverse determination to stay his own personal course.
His explore the nature of subjugation and submission, the relationship between cruelty and love, and the explosive schisms between desire and morality. Characters caught up in Zulawski’s machinations often succumb to paroxysms of movement and screaming, as if the emotions driving them are too overwhelming for a physical body to contain. Asked to explain a difficult question, a slightly Satanic character in Zulawski’s second film, “The Devil,” proclaims that he can only describe it through dance before launching into a smiling whirl of flailing limbs and flapping cloak. The main character played by Isabelle Adjani in “Possession” is so consumed by her passions that she flails and contorts in ways that seem nearly inhuman. She’s the primal scream personified.
With such a contained cinematic career (Zulawski was also an accomplished novelist) one could say that nearly every film he made is essential. We’ve chosen to highlight five in particular.
“The Third Part of the Night” (1971)
Rarely does a debut film represent the arrival of an artist with sensibilities so fully formed. In Zulawski’s first feature, set during World War II, a Polish man, Michal (Leszek Teleszyński), sees his wife, mother, and son killed by occupying Germans. He joins the resistance and soon finds himself caring for a woman (Malgorzata Braunek) who looks exactly like his wife just as the woman is about to give birth. Michel’s story is bookended by recitations from the Book of Revelation; in between, he wrestles with his relationship to his father, his place in occupied Polish society, and his duties images of family. This is no typical war movie, but rather a dreamscape of anxieties and memories, where past experience is likely to be recalled through the sort of dimly-suggested narrative ellipses found nested in Thomas Pynchon‘s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” What appears to be the strangest part of the film — Michal earns a living by strapping boxes of lice to his legs so the bugs may feed on his blood — is actually its most realistic. Lice were key to the first major typhus vaccine, developed by a Polish doctor bankrolled by the Reich in a facility that became a haven for repressed intellectuals. Language about Michel’s human family tends to blur together with reference to the lice he feeds and eventually dissects, adding to the frequently hazy delineation between reality and imagination. Death comes quickly and unexpectedly as the Gestapo patrols the city, and viewers get to ponder the weight and “reality” of each final moment just as Michael does.
“The Devil” (1972)
The director’s second film was his first to be banned in Poland, an experience that led him to France for some future endeavors. “The Devil” wraps an allegory for Poland’s 1968 political crisis in the story of Prussian invasion of Poland during the 1790s, but officials saw right through any attempt to bury the lede. Indeed, “The Devil” must be the director’s most overt political statement. Yet Zulawski, not being content to explore just one idea, also layers in his concerns about family, love, and responsibility. The film opens as dissident Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski) is freed from prison by a mysterious figure (Wiktor Sadecki) who guides Jakub on a tour to visit the now-dissolute remnants of his family. Jakub’s former fiancé has given him up for a rich political shapeshifter, and that’s only the first in a string of increasingly devastating encounters with his mother, father, and sister, all engineered by the strange man who, like a perverted Virgil to Jakub’s Dante, guides him through a personal hell. Soon, young Jakub begins to snap and great violence ensues. The director’s roving camera and his pattern of setting the most abstract concepts in very practical locations, both factors in his debut, are put to great use as Zulawski roves the countryside with the strange duo and their captive nun.