Zulawski orgy roundup part 2: By the light of the silvery moon

(Image: Panopticum)

(My previous entries on BAM Rose Cinema's Andrzej Zulawski series can be found here and here.)


Anybody who takes the time and trouble to be an enthusiast in any field has their holy grails, their tantalizing unattainables. It's like the grown-up geek's version of an ever-receding Christmas morning, where the anticipation of getting is in some ways better than the actual thing. Maybe it's the out-of-print live album, or the uncensored first publication; the baseball card with the misspelled name, or the suppressed and unfinished Polish religio-mystical science fiction epic nightmare.


To cut to the chase, last month I finally saw On the Silver Globe (1977/1988), nine years after first reading about it in Film Comment. And it was only somewhere between 30 and 40 percent a disappointment. That would be the tediously and pretentiously talky part. The other 60 to 70 percent is the surreal, synapse-frying kinda-masterpiece I was promised. Which is more than enough to make it worth seeking out if getting synapses fried is your thing.

(Image: Videodromen)

Even aside from the film's qualities, its backstory is enough to make it a tantalizing curiosity. In the mid-'70s, young Zulawski had already had his run-ins with Poland's communist censors, but was back in favor after his third feature, the French-made The Most Important Thing is to Love, was a critical and commercial success (yes, that movie was a hit - the French are weird). So he went for broke with a massive adaptation of his great-uncle Jerzy Zulawski's classic "Moon Trilogy" of novels about a primitive, violent society on the dark side of the moon, descended from a group of stranded astronauts. After two years of shooting, a changing of the guard at the Ministry of Culture resulted in someone noticing that the brat was still making gruesome and smutty grotesqueries with subversive political subtexts. The mostly completed shoot was shut down, the sets and costumes and footage ordered destroyed, and Zulawski decamped permanently for France (understandably, though in his place I would have just curled up in bed and sucked my thumb for a year or so). After the collapse of the communist government in the late '80s, the director returned and reluctantly assembled a two-hour-and-forty-five-minute rough version from materials hidden in the meantime by film archives and former collaborators, but has rarely allowed showings of this mutilated remnant of his dream project.


Whew. The happy ending is that Zulawski appears to be loosening his sphincter as regards this point. Silver Globe screened in L.A. and in Brooklyn this month, and quixotic little video label Mondo Vision, which is slowly putting out deluxe DVD editions of Zulawski, has tentative plans for it next year.


The movie itself, deeply flawed though it is, turns out to be more or less worthy of such a legend. There are as many jaw-slackening images and moments here as in any film I've seen in years (I'm tossing out plenty of still images here to give a tiny hint of what it's like to look at on the big screen) and it's a genuinely unsettling experience, though what Zulawski film isn't?

(Image: Sci-Fi-O-Rama)

This filmmaker always requires a sizable adjustment of paradigms from the viewer, and that's no less true here of science fiction-adventure tropes. There's little effort to make the locations (which include Black Sea shores and China's Gobi desert) look like the moon as we now know it to be. Uncle Jerzy's books were written at the close of the Victorian era, in which authors like H.G. Wells (no relation) and Jules Verne had also written books about people running around on the moon as if it were just a weirder, smaller version of Earth. The film is little concerned about adjusting this for post-Apollo-mission expectations, so there's a breathable atmosphere, forests, grass, rain, snow and even a sea, on whose beach much of the action takes place - there are even horses and, at one point, a car, though it isn't clear where they came from. In some ways, Silver Globe is more fantasy than science fiction - for the most part, it could just as well be about stranded seafarers on a remote island continent, and its thematic concerns are with eternal patterns of religion and politics, rather than with changes wrought by technology.


Still, Zulawski conjures an otherwordly atmosphere in every scene. He chooses his locations well for their human-dwarfing strangeness, and uses lens filters (I assume) to put a twilighty blue cast over much of the movie (although that's exaggerated in some of these screen captures, from a low-quality gray-market DVD that's floating around out there). The physical details of the moon people's culture never stop being fascinating - with their elaborate costumes, robes, headdresses, masks and face-paints, they look like a hybrid of Native Americans in ceremonial garb, and figures from medieval European frescoes. Many scenes are shot in gargantuan caverns, sometimes with yawning rifts going down seemingly into nowhere (where on earth did he shoot these? abandoned mines?), which bring out Zulawski's gift for stranging architecture and large structures, often by shooting with a wide angle lens from very low on the floor. Rituals and battles are shot with a striking eye for large group compositions that one wouldn't necessarily suspect from his more intimately scaled films - he really goes to town with a camera crane that soars and swoops over the action, never more strikingly than in a mass execution of heretics impaled on towering poles over the beach.

On the Silver Globe is an object lesson in how imagination and vision can trump big-budget resources even in this genre. Take the Sherns - telepathic, one-eyed humanoid/bird creatures, apparently native to the moon, who enslave and exploit the humans. They are portrayed by performers in expressionistic costumes (of which I could find no images readily available) that are likely to inspire some giggles from audience members who insist on the anal-retentive verisimilitude of modern state-of-the-art effects. But with a little willingness to suspend disbelief, they're more frightening than any slick digital creatures would be - they look shudderingly icky to the touch, and the stiff, lurching movements imposed on the wearers evoke creepy zombies rather than the Jurassic Park-like gee-whiz effect a Hollywood version would likely achieve. (That they might also evoke Godzilla movies is a fair point, but shut up.) More generally, the rough-edged, hand-made aura of the film enhances its impact - it feels more like smuggled footage of secret cult rituals than an epic entertainment.


