completed using new scenes !

I would love to see Andrzej Zulawski complete Na srebrnym globie (1987) using new scenes mixed in with the old footage.

The film itself is a masterpiece, even without a completed sequence.

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.

~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide





Here's something interesting: an unfinished Polish science fiction film from the seventies that seems to have become a horror movie by default. It was apparently intended as an otherworldly epic a la DUNE, but many pivotal scenes were never shot. What remains definitely does't work as sci fi, but excels as a dark, hallucinatory depiction of violence and madness, proving that a failed project can sometimes be more interesting than a successful one.





The Package
The director of this 160-minute oddity was Poland's Andrzej Zulawski, whose earlier DIABEL was banned by Polish authorities for over 15 years. THE SILVER GLOBE (NA SREBRNYM GLOBIE), based upon a three volume early 20th Century tome written by the filmmaker's great-uncle Jerzy Zulawski (and which has, incidentally, been translated into every language but English), had an even more torturous history. In 1978 Polish authorities halted its production before filming was completed, ostensibly due to budget overruns. It wasn't until eight years later that Zulawski, encouraged by crewmembers, finally pieced together the footage, with hasty voice-over narration to fill in the missing scenes.

Critics weren't kind to THE SILVER GLOBE upon its eventual 1987 release, while Zulawski dubbed it a "broken thing" and subsequently distanced himself from it. It's an unsatisfying film, certainly, but also a fascinating and utterly unique experience. There's no question that Zulawski and his collaborators have created some extraordinary imagery-we can only wonder what might have resulted if they'd been allowed to finish shooting!

The Story
Much of the narrative was flattened by the truncated production, as were many of the philosophical issues Zulawski intended to explore, but I was able to appreciate what he was after: a thoughtful, complex spectacle with a scope and ambition that remain unrivaled, or would have, at least, had the film been fully realized.

Three astronauts, two men and one woman, decide to leave the Earth and start a new civilization. Landing their spaceship on a desolate planet not unlike ours, they set to work reproducing and end up with a bevy of offspring who grow into a band of fire-worshipping pagans. These folks, who look like extras from THE ROAD WARRIOR, take to worshipping the single surviving astronaut, whom they dub The Old Man, as a God. He in turn gives them a number of rules to live by and then promptly disappears.

Back on Earth, Marek, a lovesick scientist who's just been dumped by his GF, is looking to find out what happened to the original three space-nuts and travels to the planet himself--a sequence, BTW, that is related entirely via voice-over narration over a lengthy shot of folks ascending an escalator(?). Upon arriving, he finds that its nomadic inhabitants have grown into divergent bands enslaved by mutant birdmen. The nomads take Marek for the reincarnation of The Old Man, and treat him as a God. He leads them into war against the birdmen, but this false messiah's subjects eventually grow disenchanted and end up crucifying him on a beach.


The Direction
As with other Zulawski opuses like POSSESSION, LA FEMME PUBLIQUE and SZAMANKA, the filmmaking is frenzied and psychotic, with spastic camerawork, distorted lenses and hysterical acting combining with bleak, colorless coastal locations to convey a vivid atmosphere of moral disintegration. Come to think of it, this film's concerns are similar to those of DIABEL, Zulawski's previous movie made in his native Poland (in between he helmed the French drama THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGáLOVE). That film portrayed a land succumbing to anarchy, while in this one it's an entire world paralyzed by enroaching madness.

Zulawski includes plenty of unflinching gore and sex; standard sci fi-movie hardware and special effects are conspicuously absent (casualties of the aborted shoot) and the earthbound sequences are severely limited, leaving us with a bloody and bizarre drama of brute survival in a primitive landscape. The costumes and production design are impeccable, ensuring that, if nothing else, THE SILVER GLOBE is a visual stunner. It also includes some of the most outlandish sights I've seen in any film, including a tribal ceremony that degenerates into a vast orgy, and an outrageous scene featuring dozens of people impaled atop incredibly tall spikes.

