Na srebrnym globie

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“The Ministry may have had various reasons for curtailing production, but it’s not inconceivable that someone there simply thought that another 40 minutes of this stuff might just have been too much for viewers’ sanity.”–Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

DIRECTED BY: Andrzej Zulawski

FEATURING: Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Iwona Bielska, Grażyna Dyląg, Waldemar Kownacki, Krystyna Janda

PLOT: Three astronauts are stranded on an Earthlike planet and populate it with their offspring over the years. Decades later, another astronaut, Marek, travels to the planet and is revered as a messiah who the people believe will lead them to victory over the birdlike Shern. Meanwhile, back on Earth, it is revealed that Marek was chosen for the mission by two scientist, one of whom was his girlfriend, who wanted him out of the way so they could continue their affair.

BACKGROUND:

• Based on the novel series “The Lunar Trilogy,” which was written by director Zulawski’s great uncle Jerzy Zulawski.
• In the books, completed in 1911, the “silver globe” is the Earth’s Moon; in this modern adaptation this obviously had to be changed to an extraterrestrial planet. The Moon location explains why travel between the two locations is a relatively simple and quick matter.
• After his second film, The Devil (1972), was banned by Polish authorities, Zulawski moved to France in a mutually-agreed-upon exile. When his first French production, The Important Thing Is to Love (1975) became a prestigious art-house hit, the same authorities invited him to return to Poland to work on a project of his choice. He chose On the Silver Globe.
• On the Silver Globe had a torturous production history. In 1977 Polish authorities shut down the shoot before completion, citing both cost and ideological objections, and ordered the footage destroyed. Fortunately, this instruction was not completely followed (in the film’s prologue, Zulawski laments that the government “murdered” 1/5 of his work). In 1988 the director was able to reconstruct the surviving footage and create a nearly complete film, using narration spoken over new footage of Polish streets to fill in the gaps for the missing scenes and hiring new actors to overdub some of the old ones. The reconstruction debuted at Cannes in 1988. You can find more detail in El Rob Hubbard‘s reviews of the film itself and on the documentary Escape to the Silver Globe (2021).
• Much of the dialogue was taken or adapted from various mystical texts, rather than from the novel itself.
• Voted onto the Apocrypha by readers in this poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: On a beach, dozens of soldiers are impaled (apparently through the anus) on spikes which must be thirty feet high. (One crane shot shows us an actor who is actually precariously perched on the pole.) Two robed Pharisee types in leprous caked makeup converse as they are shot from below, with the torture victims soaring above them like orbiting bodies in the sky.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Messy orange-blooded bird/woman sex; interplanetary travel pill

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: On the Silver Globe is a Cubist science fiction epic, presented as if it were being performed by a severely stoned 1970s avant-garde theater troupe enacting obscure Masonic rituals on a beach in Estonia at a point when every single actor is undergoing either a devastating breakup or a profound existential crisis (usually both). Without commentary, the plot is nearly impossible to follow in a single viewing, but the movie is definitely something you’ve never seen before.

Trailer for On the Silver Globe reconstruction

COMMENTS: On the Silver Globe‘s plot is so difficult to divine that  many exceptional critics get details wrong—for example, Richard Brody says the astronauts feed the natives drugs, when this is actually a feature of life on Earth. Others candidly confess to not being able to follow the story. This is perfectly understandable, especially if trying to reconstruct it all from a single theatrical screening; making sense of the plot requires careful study and note-taking, and is be beside the point, anyway. This film about an alien society goes out of its way to be alienating. The narrative cross-cuts between eras and planets, often with little attempt to ground the viewer. This discontinuity is only exacerbated by the long stretches of film (a reported one-fifth of the total) that is missing, and is simply described by the director over newly shot footage of ordinary landscapes and people in 1980s Poland (in one such scene, dozens of Poles cascade by on an escalator, gazing at the camera as we are told about battles being waged on a distant planet). The film’s most discombobulating factor is its dialogue, often screamed by the histrionic actors, which usually expresses abstract philsophical ideas rather than referring to the events happening before our eyes. A dying man launches into a long monologue… “Freedom exists and is lying in darkness… It turns away from the lust of darkness to lean towards the lust of light.” People, of course, do not converse like this: not even when dying, not even when delirious, not even in art-house movies. But Silver Globe‘s characters talk this way constantly: almost every line is an overly-serious epigram.

Even though the new planet is Earthlike (scenes were shot on desolate landscapes in the Gobi Desert and in the Baltics), Zuwalski does his best through mise-en-scene to make it all otherworldly. Everything is color-shifted into the blue-gray spectrum, creating other odd color effects, like fires that burn green. There are also frequent jump cuts in the middle of scenes, dutch angles, and the bizarre costumes and makeup, which, along with the narrative discontinuity and constant flow of mystical dialogue, takes us out of ordinary reality and place us in a firmly alien mindset.

