The Third Part of the Night (Trzecia czesc nocy) Poland 1971, 105 min
With Malgorzata Braunek, Leszek Teleszynski, Jan Nowicki.

Inspired by his Father, Miroslaw Zulawski's experience during WWII of volunteering to feed lice with his own blood for the Nazis developing the vaccine for typhus, The Third Part of the Night depicts a world without a God in which a young man (Teleszynski) experiences fevered hallucinations after his wife (Malgorzata Braunek) and son have been killed. A haunting first feature (Time Out London).

The Devil (Diabel) Poland 1972, 119 min
With Wojciech Pszoniak, Leszek Teleszynski.

One of Zulawski's essential works, his violent film, The Devil, takes on the tradition of Polish Romanticism to show how nobleman Jakub (Teleszynski) goes on a killing rampage when possessed by the Devil (a Prussian spy/agitator)  in 18th-century Poland, where everyone in his family is deprived and in the state of chaos.

That Most Important Thing: Love (L'important c'est d'aimer) France 1975, 109 min
With Romy Schneider, Fabio Testi, Jacques Dutronc.

Struggling B-movie actress Nadine (a disarmingly raw Schneider) draws the attention of porn photographer Servais (Testi), who attempts to give her career a shot in the arm by arranging a starring role for her in a postmodern production of Richard III opposite crazed homosexual Klaus Kinski - incurring the jealousy of her cinephile husband (singer Dutronc). In his adaptation of Christopher Frank's novel Day for Night (La nuit américaine, no relation to Truffaut's film of the same title) the connection between the lovers is like a gem shining from the bottom of a gutter.

On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie) Poland 1976/1988, 166 min
With Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Iwona Bielska.

Zulawsk's epic, based on the Moon Trilogy by his uncle Jerzy Zulawski, was begun in the mid-1970s and was nearly complete when the Polish government suddenly shut down production. A decade later the director was able to piece together the surviving footage with narration to complete this mythical science fiction tale about the First Parents and a Messiah who must be sacrificed.

Possession France/Germany 1981, 127 min
With Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill.

Featuring what is arguably the bravest female performance ever put on film - namely, Isabelle Adjani's Cannes-winning turn of shamanistic intensity - the film dares its viewer to enter a trance-like state, in which genres blur and mate to yield a new level of cinematic expression. [...] There's no mistaking the fact that deep inside, Zulawski's cinema is all about searching for grace. (Michal Oleszczyk, Chicago Sun-Times).
In this thriller about a marital breakup set in the strange anxiety of Berlin divided by the Wall, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill) escalate from public screaming matches to sudden acts of violence and horror.

La femme publique (The Public Woman) France 1984, 113 min
With Valérie Kaprisky, Francis Huster, Lambert Wilson.

An aspiring actress (Kaprisky) takes on the lead role in a film adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, helmed by a maniacal director (Huster) who subjects her to a punishing regimen of psychic and sexual domination.
Set up as the story of a woman's journey of self-discovery, but since the director is Zulawski, that trip involves sequences where spontaneous brawls erupt in cafes and the losers are thrown out of plate-glass windows, bombs go off in the streets, the director and his starlet consummate their love after narrowly escaping wafts of tear gas and rioting in the streets, and frustration is expressed through smashing plates against the wall, food fights, and chewing on broken glass. Jeremiah Kipp, Slant Magazine.
Yet another take on a man's desperate yearning for love and the Absolute.

L'amour braque (Mad Love) France 1985, 105 min
With Sophie Marceau, Francis Huster.

Andrzej Zulawski once said that he is more grateful to Sam Peckinpah than to Ingmar Bergman. And so his adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot is like an energetic action film about revenge and passionate love. A Daffy Duck-masked gunman and his cohorts charge a bank, positively giddy with animalistic glee--an opening that sets the tone for this operatically violent, careening joyride of a movie. The Holy Fool, Léo (Huster) is swept up in a weird and depraved world of hooliganism and random violence while pursuing kinky-hysterical Mary (Zulawski's muse, Marceau), who is masochistically obsessed with bedding her mother's lovers.

My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days (Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours) France 1989, 100 min
With Sophie Marceau, Jacques Dutronc.

A genius computer programmer, Lucas (Dutronc), with a brain tumor has an affair with a beautiful showgirl and fake psychic (Marceau) who performs in a bizarre nightclub act and suffers abuse from her gay husband. A complex exploration of the frightening and all-consuming nature of love.

Boris Godounov France, Yugoslavia, Spain 1989, 115 min
With Ruggero Raimondi.

Zulawski's unorthodox staging of Modest Mussorgsky's proto-Modernist Russian opera masterpiece chronicles the reign of the brutal 16th-century tsar (Raimondi, bass)- from his coronation through his brief but tumultuous tenure marked by political intrigue, backstabbing, and assassinations. With a cinematic dynamism via his endlessly roving kino-eye, Zulawski amps up the work's politics in rich theatrical settings. A project taken over from the dying Andrei Tarkovsky, proves that where the Russian master would have sought spirituality, Zulawski found the body and a contemporary metaphor on the pain inflicted onto the people by their ruling despotic psychopaths (Piotr Kletowski).  

La note bleue (Blue Note) France, Germany 1991, 135 min
With Janusz Olejniczak, Marie-France Pisier, Sophie Marceau.

In 1846 fragile Fryderyk Chopin spends his holiday in the country (Nohant)- in the company of such artistic luminaries as painter Eugene Delacroix and Russian writer Ivan Turgenev- where he rather awkwardly finds himself the object of Solange Sand's (the daughter of his lover, George) romantic advances. With sumptuous period costume and sets and the ethereal music of Chopin floating dreamily in and out, this is Zulawski's lightest and most conventionally beautiful - though by no means conventional - film.

Szamanka (The Shaman) Poland 1996, 100 min
With Iwona Petry, Boguslaw Linda.

Anthropology professor Michal (Linda) meets a nameless student (Petry), ostensibly a pizza maker extraordinaire referred to simply as the Italian. His escalating obsession with the feral young woman is matched only by his fascination with the body of a perfectly preserved 3,000-year-old shaman. Audacious, mystical, transgressive and sexually explicit enough to rival Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, The Shaman culminates in an apocalyptic disturbing finale.

La fidélité (Fidelity) France 2000, 165 min
With Sophie Marceau, Pascal Greggory, Guillaume Canet.

Photographer Cielia's (Marceau) artsy shots incur the ire of her tabloid editor, as she struggles to remain faithful to her husband in the face of an overpowering attraction to another man. Zulawski's take on the 17th-century novel La Princesse de Clèves is relatively restrained and hopeful. A showstopping performance by Marceau matches the operatic-grandeur of Isabelle Adjani in Possession and Romy Schneider in That Most Important Thing: Love.

SHORTS:

Pavoncello Poland 1967, 29 min
With Joanna Kasperska, Stefan Friedmann.
In 1912 a sick old man takes his  flirtatious wife to Italy in the hopes that she might give him an heir-and young violinist Pavoncello is only too happy to offer his services. Zulawski's debut short is inspired by a story by Polish writer, Stefan Zeromski.

The Song of Triumphant Love (Piesn trumfujacej milosci) Poland 1969, 29 min
With Beata Tyszkiewicz, Piotr Wysocki.
Based on a Turgenev story, this macabre romance details an all-consuming passion that transcends the material realm - a conceit Zulawski would take to new extremes nearly a decade later in Possession. The director's first TV feature which opened the door for The Third Part of the Night.