Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we are going to be talking about the famous, slash infamous nineteen eighty eight Polish science fiction epic On the Silver Globe, directed by Andre Zuofski. I first became interested in this movie by reading about it.
Several film critics and historians that I came across characterized On the Silver Globe kind of like the final boss of weird movies, as like the ultimate Macdaddy of weird, difficult, fascinating films, and it's been described in a lot of superlative terms. It's one of the most beautiful, one of the ugliest, one of the most astounding, one of the most exhausting and utterly bizarre, intensely compelling and impossible to follow films ever made. And having seen it now I
have to agree with all of that. I found this film both both amazingly interesting and tiring and difficult to the point of annoyance. I have such such strong reactions in multiple directions to it, but I'm really glad we saw it, and I think it's a film that most people should try to see if they can at some point just be prepared. You are in for a very long, very tiring, highly confusing experience, but it's also extremely rewarding.
I do want to add a caveat here that it is and this is all subjective, of course, it's never boring, and it is also not a when we talk about films that are, you know, sometimes challenging to watch, this film is not a film that is cruel. It's not a film that is like daring you to watch it or anything of that nature. I mean, there's some there's some grizzly moments, there are some you know, there are some bloody moments, but it's not one of those those
films that like has it in for the audience. It it wants the audience to go on the journey with it.
Right right. It is a movie that's difficult, but not because it's like Waaldewall torture scenes, though there are some. There are some scenes of physical pain and trauma, but that's not what the movie is largely about. So despite the enormous run time of this movie, I think the cut that I saw, which I think is the main cut available, was one hundred and sixty six minutes. Was that yours? Rob?
I believe so?
Yes, so very long movie, two hours and forty six minutes.
Wrong?
Am I doing the math right there? Yeah?
Believe sow forty four to forty six something like that? It is, It's not even close. It is the longest movie that we have watched for Weird House Cinema.
And despite that massive runtime, this film is technically unfinished
as the original production in the nineteen seventies. We can talk more about the production process as we go on, but when they were originally shooting this movie, it was shut down by Polish authorities in the year nineteen seventy seven with roughly twenty percent of the movie yet to be filmed, had not been filmed yet, and I understand that at one point what was shot the eighty percent we have was supposed to have been destroyed, but by
some miscommunication or stroke of luck, it was not. And then, roughly a decade after the production was halted, the still existing pieces of the movie were put together by the director by Andre Zuowski, with the gaps patched over by voiceover narration and in a strange choice, but one that I think actually works quite well Tonally, It's kind of hard to explain exactly why modern documentary footage unrelated to the plot of the film is just shown while director
is explaining what happens in the unfilmed scenes.
Yeah, that is an interesting choice because I've seen other unfinished or partially lost films where they'll stitch things together with say storyboards or illustrations or something to that effect. So this is a choice that it first seemed rather jarring. I'm like, what are we doing, what's happening? Why are we in contemporary Polish urban environment? Here? Is this supposed to be a world of the film? No, it is
not a world in the film. It is, but it is not also completely disconnected from the film, so it ultimately ends up working like you're saying, but it is a unique choice.
Often, somehow the documentary film that's paired with the voiceover narration seems to connect in a feeling way to what's going on, even if it doesn't connect in a concrete way, Like there'll be a scene where something is being uncovered, and there is kind of the documentary camera seems to un cover something in a way.
Yeah, yeah, and it's and as we'll be discussing, there is often a kind of documentary point of view, almost found footage vibe to the camera work in the movie proper, Okay, So that connects nicely, I think with this added footage of these European streets. I'm not sure offhand of these I am assuming Polish, but it could have been. These could be French streets, because I know Zubowski spent time in France as well. Well.
Even the original footage of the movie, like the first third of the movie is like the the Blair Planet Project. You know, it's it's filmed via not exactly clear what the sci fi devices are, but there's like video diaries, so we get tons of point of view shots.
And the memory of the video diaries and so forth, and then there's just a lot there's there's there are extensive monologues that are about like the voyeuristic quality of film, because you have characters in the in the film that are filming things and recording things and documenting things. And one character in particular of the old Man, ends up ruminating on this for a while, like what does it mean that I don't speak? But I absorb and so forth.
