Hooptober 12: 22/31

On the Silver Globe has been one of the white whales on my watchlist because I knew it’d be right up my alley and boy did it deliver.

Żuławski makes a found footage sci-fi horror epic interspersed with a video essay, leaves you completely puzzled as to what the hell is going on while the mythical method washes over you and then you’re not even halfway finished with the film! It’s completely unique, uniquely fantastic, and fantastically incomprehensible. My high expectations led me to believe that I ought to be annoyed at the unwavering poetical density of the dialogue, but even that added to the almost forbidden quality. It’s a challenging watch; it’s a movie that by all accounts should not exist. Interdimensional cable.

I also love how the unfinished status of the film ties into what it is saying about the scope of human narrative. On that silver planet, things are being lost, people who carry knowledge die, and the survivors are left to their own devices to figure it all out, picking up odds and ends and trying to make sense of it. Old symbols become new symbols, divorced from each other. The generations after us are more like our ancestors than they are like us. All we have left to do is etch our stories into the stone, carrying a vague hope that our names will not be forgotten, although we know that they certainly will be. “I am Andrzej Żuławski, and I directed On the Silver Globe.” Colossal.