On the Silver Globe: A Disaster in Three Parts
I’m Polish-American.
When the Buddha instructs “Life is suffering,” we Eastern Europeans say, “got it!” and move on.
Did the Buddha say more? Didn’t catch that part.
The tale of On the Silver Globe, a film by Andrzej Żuławski, is one of woe and calamity, of a talented visionary filmmaker leaving his home and then, after success abroad, returning to Poland only to see everything taken away as he attempts to adapt his Grand Uncle’s Science Fiction novels. Toil in salt mines and deserts, all for nothing. The incompetence, cruelty, and the bureaucratic fumbling and stumbling are of such a magnitude as to stagger one’s belief. Unless you’re Polish. Then, it just feels like another day. Of course there was a bitterly ironic plane crash. Of course, the film materials were ordered destroyed. In any case, work ended in June of 1977, the film 80 percent completed. No way forward, Żuławski moved on.
The flip side of the Polish mentality of expected continual suffering is that we persist, endure and keep going. Why? Not sure. But we do. And we don’t expect things to get easier.
•••
I’m from Baltimore.
Baltimore’s a Possession town. You don’t need to note the year or filmmaker in conversation here, despite there being a multitude of films bearing that name or a variant. We know you are not talking about the A.S. Byatt novel. You’re talking about the film that Linsday Raspi wrote an essay about, that Eric Allan Hatch made memes about before everyone else did.
It seemed to start with Hatch’s enthusiasm, spreading the word in the film community here about a film, first notorious as one of the U.K.’s “Video Nasties,” fairly hard to see in the original cut, but worth your time and attention. The storied and much-missed Video Americain had a gray-market VHS copy that was rented repeatedly. Revival screenings were held at The Charles and the Parkway.
The “gray market” is also something I associate with my early life among Baltimore’s Polish-Americans. “Uncle Duchek” and his ilk could be counted on to have something close to but not quite the same as what you wanted. You asked for Transformers for Christmas? You got Go-Bots. When you complained, it was hard to convince anyone that it wasn’t as good, the same thing, really.
At Beyond Video, there are multiple copies of Possession for rent, in every format you could want.
•••
I’m fascinated by cinematic failure. I’ve read extensively on flops, misfires, and unrealized film projects. It’s a hobby.
The 1988 release of On the Silver Globe doesn’t fit any of the above. Its history is its own, its completion unique.
When there was an opportunity to screen the film, it was of enough interest to get a few fellow cinephiles to show up. And getting these people together is like herding cats.
I was trepidatious. What could be made of an initially uncompleted film, finished a decade later? Was this going to be a waste of time, like my attempt to sit through the reconstructed four-hour Greed (1924/1999), more still images than film?
I’m happy to report that, though a long haul, there’s enough On the Silver Globe left to be worth watching. If completed and released in the late-1970s, I could see it making a big impact on sci-fi of the time; but after spending more than a decade unfinished, its astounding innovations and fantastic images were robbed of a decade of influence and critique. On the Silver Globe is still hard to see, the recent disc release “region locked,” a dodgy-looking DVD going for $200 on Amazon.
But tracking a copy down was worth the time. The celluloid “patient,” stitched back together by clever surgery by its creator, roars to life on the screen. Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe persists and endures, never expecting things to get easier.