So there's a lot in the film that seems to be speaking to a director slash creator's experience, and then we see that reflected back into these bits about the lost portions of the film.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, for example, there are parts where when the characters are looking into one of the other characters faces as they're recording a so called video diary, like one of them sort of tries to direct for them. They say, like turn it off now, you fools, this is not the right time or something. But then there's another thing that connects to that about the sort of metafilmmaking themes of the movie is how many characters throughout
the plot are described as actors. This is a recurring theme that like, well, it'll make more sense once we describe the plot that exists. But like a society that emerges on another planet as it is colonized by humans, and it seems that a major function within the emerging society is that of an actor. Somebody who says I'm an actor, I'm playing a role, and they'll like look into the camera at certain moments and say, how do you like my acting?
Yeah? Yeah, in this kind of bohemian, pagan, post apocalyptic society that emerges on this alien world. We see important roles set aside for of course martyrs and saviors, but also ultimately filmmakers and profits and actors.
And presumably the designers of parade floats, because we get those two. Yeah, So we'll probably talk a bit more about the production of the movie in a bit here, but just to say at the beginning, the production was quite famously intense, expensive and challenging. I think demanded a lot of the actors, and there are some reports that like it was a rewarding but grueling experience. It was very expensive and lavish. It was like an extravagant production.
They shot in many different locations all over the place, from the Gobi Desert to the Baltic coast of Poland and places in between, I think in the Caucasus mountains. It was just supposedly incredibly intense. And then it was brought to a conclusion before they had actually finished making the movie, because the Polish authorities shut it down for
some reason. There is dispute about what that reason actually was, like, was it related to was it related to supposedly subversive themes of the film that the authorities were uncomfortable with. Was it related to them going over budget and just like it being too expensive or was it one article
I was reading. I don't know how seriously this suggestion is made, but there's a very good article about the movie you can look up in Film Comment magazine by a writer named Jonathan Romney, who mentions first of all that On the Silver Globe is sort of the one of the defining examples of a film mode in the French expression m audit meaning a cursed film, a film that just like doesn't really belong in this world. In fact,
Romney says that it is. It's a film mode made by a director who seemed to specialize in making film mode. But also he mentions the possibility that it could have been shut down just because people were looking at this and like, people can't take like forty more minutes of this movie, you know, even the eighty percent we have is one hundred and sixty six minutes long, and it's
and it's so intense. It's going to be it's going to be amazing if people sit through this whole thing and can take it in all at once.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And you can imagine that some of the more aversive qualities, and there's plenty of places you can point to in the film that these may have been some definite contributing factors to like the order to destroy the film, because of course it's one thing to cancel something for going over budget, but to say, actually we want this erased from the world. And again, like you said, thankfully that effort was not fruitful.
So what we're left with is, in my opinion, a really truly fascinating artifact, not necessarily something that's going to be fun viewing for your regular movie night, Like you need to commit, you need to know what you're getting into with this one, But if you're willing to go there, it is an amazing film. It exhibits at once a weird genius and a deep passion like for all of the you know, we'll have some things to say about this movie's almost random feeling philosophical monologues, but it is
clearly a movie made with deep feeling. The feeling is just pouring out of it, and it's hard not to be infected by some of that. Also, just the textural genius of it, all of the costumes and the sets and the visual composition is just amazing, but it also does have a kind of artistic belligerence to it, like it is rob You you mentioned that it's not a movie that's like, you know, trying to harm the audience by just showing them gross torture scenes and all that.
I agree, it's not like that, but it is kind of a belligerent film, Like in a way it is challenging your attention to single combat.
Yeah, it is a film that will philosophically berate you and you want to take it all in. You're like this because the acting scenes in which we get these extended monologues, they're often just just amazing. Like the energy of the performance and the severity of the performance is just so enthralling. But it is kind of a struggle at times to really fall follow all the threads that are going on there.
In that article and film comment, Jonathan Romney describes sort of a set of films that don't feel like they belong in our world, that feel like they sort of come from another place, And he writes quote adhering neither to familiar screen aesthetics nor to the customary logic of filmmaking economics, they present themselves as free floating, lawless bodies, autonomously occupying their own sectors of the filmic cosmos. And I think that nails it. That's what this movie feels like.
It is a free floating lawless body. Yeah.
