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Description:
This 3 disc DVD box set contains:
THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT (1971)
Original title: Trzecia Część Nocy
This highly influential award-winning film, set during the time of the Nazi occupation of Poland, is rich with multilayered apocalyptic imagery and symbolism. Even though the film won an award for best debut in Poland, distribution was halted there by the authorities, and the director was viewed with suspicion. His next film, Diabel was kept from release for 12 years, until 1988. The film begins as a young man narrowly escapes the massacre in which his family is annihilated. He makes his way into town where he is nearly captured, but another man wearing clothes similar to his own is taken in his stead. After taking refuge in the home of a pregnant young woman who closely resembles his dead wife, he helps her with the birth of her child. While working in a typhus center, as someone who is repeatedly infected with the disease in order to produce vaccines for others, he experiences many hallucinations and does some bizarre things while seeking to come to grips with his traumatic life and the guilt he feels for being alive when all who knew him are dead.
THE DEVIL (1972)
Original title: Diabel
Though presumably dealing with the Prussian army's invasion of Poland in 1793, this ambitious and highly allegorical drama probably seemed too contemporary to Polish censorship back in 1972 , thus didn't get released until 1988. Young Polish nobleman Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski) is saved from imprisonment by a stranger. In return, the stranger wants to obtain a list of Jakub's fellow conspirators. As he follows his mysterious savior across the country, Jakub is affected by the overall chaos and moral corruption; he goes insane and becomes a mass murderer.
ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988)
Original title: Na Srebrnym Globie
The labyrinthine plot deals with a group of space researchers who left the Earth to find freedom. Their spaceship crashes and they land on the dark side of the Moon. They all die except one and leave a lot of children who eventually turn to shamanism and fire worship. They call the last survivor the Old Man and simultaneously loathe and revere him. Finally, the Old Man retreats to the mountains, puts his video diary into a small rocket and sends it to Earth. The rocket reaches its destination and the notes fall into the hands of another group of researchers. One of them, Marek, journeys to the Old Man's planet and lands in the mountains. When he emerges from the hills, the aboriginal inhabitants mistake him for the long-awaited reincarnation of the Old Man and look to him to deliver them from the dreaded sherns - strange, winged mutants. The making of this film in 1978 was brutally interrupted by the Polish Ministry of Culture. When about 80% of the shooting was complete, they ordered the filmmakers to destroy all related materials. This decision caused director Andrzej Zulawski to leave his homeland for France, where he spent the next ten years. During the democratization of the Polish political regime in 1986-1987, Zulawski returned to the country to finish the picture. Having lost the sets, costumes, actors, and momentum, the director chose to complete the film from the spared footage, adding a voiceover for the missing episodes and utilizing other actors to dub the original actors who were no longer available. Even in this mutilated form, the film appears as a highly ambitious, if overwrought, sci-fi epic that draws upon philosophical concepts rather than special effects.
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