The story is split into two large sections (plus the parts set on Earth—but no need to overcomplicate things in this short overview). Like El Topo, the halves cleave along Biblical lines. The first section mirrors the Old Testament. The astronauts colonize the new planet by breeding; with only three survivors (two males and one female), the colonists necessarily propagate themselves through incest. Although the new generations mature much faster than on Earth, allowing them to form a tribe of hundreds in mere decades, for some reason the last patriarchal Earthling, Jerzy, does not die promptly; he lives as long as Methuselah, long enough to become an object of awe to the generations he fathers. They both revere him and, like unfaithful Israelites, fear and resent him. The people develop their own primitive rituals and culture, dressing in wild costumes that combine Native American, Japanese, and African inspirations, making themselves up like Noh actors working with hippie facepaint, dancing like pagan performance artists before the otherwordly bonfires. Jerzy becomes remote, distant, and hermetic, speaking only in parables (but then, characters in this movie would order takeout in parables).

The second part is the New Testament section, with astronaut Marek arriving from Earth and immediately being adopted by a sect as a messiah come to fulfill a prophecy. They believe he will lead them to victory over the invading Sherns, the telepathic bird people native to the planet. The symbolism isn’t subtle; Marek paraphrases Christ several times in the film, and is betrayed and literally crucified in the end. We see grand battles in this section, but they are often staged like Shakespeare-in-the-park melees, with dozens of combatants waving their weapons in the general direction of their enemies until they fall down, more dance than combat. The Sherns are mysterious, technologically superior, and possess some sort of arcane knowledge that the humans find impossible to comprehend. Marek becomes obsessed with learning about them (Marek becomes obsessed with a lot of things). This section also features an excess of carnality, with sex scenes between Marek and a sort of Mary Magdalene character, some brief “bestiality,” and a large, writhing orgy of damned souls.

In both sections—and in the Earth sequences, which introduce entirely new but equally tormented characters—a sense of relentless doom and failure hangs over every venture. This explains the character’s constant state of existential panic. They sense the futility of it all: the social structures that collapse, the lovers that betray, and they are desperation to find some meaning and a way to live in the face of relentless decay.

To be perfectly honest, On the Silver Globe might have been a better film if the Polish authorities had destroyed more of it. An editor’s touch would have made it more watchable, for sure. But although a more compact film might be better, it would be less notable. We would lose the mad monument to overindulgence that now exists, one whose grandeur is only exaggerated into legend by its missing pieces. Zulawski’s movie has too much of everything: it’s too long with too much emoting of too ambitious dialogue. Even the costumes are have too many frills. Too muchness is the essential aesthetic. On the Silver Globe is not necessarily a good film—although, like the curate’s egg, parts of it are excellent. It’s not an easy film. What it is, however, is an immensely strange film, a work that stands as a testament to its own excess. It’s like a Gothic castle built by a madman who keeps adding flying buttresses and ornamental gargoyles long after he should have stopped, and who may have kept adding to it forever if he had not run out of marble.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Absurd and extreme, but never morbid, this European shock-cinema offering goes so far overboard in its excess that it becomes a bleak comic spit into the face of organized religion, organized society, and even organized narrative. It’s completely out of control, almost joyfully so, like a child knocking over sandcastles.”–Jeremiah Kipp, Slant

“…uniquely weird sci-fi film… seems overwrought, only in a semi-coherent state and too ambitious, but is strangely appealing and worth its weight in złotys as a scary cult film.”–Dennis Schwartz, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews

IMDB LINK: On the Silver Globe (1988)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Na srebrnym globie/The Silver Globe – Archived entry on the film from the Zulawski homepage; includes a sound clip

LIST CANDIDATE: ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1977/1988) – El Rob Hubbard‘s original review of the film

HOME VIDEO INFO: Long unavailable on video except in pirated copies, On the Silver Globe is still difficult to track down today, at least for Americans. In 2021, Zulawski’s reconstructed film was rescued from complete obscurity by Eureka for their “Masters of Cinema” series on a 2-disc Region B Blu-ray. It’s a 4K transfer with a highly informative (in terms of “understanding” the film, it’s virtually indispensable) commentary by Zulawski confidant Daniel Bird, who also translated the subtitles. The set contains are a pair of additional featurettes from Bird and two others, covering topics including original novelist Jerzy Zulawski, locations, cinematography, and “Lunar Futurism.” The most substantial bonus is Escape to the Silver Globe, the 2021 feature-length documentary about the film.

Eureka also released Silver Globe along with Third Part of the Night (1971) and The Devil (1972) and as part of an equally-rare Zulawski box set. Extra features in the three disc set are unknown.

North Americans, unfortunately, will have to order either of these from an exporter or secondary markets (i.e. Ebay), and have a player capable of handling Region B discs (beware, because some all-region players may still have difficulty with this particular offering).

Then, in 2025, Europe’s Mondo Vision released the film on 4K UHD. Although this release was supposedly targeted at North American audiences, it is as difficult to find at retailers as the Masters of Cinema disc, but can be ordered here. The disc comes from a different 4K transfer and with different bonus features: an exclusive “making of” doc, a collection of Zulawski trailers, a photo gallery, and film commentary directly from the director himself (recorded before the auteur’s death in 2016, obviously). Numbered Limited Edition sets come with the soundtrack CD, a booklet, and some more odds and ends. We are not certain which of these last set of extras are also available in the standard edition.

The movie is not currently available on streaming platforms. Silver Globe would make a great acquisition for the Criterion Collection (or a similar boutique label) if they could swing the rights. The market is niche, but it’s there.