Here is one planet dying and another planet beginning, the ambassadors of the former colonizing the landscape of the latter.And so we begin the dawn of a new yet old civilization, astronauts who crash into nothingness and must create life out of nothing. They leave because their old one is stuck, in cycles of destruction where nothing changes. Humanity there sets itself back every time it takes a step forward, reaching the ceiling of human advancement. And so in the wake of their landing they must make anew, bringing with them the knowledge and culture of the old.So time and time passes, the first generation slowly dying out until there is one old progenitor left and the new generations forming their own amorphous culture which incorporates the memories of the old. Yet as time goes by this grows out of control, a civilization in its own right that cannot be maintained by one man. And so the progenitor retracts back to ground zero: the spaceship that crashed onto this Garden of Eve. During this time he recorded his new life, and sends it back to Earth for others to see. A scientist picks it up and travels there himself, and when he arrives he is warmly greeted by these denizens. "Hurrah" they cheer, for they believe him the second coming of the progenitor, a Jesus-like figure who can give them salvation. He tries to fulfill this role he's placed in, a role twisted from its Biblical origins through the passing of oral tradition where layers of abstraction warp even the most foundational of culture.But he cannot. The political systems he occupies have taken a life of their own, and the influence of a single person is reduced into naught; civilization as a child side-effect of the original astronaut's survival, now fully-grown to where it feeds into itself. Myth as a child of civilization as a child of the individual, the singular voice reduced to nothing as the mass of the collective spirals out of control.And so Andrzej Żuławski shows us that even if we start again, if we had a second chance, humanity would arrive once more at its embittered end. War, conflict, chaos, suffering. These are the cyclical natures of our existence. Generational memory is a fleeting one indeed, and as we grow old our children may not understand our ravings; to what end do our attempts at holistic embetterment prevail when we simply kill the gods we create? The new has no faith nor understanding of the old, and without that we only repeat the mistakes of our past.Such madness displayed in this film is then a reflection of our own, dialogue obtuse as a surrogate for our own. As the film was unable to be completed before the state shut it down, Żuławski fills in the missing parts with narration over shots of modern Poland. Why do such a thing when intertitles could serve such a purpose? I realize it's because both worlds have converged.
"i was taught that the eye of the world which is watching me is the same eye with which i am watching the world. this eye is neither cheerful nor evil… neither feeling nor expectant. it is indifferent like water”i've always been fascinated by the purpose of art. recently, i find myself to be in awe of everything related to creativity and experimentation, and actively looking for these sort of pieces.'on the silver globe' is a paragon of the science fiction genre. it is exemplary in a way that few movies are, both in its uneasy visual style and thought-provoking nature. the film's plot is committed to raise questions about humanity which don't necessarily need or have answers but work flawlessly as a philosophical exercise.
Edited 6/2/23 for political content.A friend asked on Facebook who should be directing the Star Wars remakes, living or dead. Had I seen this film when he asked, I would have said Zulawski without hesitation. This is what a science fiction epic should look like, warts and all. Zulawski waited over ten years to complete this. The film fills the gaps with footage of some city and Zulawski himself narrating what we are missing. These jarring transitions add to the found footage feel of the film in that they suggest someone on Earth is extrapolating what we have seen.The film follows a group of astronauts who have landed on another, Earth-like world, escaping something on Earth. They find an ocean beside which to live (it is implied that bodies of water help them breathe, though I am not sure I understood it right). Time goes by, and the whole thing is filmed by one of them, who will come to be called The Old Man. The children of the astronauts begin to become primitive and feral, and their rudimentary civilization begins to mythologize Earth and the first generation. The only female in the original crew is revered as a Mother Goddess, and The Old Man is treated both as a source of wisdom and as an antagonistic yet respected force.What follows is the evolution of civilization, religion, and culture. Another astronaut appears and is heralded as a messiah. Bird-creatures enslave the humans, and hybrid monster children are kept in a cave. Strange legends crop up, and power structures have formed. It is a brutal, horror-filled world where religion has become a focal point out of necessity, out of a need to make sense of things because there is nowhere else to turn.This film offers an explanation of messiah myths. It also rather bleakly suggests that these beliefs spell doom for the believers, that there is a price to be paid for clinging to saviors, for mythologizing the past, for othering and cruelty.All of this is done with a Tarkovskian eye for overcast vistas and strange scenery, combined with costuming and make up work that Jim Henson would respect. Greys, dull greens and blues, and blacks dominate the film, but there are patches of vibrant reds and yellows in the midst of it all that make the cold, alien world all the more unreal and engrossing. It makes the culture that is birthed on this strange world feel real, knowing it has a reasonable analogue on our world, much as the monomyth's longevity is bolstered by its ubiquity. The familiar makes the unfamiliar more palatable. The only small complaint I have is the sudden inclusion of hard rock guitars in the latter part of the film, in scenes that seem disconnected from the main narrative. A subplot involving friends of the messianic astronaut crops up later on that veers off in a strange direction and doesn't quite work out, and in some parts of this, inexplicably, some guitar solos start interjecting into the soundtrack. It's especially bizarre because the film was not heavy on music through the rest of its run. There aren't enough of these intrusions for it to significantly detract from anything, though.
