A crazy, cursed, ambitious, unique film… On the Silver Globe by Andrzej Żuławski is a cinematic chimera, exciting, but incomplete.
In 1977, just as Star Wars was about to change American science fiction cinema forever, another sci-fi story was suddenly shut down. Far removed from George Lucas’s space opera adventure, On the Silver Globe could be considered its absolute antithesis. This space fable by Andrzej Żuławski (Possession, The Important Thing is to Love) is opaque, psychedelic, disturbing… and instead of seeking to entertain, it delivers its philosophical and political discourse in a very direct way.
Nothing out of the ordinary when you’re used to science fiction literature. But rarely has a film attempted to transpose the density (sometimes indigestible) of this literature to the screen as Sur le Globe d’Argent does. In many ways, Andrzej Żuławski’s feature film is a bit like a Polish Dune. It features themes similar to Frank Herbert’s work (the advent of a messiah in a barbarian civilization, allegories of fascism, religion). This twinning will go so far as to where Dune will share its curse of adaptation projects (before the arrival of Denis Villeneuve) with Sur le Globe d’Argent.
Żuławski, the dreaming globe
Unfortunate and unfinished, On the Silver Globe is a puzzle of science fiction cinema that manages to stand out from Żuławski’s filmography by its singularity. And this is no small feat when you have already been confronted a little with the gentleman’s other productions. The Polish filmmaker is indeed known for his nonconformist style, his traumatic shoots and his taste for visceral tales.
And it is not easy to approach his cinema, so diverse and rich is it. But in general, we can say that Żuławski has always used his medium to explore metaphysical, existential and societal themes – particularly in relation to the situation in Poland between the 70s and 80s. Żuławski has never been one to compromise with his vision of things, which has had the effect of marginalizing some of his films.
Nothing can prepare you for this
So, when he came across the opportunity to embrace each of his obsessions in a single project, he naturally set about producing a film that was even more marginal than the others. More chaotic, but also more personal. Because On the Silver Globe is the realization of a dream. For a long time, the filmmaker had been toying with the fantasy of adapting a literary saga called The Lunar Trilogy, written by his great-uncle, Jerzy Żuławski. And despite the difficulty of the challenge, he intends to succeed.
This is a colossal epic (in the same way as Dune) taking place on a Moon recently colonized by human survivors and in which the m…
