Images courtesy of http://www.andrzej-zulawski.comPolart has just released On The Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie), a brilliant and frightening Polish science-fiction film whose fractured plot of a society displaced and degraded ironically reflects the film's aborted place in cinema history. When the film's backers floundered and the Polish Ministry of Culture closed production in 1978, it was not until the fall of Communism in 1986 that director Andrzej Zulawski completed his film. He bridged unfinished scenes with narration and utterly mismatched footage that does not jar the story- amazingly, it succeeds in connecting the film's themes to the present as well as the future.
Although On The Silver Globe is one of Zulawski's first films as director, its style and themes have echoed through his career: wildly-pitched performances, thrashing physical confrontations and crazed close-ups alternating with wide-angle depths of action can also be seen in his best known film, 1981's Possession. Possession won Isabelle Adjani a best actress award at Cannes but also allegedly pushed the actress to attempt suicide, due in part to her role's intensity.
Opening with a spaceship from Earth crashing on a planet's surface, the film's themes of death and displacement echo until its final frames. As the ship's three survivors begin to populate the desolate landscape, their descendants devolve into ragtag, brutal tribes. Generations later, the arrival of an emmisary from Earth is hailed as the return of a long-awaited messiah...but we all know what happens to messiahs.
This movie is not for the faint hearted. Some viewers may find it the cinematic equivalent of having a cheese grater rubbed against your face for two and a half hours. If you can bear its extremes of beauty and brutality, you'll see a futuristic, funhouse mirror of the everyday brutality that exists all around us.
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