I mean it is difficult to compare this to other films, and certainly almost impossible to try to make it adhere to the laws of other films and to the framework of other films. That it has its own vibe, its own rules, and you can't fault it for following that pathway.
So yes, this is indeed a Polish film, and in fact it is our first Polish film on weird House cinema, and I have to say it might also be my first purely Polish film viewing experience, you know, not counting like co productions and of course various films with Polish talent or Polish you know, authorship and so forth. So we can put another pin in the map and another apology to France. We'll get to weird French movies eventually,
so often we'll throw in an elevator pitch here. I don't know that an elevator pitch can really do this film justice, so we might have to skip that, but it is. It is an epically weird film in multiple ways. So it is a it is a it is a fitting pit for weird house cinema.
It's kind of an alternate Book of Genesis set on another planet, Like, yeah, like a sci fi book of Genesis. Or maybe it's bigger than Genesis. Maybe it's like the whole Bible set on another planet. It's really got everything it's got. It's got saviors and profits and strife and concret quest and loss, and it's got it all.
Yeah. And aliens. It's got some really cool aliens. Yeah. In a way, it reminds me a little bit of Paradise Lost, only instead of trying to justify the ways of God to man, it's trying to justify the ways of man to God by by shouting at God.
Yeah.
All right, let's go ahead and listen to some trailer audio. This is from I'm honestly not sure if this is in any way an original trailer. This one was posted by the Austin Film Society. This might be more aligned with a recent re release of the film, which I'll mention here in a bit, but it should give you some flavor and you'll get to hear some of the Polish language of this film.
Are we going to hear one of the Sharns talking, Yes.
We will hear a sharn.
Esta es. Yeah. Yeah, you still scord, Yeah, you still want to be champas of tenty eighteen, station to be champs of them or it's your papa a pianetto for pretty us.
All right, So that gives you just a little little taste, but insufficient, because this is a film full of sights and sounds that I just have to be absorbed over the course of nearly three hours, and even the language itself. Again, I don't think I'd watched anything in the Polish language before, a film in the Polish language before, and this is
like a lot. There's a lot of Polish language to absorb here watching it in Polish with English subtitles, and as is often the case, you know, like the rhythm and the poetry, all the language seeps into you even if you don't you know, understand it, even as you're reading it, along with the dialogue and these performances.
Yeah, obviously I don't speak Polish, but there were little moments where like a word I would recognize would like hit and lock in. Like, there were many points in the movie where somebody would place huge emphasis on the word provda meaning truth.
Yeah, And.
There were a few things like that, the word the Polish word for earth, which I forget now there are parts where that is sort of repeated in fatically and it kind of burns in. Yeah.
So that's always an interesting experience in a foreign language film. All right, If you would like to see on the Silver Globe before we proceed here, well it is. You can get it. That's the good news. However, as of this recording, there's sadly neither a current legit streaming option or a Region A or region free disc as far as I'm aware of, but the film has been restored in HD. Eureka Video in the UK put out a great looking Region B blu ray with a bunch of extras.
I think we have heard that a Region A or some sort of region free release might be on the way, but I don't know the details on that or who's putting it out.
I hope they do. I mean, I know this movie has been shown in screenings at like art house theaters and stuff in recent years, but I don't know who is actually working on a disc release that can be seen in all your regular players in the US. But but yeah, I hope that's coming soon.
Yeah. Yeah, So you watch this on a disc rented from Videodrome, and I ended up just watching it on YouTube, just because that's the best way I could get it, and it ended up getting really good film quality. But of course none of that is guaranteed when you're depending on YouTube rips of movies. So still looking forward to a proper region A or reading free to release in
the future. All right, Well, let's talk a bit about some of the people involved here, and in doing so we'll sort of also go through some of the main characters, I guess, before getting into the plot. Starting here at the top with Andrea Zuwawski, the director and the writer
screenplay credit on this. He lived nineteen forty through twenty sixteen, Ukrainian born Polish director and writer who made a career of really going against the mainstream and state sensibilities, appealing ultimately more to art house tastes, while also working with
some of the biggest names Polish cinema. He studied cinema in France and then served under Polish director Andre Wasta, and he directed a pair of nineteen sixty nine TV movies which I'll come back to, and then he directed a film titled The Third Part of Night in nineteen seventy one. I haven't seen this one, but I've read that it's a rather intense and horrific holocaust drama with
various dreamlike elements to it. And in nineteen seventy two, he's credited with directing two episodes of the Polish Christopher Lee hosted horror anthology series Theater Macabre. Though these two episodes that he directed seemed to be these same short films from nineteen sixty nine, so they might have just been repackaged for TV anthology usage, which of course is not unheard of with horror anthology series in general.
