galensaysyes
I suspect this may be a kind of fake. It's all that remains of a film whose production was stopped in the middle: a science fiction film that, to judge from this paste-up, might have been something like Stalker done in the style of Weekend. Unfortunately, the sequences that were never shot included virtually all of the science fiction and most of the action, so that two-thirds of what's left concentrates on three people trekking through barren landscapes and going crazy into the camera, as in Blair Witch Project. I found it difficult to track the progress of their degeneration, which all seemed very much the same. Based on this, I'm not surprised the Polish film bureaucrats canceled the production, only that it took them as long as it did. Now the extant footage has been edited into what the DVD case calls a reconstruction. But is it really? Or is it a new construction using the old materials? What made me begin to suspect this was that throughout the film, while the director summarizes the unshot sequences in voice-over, the screen shows what seem to be outtakes, but the last of them closes on a shot of the director, taken contemporaneously. So were the other interpolated sequences shot then or forty years ago? And if forty years ago, were they to have gone in where we see them or elsewhere, and as we see them or in some other form? Or were they just scrap? Much of the rest consists of long tracking shots of scenery, which also look like outtakes. And the film is edited in a style now fashionable--with series of multiple cuts on the same angle, a few seconds apart--which I don't remember being the fashion forty years ago. This made me wonder whether the director had cut the film as he would today, rather than as he would have back when. I also wonder whether he had done so partly to disguise the incompleteness of the available material. And where did the music come from? If the film was never finished, it can never have been scored; and to me the music sounds new, too. So all in all I don't know how to judge the "reconstruction" on the basis of what it was to have been because I don't know how much I'm seeing of that. If the gaps could have been bridged with staged readings of the missing portions of the script, maybe read by the surviving actors, the film might come together into something; as it is, it seems to be little more than what another, better known film was deliberately intended as and named for: ashes of time.
Joseph Sylvers
It's difficult to judge this film accurately because it is a fragmented damaged piece of an artifact, but like Micheloangelos armless David or the defaced Sphinx, the crack in the Liberty Bell, etc, broken things can still hold a remarkable power, perhaps more so than if they had remained intact. Polish authorities halted production of this film, confiscated and burned props, setts, costumes, and footage, leaving about 25 percent of the remaining film, instead of making a documentary about the horrors that befell him ala Lost In La Mancha(though Zulawski did have significantly more footage Gilliam), he includes the destruction of the film as part of the narrative. Those scenes which aren't intact are summarized through voice over from the director himself as hand-held cam(still dizzying Zulawski) tours an unmanned Polish city. The story of On The Silver Globe is an adaptation of "The Lunar Trilogy" written by the directors Uncle Jerry Żuławski between 1901 and 1911(never published in English but popular in Europe), about a Space Crew landed on a distant moon inhabited by primitive humanoid creatures, who find a device which shows them the voyage of an earlier space flight to the planet made by pilgrims who crash or are seeking a new life(it's never clear at least in the film)where after the struggle to survive, begin the process of procreation, accept the children born on the planet grow at an extremely accelerated rate generations passing in less than decades. The first hour or so of the film is all p.o.v. handicam shots ala "Cloverfield", "The Blair Witch Project", "Diary Of The Dead", etc, we see only what the astronaut's see as they begin rebuilding civilization in their own fashion. We observe the culture, customs, architecture, and yes even fashion of the newly developing humans over generations which seem to pass in the time it takes the astronauts to grow facial hair. Because the astronauts age at a much slower rate, they become Godlike elders of the newly emerging(from incest) humans. The anthropological goings on in the background, are more interesting by far than the dialog which I can understand why other's might say sound like the ramblings of mental patients obsessed with meaning, feeling, and Godliness.At first I thought the dialog was the result of hallucination and the stress of surviving in a new completely isolated environment, then as the astronauts die off, I thought again, this is is the result of this last mans increasing isolation(unable to communicate with his offspring who are in fear/awe of his existence, "Why don't you die?", as he wanders the village despondent). Then later I considered it was an affect of the planet, maybe even the Shern projecting some kind of madness(will address get to this later), and inevitably considered there was no reason for the obtuse dialog which does sound more often then not dubiously sane, as well as the possibility that their madness is somehow supposed to be a reflection of our own, as Native and Earth-born alike all seem equally psychotic, exploring the extremities of their environments, the former in collective ways war, torture, orgies, the latter in personal ways drugs, dementia, delusions of grandeur, but I digress. The second half of the film shows us one of the astronauts who discovered the origins of the planet, being selected as the messiah( think of Earth as Heaven and you get the Biblical allusion to The Resurrection), by the natives who we come to realize are the descendants of the first mission. The new Messiah indulges in his Godking status, and deals with the threat posed by winged telepathic creatures called Sherns who kidnap and mate with native women to produce...lizard men? What follows is espionage, decadence, war, and delirious parade of fantastic and occasionally grotesque images(p.o.v. shots of men impaled rectally on 100ft stakes with their intestines hanging out, crucifictions, etc.) All and all On The Silver Globe is a messy movie, brilliant visual poetry and an interesting anthropological concept somewhere between Ursula K Lu Guine and Alejandro Jodorowsky but predating them both by almost fifty years(date of the original story), coupled with an at times incoherent plot and obtuse dialog. Factor in that this film wasn't completed for political reasons, which Zulawaski does, each time he shows us real people walking around as he describes what the astronaut's did next, and you've got an interesting if imperfect jewel of a film. If completed in full it probably would not have been a masterpiece, though the first hour are some of the most naturalistic and oddly surreal images of coming to a new planet that I have ever seen in any SF film, however it would definitely have a loyal place as a cult classic snugly on DVD shelves somewhere between "The Holy Mountain", and "Dune". For adventurous literate film seekers a fragmented modern story of the cyclical nature of time, the destructive nature of hero worship and deification, and human cultural anthropology. Like the film found by the astronauts "On The Silver Globe" is a damaged and incomplete artifact, sacrificed and crucified before it's time like it's protagonist, while warning of the abuses of power and ideologies we accept and propagate which allow them to flourish, and which inevitably lead to this films own cancellation.