Vital Statistics
THE SILVER GLOBE (NA SREBRNYM GLOBIE)
Zespol Filmowy Pryzmat/Studio Filmowe Kadr
Director: Andrzej Zulawski
Producers: Jan Wlodarczyk, Ryszard Barski (1976-78), Tadeusz Lampka (1986-87)
Screenplay: Andrzej Zulawski
(Based on "The Moon Trilogy" by Jerzy Zulawski)
Cinematographer: Andrzej Jaroszewicz
Editor: Krysztof Osiecki
Cast: Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Iwona Bielska, Jerzy Gralek, Elzbieta Karkoszka, Krystyna Janda, Andrzej Lubicz-Piotrowski, Jan Frycz, Wieslaw Komasa



"On the Silver Globe,"
By Michael Atkinson


[ Andrzej Zulawski's "On the Silver Globe," Polart, 1987]

What we talk about when we talk about "lost film" pertains, more often than not, to celluloid allowed to decay into nitrate goo, usually at the hands of neglectful businesses who saw little reason to preserve films once they'd had their theatrical run. But Andrzej Zulawski's "On the Silver Globe" (1987) is another kind of lost altogether — a berserk, one-of-a-kind science fiction epic, conceived and fashioned by Europe's most notorious hyperbolist, the production of which was halted and destroyed in 1978 by the censors in Poland, who probably didn't know what in the name of a pagan god to make out of Zulawski's outlandish, gory, screaming-mimi footage, but saw clearly that it wasn't what the Politburo had in mind when it came to Communist culture. Zulawski expatriated to France in a depressed rage; after he returned to a democratized Poland in 1986, he was convinced by Film Polski and the loyal cast and crew to assemble the film anyway, shooting new footage, recording narration to fill in the story gaps, etc., for a kind of honorary screening at Cannes. After that, "On the Silver Globe" vanished — Zulawski did not want it publicly shown, and it quickly became one of the most hankered-after unseen films of the modern age.

In fact, when I wrote about Zulawski and "On the Silver Globe" for Film Comment five years ago (I'd seen a bootleg), I labeled the film (and I promise, this will exhaust my self-quotation rights for the next decade), "one of cinema's most appalling, breathtaking follies, and the most frightening art film you will never see." That is, until now — somehow, someone wrested it from Zulawski's embittered grasp, and here it is, sans explanation, on DVD. Newcomers to Zulawski's filmmaking might be discombobulated even if the film weren't a fragmentary cobble-job: the tone he doggedly attains, the manner in which he ratchets up his cast and camera, is as close to skull-splitting psychotic frenzy as movies have gotten. No actor reads lines realistically in a Zulawski film when he can howl them in maddened agony; no shot simply captures a landscape when it can scramble and catapult and race like a starving cheetah. "On the Silver Globe" is, of course, a special case (the only Zulawski film to ever get a theatrical release here was 1981's "Possession," a portrait of dissolving marriage that involved a Carlo Rambaldi monster and a measure of procreative-sexual unease that makes David Cronenberg look like Nora Ephron). The story is pulled from a famous series of Polish science fiction novels, the "Moon" trilogy, written by Zulawski's own granduncle, and here it is mostly told in narration over footage of contemporary Warsaw: A disastrous mission to the Moon (Zulawski used the Gobi desert and the shores of the Black Sea) spawns a primitive society that, a few generations down the road, hails an investigating cosmonaut as their messiah and warrior-king in the battle against a race of winged mutants.

But it's the primal, ghastly originality of Zulawski's Dantean visuals that brand the memory: armies of black-robed savages dancing through mysterious rituals on white-sanded beaches; the sea water in flames behind a slow-motion shore battle between moon-men and mutants; tribal dramas played out in what looks like a hand-carved cavern the size of a warehouse; cinema's most appalling crucifixion; a mob of heretical victims impaled — as in, Vlad-the-Impaler-impaled, through the rectum — on 25-foot, intestine-roped stakes on the same beach, captured by Zulawski in a crane shot that launches high enough to hear one of the poor bastards choke out a few last words of protest. "On the Silver Globe" is an unfinished thing; it's both difficult to say it's a successful film as it stands — that was certainly never Zulawski's intention — and to imagine what it might've amounted to, almost 30 years since its plug was pulled. But you're not likely to see anything remotely like it, ever.




"Without mercy, a man is not a human being." Sansho the Bailiff, 1954