Was Christopher Lee hosting an exclusively Polish show or is this a show that aired in multiple countries?
Now? This was a Polish horror thought the series, and you know they were able to get Christopher Lee to come in probably similar to we were talking recently about a small scale Canadian production that brought in Vincent Price to do something similar. So they probably brought him in for like a day, and he reported all this stuff.
Yeah, they shot all his segments and then they just space him out.
That would makes sense, and perhaps repackaged some already existing films and commissioned some other short works. So yeah, I'd love to hear from anyone in any of our Polish listeners or listeners with access or memories of Polish television. Perhaps you can provide more information about this.
Nineteen seventy two I think that would have been right around the time of the Wickerman. By the way, Wickerman is maybe what seventy three? Oh yeah, so you're getting that Christopher Lee, which is all the Christopher Lees are great, but that's the best one I think.
All right, So after this, Zuotsky follows it up with the nineteen seventy two historical satanic horror film The Devil and I also have not seen this one, but apparently there's plenty in here to poke Polish authorities, because they ended up banning the film in Poland. And in the midst of this, Zuotsky moves to France.
I heard it described as him being basically exiled.
Yeah, yeah too, it was too much, so he ends up going to France. After this, he makes the nineteen seventy five French romance drama That most Important Thing Love. And he returned to Poland for his next project, which is, of course the ambitious adaptation of his grandfather's science fiction novels. This is On the Silver Globe, shot between nineteen seventy six and nineteen seventy seven.
Yeah, so, from what I understand, on the Silver Globe is the title of the first of a cycle of three science fiction novels that Zuofsky's grandfather wrote.
Yeah, the Lunar Trilogy. Yeah, and a little more on the grandfather here in just a minute. So we've already discussed the problems this production, and we'll probably touch on it a bit more. Needless to say, the film does not come out in the late seventies. It's going to be another decade before it comes out. After for a while it may seem that it is completely lost. So but he keeps me moving on. You know, He's going
to keep making films. So Zowski after this point makes what might be his best known film internationally, one that I think if you've spent any amount of time like I have, rummaging around in video rental stores, you've probably seen the box out for this one because it has like an illustration of a gorgon of a Medusa on the cover. This is the nineteen eighty one psycho sexual horror film Possession.
I've never seen this, but I've heard I've heard it described actually in kind of similar terms like intense and difficult but very good.
Yeah. Yeah. It stars French actress Isabelle and Johnny sam Neil and German actress Margaret Carstensen. And yeah, I was reading a little bit. I haven't seen this one either. I'm just familiar with it by reputation. And I did see some interview segments from sam Neil and also from a Johnny who were pointing out that he out this was a rewarding but grueling acting experience that they're glad
they did when they were younger. And these are like, you know, decade or two old interviews, so we're not dealing with like, you know, current sam Neil reflecting on a film from the eighties. This is like nineties or early two thousand, Sam Neils reflecting on a film he did.
I'm in my Jurassic Park era. Yeah, Jurassic Park and Event Horizon. I can't do stuff like Possession anymore. Where we were going, we won't need eyes to make films.
Yeah. So, this was Zuotsky's only English language film and it was a French West German co production. He followed it up with the French drama The Public Woman in eighty four, Mad Love in eighty five, though this is not related to any other film with the title Mad Love, And then after this point, On the Silver Globe was finally released in the more or less in the forum that we experienced it in.
Yeah, so the way he describes it, because he you know, it's funny. The version of On the Silver Globe we have is mostly just a reconstruction of the film with these patches filled in with the modern documentary footage and
Zuofsky himself narrating the missing scenes. But it's also, I don't know, like two percent a documentary, Like there are parts where he just talks about what happened with the film, especially at the beginning and the end, and so he has like a monologue at the beginning that we'll get to when we get to the plot section. But I think toward the end he talks a bit about what
happened with the film. Doesn't he say that, you know, all of the costumes and the sets and everything were destroyed, but that maybe some people were able to hide to get a few of them away.
