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Na Srebrnym Globie * Andrzej Zulawski (1988)

“On The Silver Globe” is Zulawski’s “best known but least seen film” according to the box and I understand why. It proved hard to see! I heard about a Zulawski box with this one, “The Devil” and another film in it. I thought I ordered that box, but got another one with three French films, one of Zulawski. The Polish box that I did want to get turned out to be very expensive, but “On The Silver Globe” and “The Devil” fortunately have been released on DVD separately too. Also quite expensive though. Then there is the story of the film itself. Zulawski started filming in the 1980’ies, but the Polish government forbid the continuation of the project and to destroy all material. Zulawski fled to France and was 10 years later allowed to return and finish his project. He chose to complete what was left of the originel tapes and what we see are the parts that are left, the holes are filled with the read out texts of Jerzy Zulawski’s (Andrzej great-grandfather by the way) novel that this film is based on with random images on the background. The film is obviously based on a book. The dialogues (also mostly overdubbed because of the destruction) are mostly long and philosophical monologues which give the impression that you are watching an ancient play of, say, Shakespeare rather than a film. The gigantic ‘overacting’ adds greatly to this. The long monologues in Polish also make that I constantly had to try to keep up with the subtitles leaving but little time to watch the visuals. All this resulted in the fact that I do not really have a good idea of what it is all about. A group of spacetravellers (called “astronauts” while I would have expected “kosmonauts” by the way) land on the moon that looks a lot like earth. The astronauts that survive settle and then at high speed a new population grows who on their turn run into the original population of the silver globe. The new population creates its own worldview with the original astronauts as gods.
“On the silver globe” is a weird film that I will probably have to watch a few times again before things really start to make sense.

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