“War Beading up into a Red Dot”: Autobiographical Discourse in Andrzej Żuławski’s “The Third Part of the Night”

Abstract

The author is mainly interested in the chosen aspect of autobiographic dispute, namely a film autobiographism understood as a defined communication attitude of the film author and the audience reaction generated by it. In this paper Maszewska-Łupiniak discusses autobiographism included in the fictional film narration of The Third Part of the Night by Andrzej Żuławski. His film, presenting a part of a family history, matches the autobiographic dispute. As a text about Holocaust, it creates a universal message – the duality in the film structure makes us think about the relations between a creator and his work, between the ethical conditions of that relation. All that is reflected in the style and poetics of the film, which, in turn, makes the receiver of the story adopt a distant attitude. [originally published in Polish in Kwartalnik Filmowy 2011, no. 73, pp. 163-174]

Keywords

• Andrzej Żuławski
• autobiography
• Holocaust