M yeah. Yeah. And then in the towards the very end too, we see his reflection in like a window or some glass on the street, and I don't know Poland or France wherever he's walking around here, So we get this this mirrored glimpse of the director, which which I thought was was quite perfect for.
This portion of the film, and that the any kind of bolts away. Yeah. Yeah.
So after On the Silver Globe was finally released, he would direct six more films, the last being twenty fifteen's Cosmos, a French Portuguese thriller that apparently does have some fantastic elements. So I'm not sure if it's if we're talking like magical realism or sci fi, but I think it doesn't seem to be defined as like a purely you know, speculative picture or anything. All right, So that is the director Andre Zuwewski. But then we have Jersey Zuwowski, his grandfather.
This is the author who wrote the Lunar Trilogy upon which this is based. He lived eighteen seventy four through no nineteen fifteen. Yeah, he wrote the Lunar Trilogy between the years of nineteen oh one and nineteen eleven, so these serve as at least in large part, basis for the film, though this adaptation certainly seems to update the
lunar setting and replace it with an alien world. We often see this with older science fiction that has been translated into latter decades, you know, where we have a different understanding of what the cosmos has in store for us. And the trilogy was apparently pretty successful. It was beloved by a wide Polish readership, including Polish sci fi writer Stanislav Limb of Solaris fame. And it's hey, it's also
available in English translation. I'm not sure at what point it enters English translation, but it is out there right now and you can pick it up in most formats. Jersey Zuwefski's career was cut short as he died of typhus during World War One, and this stands out as his most well known work.
Did you read anything about what motivated Andre to adapt his own grandfather's novel, like why was he interested in doing that? I didn't come across that, but it seems like a good question.
I didn't run across particular reason, but I understand that he had long wanted to do it, you know, like he felt a you know, obviously a connection to his grandfather,
the father, and his grandfather's work. But at the same time, you know, it's the adaptation seems to from what I can tell, it's, you know, it's true to a lot of the elements of those of those books, but also has this additional philosophical content and also you know, commentary on creativity and being a director that do seem to originate more with the director here.
And by philosophical content, I assume there you are referring in large part to this film's monologues's it's bold all caps, thirty two point font monologues about you know, one must if one acts, one has roots and oh god, I pulled a couple of quotes in here. Oh, here's here's one. I will feel in me, your inhuman translucence. I will feel your incomprehensible breath, your absolute coldness, and stuff about how like my identity is now you and your identity
has penetrated my identity and we have become you. Yeah, man, I think we got to talk about the actors because they are the ones screaming these lines in the surf.
Yeah. Absolutely, this is this is a film where pretty much every performance is just this existential waltz at the edge of sanity. Yeah, and it actually put in my mind, I believe it's a fresh air. Interview that I heard recently with the actor Emma Stone. Contemporary actor Emma Stone was recently in the excellent weird movie Poor Things. But she was talking about like the riders of acting and about like afterwards, you you may the actor will feel
often emotionally drained. They need to sort of like come down, reprocess. They may be just physically tired, if not from anything they're doing, like physically in terms of stunts or anything, but just from like the like the raised levels of excitement in the body while having to embody these you know, sometimes it's you know, often extreme states of human emotion and behavior.
Yeah, when you perform intense emotion deliberately to play a role in many ways that that it convinces your brain and your body that you're actually having those emotions, and so you can't just like turn it off easily after the scene's over. For for a lot of actors, you can't. So there's sort of a you've got to ramp up and then you've got to coast back down after it's over. Yeah.
Yeah, And and this is a lot of times, I mean that's often going on, if not always going on
in film, but sometimes it's invisible. This is a movie where it's almost impossible to ignore that reality, especially as the characters are giving these like these just high intensity, extended monologues whilst you know, being waist deep in the water or wallowing in the mud or or you know, or they're naked or they're you know, covered in blood or some other kind of uh uh, you know, additional factor is involved here that really just drives home, like wow, this this was a commitment.
I think most of the main cast in this movie is very good, but I don't think that with with maybe one exception, there really aren't subtle performances there. I mean, this is a movie where it's it's fever pitch with almost everybody all the time.
