“You’re here! There’s nothing. Nothing here!”
I hope you’re feeling generous. Generous enough, that is, to forgive what I sincerely believe to be judiciously applied hyperbole concerning On the Silver Globe, the recently-late Polish auteur Andrzej Zulawski’s lost-and-half-found, partially reconstituted, but necessarily incomplete masterpiece, begun in the mid-1970s, finally released (after a fashion) in 1987, but rarely seen and semi-secret ever since. Currently enjoying (at least I hope it’s enjoying) an extended moment of relatively profuse attention while touring the country in a superior new iteration, this curious, at times hysterical pageant arrives in Cambridge tonight, and screens an additional three times tomorrow. You probably shouldn’t miss it.
Probably, because, well, it isn’t for everybody. I want to emphasize the film’s utter uniqueness–A.O. Scott remarked in the New York Times that “[i]t … seems to arise from a parallel universe, a cinematic cosmos whose precise coordinates are hard to specify“–before nevertheless offering a few tentative signposts, precursors or distant cousins that may suggest the scale of Zulawski’s ambition, and the quality of strangeness sustained throughout his most infamous film.
So, list alert. If at least one of the following is of special significance to you, On the Silver Globe is a fairly sure bet to work your wonder-levers more dexterously than you’ve had them worked in a long time: Jodorowsky (El Topo), Kubrick (2001), Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Magma (Mekanik Destruktiw Komando), Wagner (The Ring cycle), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Tarkovsky (Stalker), Wojciech Has (The Hour-Glass Sanatorium). It may also click with admirers of the cryptically baroque spectacles produced by Jeunet and Caro or Terry Gilliam.
There are rumors that the sea did not part when you looked at it.
Like many of the above-cited works, On the Silver Globe lends itself equally to at least two extreme reactions, the first being dumbstruck awe and the second being a compulsive mania for exegesis and contextualization, between which the receptive viewer oscillates in abject fascination.
The plot, very loosely adapted from a trilogy of novels by the filmmaker’s great-uncle, Jerzy Zulawski–and even more loosely described in this slapdash paragraph–recounts (in dizzyingly nonlinear fashion) an ill-fated project of lunar colonialization, which founders when neither the moon’s bird-like natives nor the hybrids produced by their interbreeding with the first wave of humans prove receptive to colonial efforts to supplant religion with technology.
Objectively correlating physical scale and philosophical design, Zulawski’s 1970s footage was shot in locations ranging from the subterranean (the Wielickzasalt mines) to the sky-scraping (the Caucasus mountains), while the 1980s material–accompanied by the director’s own voiceover explaining and bewailing the film’s jury-rigged structure–depicts faceless Poles parading around a modern metropolis on their inexplicable yet probably predictable rounds, representing, perhaps, the provisional victory of disenchanted rationalism over religious tribalism. Poland would soon, of course, gain another chance to effect a better balance between the two–an effort now more precarious than ever after the ascendance of reactionary forces to political power.
The actor is the victory of ugliness over the beauty of the world.
You’ll want to see On the Silver Globe at the Brattle tonight (or tomorrow) even if you’ve seen the DVD, not only because it will mean seeing it on a screen much larger than the largest television you own, or even, if you’re running a projector, whatever wall or bed-sheet you spray its light on, but because, from all reports, the digital restoration making the rounds this year is a major achievement, much truer to Zulawski’s intent visually and accompanied by a more comprehensive and faithful set of English subtitles.
Those, anyway, are the reasons why I’ll be at the Brattle tonight (or tomorrow). Everything else I say about this most singular of visions–a film conceived by one of world cinema’s most singular filmmakers, terminated in medias res by Communist authorities in 1977 only to be reborn as a mutant half-breed a decade later, as the Iron Curtain parted and disintegrated–is based on the same DVD that you may have seen.
If the brain is not burnt, we’ll get the information, where it came from and why.
That On the Silver Globe should, both as a film as such and as a traveling, consumable experience, be marked by such continual reconstruction and re-presentation is almost too perfectly homologous with the film’s central theme, which I take to be a revision of the Marxist dialectic its science fiction scenario mocks and undermines.
In the world Zulawski depicts here, which is (surprise!) also our own, theses and antitheses only ever resolve into further contradictions, fresh antagonisms, never into a tonic synthesis. What is solid fails to melt into air, and any force–whether religious, political, or scientific–that imagines otherwise will come to rue its hubris.
Or perhaps what is air is always necessarily of the air, and there never was or will be anything solid anywhere. In any event, there is an embarrassment of wings involved. Wings and eyes, broken and otherwise.
On the Silver Globe
1988
Directed by Andrzej Zulawski
166 minutes
10/21 7:30pm
10/22 1:00pm, 4:30pm, 8:00pm
@Brattle Theatre
