Mr. Zulawski's best-known film stateside, "Possession" (1981), with an award-winning, explosive performance by Isabelle Adjani, drew on the trauma of his own divorce.
In the late 1980s, Mr. Zulawski intercut the surviving footage with narration describing the missing sections that plays over scenes of contemporary Poland, resulting in an eerie amalgam of wildly uninhibited storytelling and reminders of its personal cost.