That's right, and the really one of the best examples of this is ultimately are our central character. Uh this is Andre Severin, who plays Merrik Marek, is a second wave astronaut from Earth. Who is received on the alien world as a savior and yeah is ultimately I guess our central character. Severin was born in nineteen forty six. Polish actor of stage and screen as well as a director. He is considered one of the greatest Polish actors of
all time. Highly decorated and respected. His credits go back to nineteen sixty five, still active today. Most of his credits are Polish or French films, including nineteen eighties The Conductor starring Sir John Gilgood and Golum from the same year. He also appears in nineteen ninety three's Schindler's List, which features several Polish actors. It's a supporting role, but it's you know, it's in the top like six or seven credits when you look at the films listing on the
various movie databases. He was also part of the international cast for Peter Brook's epic adaptation of the Mahabarata, playing the part of Yudistra, one of the Pandava brothers and
a central character in that. That is also that in a way you could compare this production that that particular production with on this over globe, because that is a very long adaptation of an epic that contains, in this case a number of international actors from various countries, but they are often engaging in extended monologues that have that are very deep and at times challenging to follow in full.
So Severin here, Yeah, spends a lot of screen time at or toppling over that edge of sanity, and even the less extreme emotional parts of the performance are he is at least emotionally naked, sometimes actually naked. And Yeah, this is definitely one of those performances, perhaps aided by the close proximity we are too. So many of these monologues there is a sense that the actor is not just speaking into the middle distance like they are speaking
at you. They are like sort of clawing their way as if as if trying to emerge from this world and this picture into your living room or into your cinema, et cetera.
In that article in Film Comment, I mentioned Jonathan Romney speaking of multiple characters doing these kinds of high intensity performances, But I think he probably has sever and most front of mine when he says this quote. The performances are flambuoyantly incantatory or declamatory, as if each actor is addressing an audience position somewhere over the brow of Yonder Hill.
Much agonized screaming and mad laughter is called for as the actors deliver grandly philosophical or religios discourse and then a few sentences later, Bear in mind that much of this dialogue is shouted, even screamed, by actors sometimes drenched in blood or standing waist high in the sea.
Yeah.
One of the videodrome gang on letterboxed, a guy by the name of John, commented that he quote kept expecting klaus Kinsky to stumble into frame Yeah, which I totally get that, because I would say that the raw energy and madness injected into this and other performances in the film are easily comparable to the sort of intensity that klaus Kinsky tended to bring to a picture.
As I often emphasize, I think Kinsky would bring a more chaotic evil energy to the proceedings, whereas I don't feel that kind of like malice in any of these performances, but I do feel that intensity. Yeah, the Kinsky intensity is there.
Yeah, all right. The next actor of note, and this is a character is more important early on. This is the character Jersey played by Jersey Trella who lived nineteen forty two through twenty twenty two, also known in the film as the Old Man.
So this is the actor Jersey playing the character Jersey based on the novel written by Jersey.
Yes, yeah, And I don't think that is an accident here, because this character is the filmmaker. This is a filmmaking first wave astronaut to the alien planet who yeah, shares his first name with the author and also seems to echo various ideas about filmmaking that align the character with the director. And he also becomes a demigod.
He's interesting in that. So we haven't gotten much into what the plot of the movie is, and there will be difficulties with ever explaining it fully. But yeah, So it is a movie about Earthlings colonizing another planet and founding a new culture there. And one thing that I think is interesting is that we see this character Jersey is one of the original astronauts who creates this colony, and he is the one who remains the most aloof from the emerging culture that is created, you know what
I mean. Yeah, he's the filmmaker, but he's also for a long time depicted as resistant to becoming fully integrated into the culture that comes into being.
Yeah, like he wants to observe, he wants to film, he doesn't speak, becomes this person of mystery to the descendants of these first wave astronauts to the alien planet, in part because he doesn't die. He's like the oldest person anyone knows of on this white Don't you die? Yeah, So he's like this, you know, this this immortal, this haunted immortal that keeps filming things, but also doesn't really share anything. It stands apart from this society.
This is the character I mentioned. This seems like the only actor in character that's actually not at eleven the whole time.
