On the Silver Globe (Żuławski, 1988): Garden Cinema, 2.30pm
The film will feature a video introduction by writer Adam Żuławski.
Andrzej Żuławski’s sprawling lunar futurist epic, a dark and delirious allegory on civilisation and original sin is a haven of futurist worldbuilding, hemmed in by Magdalena Tesławska’s ornate, baroque costume design. Famous for its long, troubled and repeatedly thwarted production, On the Silver Globe was finally immortalised in its incomplete state in 1988, with supplemented scenes of contemporary Poland that further a jarring juxtaposition to the story’s otherworldly alien landscapes.
Film Comment review extract (full analysis here):
Even with this extra self-reflexive layer, it’s hard to make claims for On the Silver Globe
as a great film or even, by conventional criteria, a good one. It’s
excessive in so many ways—so grandiose, so hysterical, so utterly
earnest. Yet it’s a film you should see, on the big screen if possible,
because it’s such a spectacular anomaly—because its sheer will to
strangeness is so furiously unrestrained. In its poetic and
philosophical aspirations, in its outrageous maximalism, in its utter
disregard for the normal prerogatives of pleasing an audience, this is
the sort of film that by rights should not even exist. On the Silver Globe is not just a film maudit,
but a genuine example of that small but exalted category of films you
might call “Impossible Cinema,” in which I’d include other massive
visionary projects either completed or aborted: Andrei Rublev; the landscape epics of Miklos Jancsó; Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune, as well as his earlier completed films; Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (similar to Silver Globe in its mix of primitivism and futurism); and the supposedly forthcoming Dau, a long-gestating Russian epic of already-legendary don’t-hold-your-breath status.
Jonathan Romney
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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