It
is like the trippy, absurdist science fiction epic Jerzy Grotowski never made.
Andrzej Zuławski also considered it the film he never made, or rather the film
that was “murdered,” despite stitching together his surviving scraps into over
two and a half hours of immersive strangeness. Thanks to the ham-fisted Polish Communist
censors, it is an even more surreal viewing experience. Digitally restored to a
clarity probably never really seen before, Zuławski’s mauled and maligned masterwork
On the Silver Globe (trailer here) re-releases today
at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
In
both narrative and aesthetic terms, Globe
is closely compatible with Aleksey German’s adaptation of the Strugatsky
Brothers novel, Hard to Be a God,
which should either thrill or despair viewers, depending on how severe and
adventurous their tastes might be. Both films tell the stories of space travelers
from Earth who essentially go native on a distant world. In the case of Globe, it is astronauts Marta, Jerzy,
and Tomasz who give birth to a new human civilization, like an Adam and Eve
threesome, but with all the jealousies implied by the “two’s company, three’s a
crowd” cliché.
As
the new civilization becomes increasingly tribal, their descendants welcome
Marek, a new arrival from Earth as the messiah in the battle against the
Sherns, the planet’s sinister bird-people, who seem to have some sort of
extra-sensory powers. Or something like that.
Frankly,
Zuławski was never really going for narrative cohesion in the first place. Yet,
when the new Communist culture commissar Janusz Wilhelmi shut down his
two-years-and-counting shoot and ordered the destruction of all the film and
components Zuławski and his crew couldn’t hide away, it literally left gaping
holes the auteur eventually filled in the late 1980s with voice-overs. Considering
Zuławski always makes it explicitly clear why his narration is necessary, Globe might just be the most savagely
passive aggressive film you will ever see.
It
is also remarkably heady and bafflingly obscure. While the religious symbolism
is tough to miss, the finer points of the alien culture and the characters’
relationships seem to shift and evolve with confounding regularity. Yet, like
German’s film, it is loaded with outlandish set pieces and gritty, grimy
world-building detail. Cinematographer Andrzej Jaroszewicz’s wide angles and
fish-eyes gives it all a truly otherworldly look, while Andrezej Korzynski’s
electro-ambient-symphonic-blues-prog-rock score heightens the eclectic,
anything-goes vibe.