Right, Yeah, and he's still going to drill right into your soul with you know, at times kind of mumbly monologues, you know, looking right into the camera. But yeah, certainly subdued compared to the other performances. So Trela here was a Polish actor with credits going back to nineteen sixty eight, including seventy three's The Hourglass Sanatorium, eighty six is Gagag Glory to the Heroes, nineteen ninety four's Three Colors White
and what is This two thousand and one's Quovadas. This is a film that pops up for a number of people involved in this film. All right, The next character is and I could be wrong with this, I believe Asol and she is played by Grausner Dalagh born nineteen fifty four. So this character is one of the human descendants of the alien world. She becomes Merrick's lover. This is a Polish actress with credits going back to seventy nine and continuing on through at least twenty twenty two.
Looks like she did a fair amount of German TV and cinema as well. This is another intense performance.
She's really intense and quite good. I think this is one of the characters who plays an actor and looks into the camera and says, what do you think about my acting?
Yeah? So great, great performance here.
Yeah.
The next one, okay, this is the next character is a third wave human astronaut to the planet.
This is this character is where I start getting confused about whose relationship to what where is he when? I don't know? We can talk about that later. But this is Yasick.
Yeah. Yasick is played by Valdemar Kownowski born nineteen forty nine, another Polish actor. He played the Witcher's father in the original Polish adaptations of the Polish Witcher fantasy novels.
Oh okay, So for.
A lot of you out there, Yeah yeah, Even if you haven't seen a Polish film, you've in all likelihood seen something that originated in Polish literature of one form or another. Be that something like Solaris or something like the Witcher series.
Ah, the shared DNA between on the Silver Globe and the Witcher wouldn't be great. If the Witcher showed up on this planet.
Oh man, he'd find plenty to do.
He's like, I'll take care of your shurns for a price.
All right. The next character is Marta. Marta is a first wave human astronaut to the alien planet and ultimately I believe the mother to all human descendants there.
That's right. She's the Eve of the interplanetary Adam and Eve and Jersey trio.
Played by Iwana Bilska born nineteen fifty two, an award winning actress with credits from nineteen seventy eight till today, including two horror films of possible interest. One is nineteen eighty three, She Wolf which is said to be pretty great, and twenty fifteen's The Lure, a Mermaid movie that I've also read good things.
About, a scary Mermaid movie, I think.
So I don't know a lot about it, but I just did like preliminary glancing around looking at some reviews, and people seem to like it, so color me interested. But anyway, her performance here as Marta, the mother of humans on this alien world, another intense performance. As we'll discuss with this character. This is basically the first wave astronauts almost immediately to send this kind of bohemian pagan
waltz with madness. It's you know, it's like it's going into going to another planet seems to just intrinsically trigger just a philosophical conundrum, to say the least for any space traveler. You know, it's like in Event Horizon, you go into space and you turn into hell Raiser, And in this movie, you travel to another planet and you are just instantly unmoored from your understanding of self or world.
Yeah, it's like you arrive on the Silver Globe and you are deeply troubled by the question of what it means to act.
All right, A couple of other actors I'll mention more in passing. I don't have extensive notes on them, but Jersey Graalek plays Peter. Peter is the one or the other of the three first wave human astronauts the alien planet who seems to have the most pronounced descent into raving madness.
Though he is the primary atom of all of the colonists, so he's like the father of many of the do people on this Earth.
Yeah, and graphically of nineteen forty six through twenty sixteen, then I believe the first daughter of Marta is the character Ada, played by Helsbitta Karovska born nineteen forty three is another Polish actress with extensive Polish film credits. Oh and then we also have a character that is called the actress because she is an actress, but not an actress on the alien world. She is an actress on Earth,
which should we be calling Earth Old Earth? In the film they talked about Old Earth a little bit.
I mean, I've been thinking of it as Earth and the Silver Globe.
I guess, all right, So this is the Denizen of Earth and she is played by Christina Janda born nineteen fifty two. Award winning Polish actress, best known for nineteen eighty nine's Interrogation, in which she starred and one Best Actress at the Kinds Film Festival. Other films include nineteen eighty six's Leputa, nineteen ninety five's Pesca, and two thousand
and fives A Few People a Little Time. She was also in the Polish sci fi films The War of the World's Century from nineteen eighty, Synthesis from eighty four, and nineteen eighty five's Oh b oh Ba The End of Civilization.