Comparisons of Silver Globe with big-budget alternatives come to mind most in the second section, with the arrival of Marek, a lone astronaut investigating the disappearance of the previous mission generations before, who is hailed as the moon people's prophesied savior from the sky. Once he reluctantly accepts his role and leads a rebellion against the Sherns, the sense of deja vu I was experiencing snapped into focus - I was reminded of Dune. David Lynch's more or less disastrous 1984 stab at a science fiction epic was also about a young man who lands on a harsh world where he becomes warrior-messiah to a subjugated tribespeople; even Marek's black spacesuit (which he continues to wear throughout the film - must have gotten pretty gamey) foreshadows Kyle MacLachlan's desert outfit. 

(Image: Shadowplay)

(Image: Kaktak)

Lynch couldn't, of course, have seen Silver Globe before making his own movie, but I wouldn't be surprised if he'd heard tales of it, and I can't help but wonder if some stills were floating around somewhere for him to see. It's even less likely that Jerzy Zulawski's original novels influenced Frank Herbert, author of the Dune source novels, as the Moon Trilogy has never been translated into English (making them another one of my holy grails, especially now that I've seen the film).


But the differences between the two films are more telling than the similarities. Dune exemplifies the superhero-messiah complex common to much popular science fiction and fantasy, from the Arthurian legends to The Matrix: salvation for the masses depends upon an uncommon leader or hero whose abilities and destiny are beyond those of us ordinary folk, and, often, whose coming is foretold in religious or mystical fashion. In Zulawski & Zulawski's tale, this convention is upended brutally. It's clear that the moon people's religious myths and prophecies are based on misinterpreted, fading memories of spacefaring predecessors. And Marek eventually discovers that being messiah isn't all it's cracked up to be - that while saving his adopted people from monsters might turn out to be more than he can handle, it's even harder to save them from themselves, or even save himself. This melancholy critique of religious and genre convention is the thematic heart of On the Silver Globe, and the reason its volcanic madness remains compelling throughout rather than a curiosity or gimmick.

(Image: The Obscene Mirror)

Of course this is all performed in the customary Zulawski register of raw-throated mania, underlining his vision of a benighted community just one rung up from the prehistoric muck and constantly on the edge of chaos and collapse (though judging from his other work, he views all eras of society in roughly this way). By this point in the series, I was accustomed enough to take this largely in stride. Also in play, though, is Zulawski's love of lengthy philosophical-poetic monologues, which almost any character will indulge at the drop of a feathered, bloodstained headdress. It's one of his legacies from the Godard film-as-lecture school of Euro art film, as opposed to the pulp and the surrealism that also inform his work. I suppose whether or not you can roll with it is largely a matter of taste. For me, it too often brings the film crashing back down to the dusty earth out of the exalted realms of insanity in which it otherwise flies, and it's almost fatal at times - what feels like a third of the considerable running time is spent on declarations like "Only a cripple can create, or a dead man," apropos of little as far as I can tell.

(Image: Voleur de Secrets)

A more interesting intellectual-verbal conceit is his handling of the missing portions of Silver Globe. Sections of the narrative that were never filmed (sadly, including some truly spectacular-sounding stuff) are bridged by voiceover narration. A relatively conventional approach would have been to integrate these as much as possible into the surrounding material - inserting the narration over, say, still images of the locations or drawings of scenes. Zulawski instead puts the narration over newly-shot documentary footage of daily life in late '80s Poland. The jarring drop out of the all-enveloping atmosphere of the moon sequences is painful, but it also achieves the effect of a complex and subtle commentary with a minimum of fuss. The distance and closeness between Poland then and now, and between our society and the movie's fictional one; the lost opportunities and lost lives under the former totalitarian regime; the power and the feebleness of cinema when confronted with the real world; all of these wistful reflections and more are evoked as we watch real, ordinary people shuffling and swarming down sidewalks and escalators, while a droning voice on the soundtrack tells us of rocketships and bird-monsters.


This ends with Zulawski shooting his own faint reflection in a store window while in voiceover he pays tribute to the colleagues who preserved his footage and other materials in secret during the years of his exile, and to the sense of mission that drove them together to complete this truncated version. As we shuffled out of the theater afterwards, some above-it-all hipster near me was inspired to idiotic commentary by this closing, which he seemed to find intolerably sincere and self-important. "'Yayyy, we did it!'" he scoffed. "God, it's only a movie." No, you infant, it's not just a movie. Not when it represented the dream of so many people who worked so long to achieve it. Not when the government of a nation crushed it and its creators under its boot-heel. Not when people risked their careers and probably prison to preserve it. All so you could smugly sit back in your cozy Brooklyn loft and sneer at what's valued by people who've risked more and worked harder than you ever will. Zulawski may not be big on "respect" as a way of relating to the world, but that doesn't mean you've earned the same privilege. So show a little goddamn respect.

A nice Easter weekend picture for you. (Image: Andrzej-Zulawski.com)

A couple other interesting pieces on the film:


The House Next Door

The great, nay, the indispensable Shadowplay by Scottish writer and filmmaker David Cairns (a sample of his critique: "Jings. Cripes. Crumbs. Wow. Sheesh. Jeepers. Wow. Whew. Blimey. Crikey. Golly. Gee. Gosh. Whoa. Strewth. Heck. Flip. Jehosephat. Bismillah. Criminy. Holy cow/moley/crap/shit.")