I Would Like to See It: On the Silver Globe

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” wrote Marx in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. It’s a sentiment which permeates Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe, an unfinished masterpiece revolving at terrifying speeds at the bleeding edge of comprehensibility. We watch as a crew of cosmonauts crash lands on a vast and apparently empty world. The children of their isolated boredom and desperation age with frightening rapidity. Civilization begins to take form, first as outgrowths of the surviving cosmonauts’ personalities and outlooks on life, then bifurcating and multiplying in its expressions with cancerous swiftness. The last surviving astronaut, the Old Man (Jerzy Trela), looks on as cults spring up around his unspeaking presence and the descendants of his crewmates vie for power, loyalties splintering and reforming, lives passing in the blink of an eye.

In spite of the film’s astonishing costuming, which prefigures and in many ways exceeds the bar-setting work Bob Ringwood did as costume designer for David Lynch’s Dune, Żuławski’s work of science fiction is far less interested in space opera than it is in the ever-mounting burden of history. Bodies decaying. The impaled proclaiming philosophical truths. Dress and custom morphing practically in front of the naked eye, elaborate rituals obscuring meaning as the foundations of practical consideration on which they are built erode into the pounding waves. Form outraces function outraces essence until all that remains is capitulation to the wordless demands of those who have died to uphold a social work neither they nor the living now trapped within its psycho-material superstructure can ever hope to comprehend or alter.

Żuławski’s camera is hectic and harried, present first as a film within a film — the mission recordings of the cosmonauts — and then as a silent testament. Even here the shape of the film and the nature of its existence conforms to the demands of history’s ravenously ignorant march. What begins as an attempt to make sense of an alien landscape devolves into rote performance. Even at an existential level On the Silver Globe feels the weight of the pressure to be, its narrow and incomplete escape from banishment at the hands of Polish censors patched over with spliced-in narrated segments depicting everyday life on Earth in the 1980s. The film comes to us both stillborn and from suspended animation, an incompletable work which rushes straight into the jaws of meaning again and again until we cannot help but close the circle for it, joining its helpless characters in the pursuit of something beyond rote observance of dead custom.