This is the one on Earth who Yasick is her lover, and Marek was her lover, but they got rid of him by sending him to another planet.
Correct, that is, okay, the primary connection between these characters. And we get to see some drama play out between her and Jossick on Earth, and it's she's not in it a lot, but she has this kind of like noir ice queen actress type with that kind of like old fashioned hat, you know. And she also, like everybody in this film, looks visibly pale, in part due to I think just like the way they shot or processed the film. So if she has a real ice queen vibe.
Yeah, she looks like she would be stumbling into the private detective's office with a cigarette and a holder, saying, you know, my husband, I need you to but she she also there's a great scene where she's trying to run over Yossick with a car in the middle of the desert, and.
That great space car or future dystopian future hot wheels car is pretty great.
I think this is the scene where Yosick says in the end, every reduction to physiology is the fascism of the soul.
Yeah. Of course, I've always thought that that's also where we get to in some of these scenes. This is when we get to hear the most of the prog rock section off the score.
Bet you didn't think you'd get that, huh. Yeah. So it's not until the last quarter of the movie that the electric guitars come in and you get some rock music.
Yeah, and so fitting that. The final person in the production we're going to talk about here is Andre Korzinski, who lived nineteen forty through twenty twenty two, highly successful Polish composer who worked with Zuofsky on eleven of his films,
including The Devil and Possession. So the Devil score I listened to a little bit of this has a kind of psychdelic rock and kind of like chaotic jazz percussion vibe to it, and Possession has which again I haven't seen, I just was listening to portions of the score has like a stronger synth than disco vibe to it, but with also a lot of flute, kind of jazz flute vibe. I guess you might call it jazz clute on classical notes and flute. And then on the silver globe, I
don't know. I guess you might say it leans more towards a kind of serious sci fi ambiance for a lot of the score, but then has these very noticeable splashes of prog rock, especially later in the picture. Nice Now. I don't believe this score has ever been released, but Finders Keepers Records put out The Devil just last year, and they have been before that. I believe they put
out the score of Possession, so you never know. Again, He's a he was a highly successful, pretty famous Polish composer, and these scores are are very interesting, so I think there is an audience for them.
Okay, is it time to talk about the plot.
Yeah, let's venture into space to the.
Extent we can. Let's start with some disclaimers. This is not like an just abstract art house film without a plot. The movie does have a plot. It has a concrete story that I think can in principle mostly be followed, but it is quite difficult to follow for reasons at multiple levels. For one thing, there there's a lot of stuff in the movie that does not really advance the action,
does not move the plot forward. There are the weird philosophical monologues, which are interesting though they can themselves be difficult to follow, but they don't seem to often affect what happens between the characters moving on. They're more kind of reflections of inner thoughts that, to varying extent, seem connected to what's happening in the plot, though sometimes they
seem totally unconnected. Another problem is who is who? I could not always keep the characters and their correspondence as straight. I don't know if you have the same problem, but I would be wondering, like, wait, is this the same person who was just in the last scene? And sometimes I'd rewind it and try to figure it out, and other times I was just like I don't know.
I would highly suggest having the Wikipedia plot summary for this on your phone handy just to glance at now and again. That's what I did, and I found that it helped immensely. Yeah, probably not entirely necessary, but if you're suddenly like, wait, who is this character? What is he doing? You can just sort of get up to speed and then you're good to go.
We also have the missing segments that we get narrative explanation to tell us what goes on there. In fact, I would say it's probably easiest to follow the parts of the plot that are just being narrated by the director because there's less confusion about what's happening than when you're actually watching it acted out.
You know.
And I didn't expect this to be the case, because the first time there was one of these segments, I was kind of like, oh man, it's a shame we don't get to see that, and you know, what they're describing sounds very visual. By the end of the movie, there is one scene in particular that I was almost kind of glad that I didn't see, because by that point you have been completely indoctrinated into the visual and sonic world of this picture, so anything he describes to you.
You can basically simulate it in your head. You know what the characters look like, you know what the set looks like in many cases, so you can piece it together. So it weirdly like works really well later in the picture, to the point where you almost feel like you saw the scene that was missing.
I agree, and in fact, I think we should consider ourselves as reviewing not the movie that was intended to be made in nineteen seventy seven, but the product that exists now. The movie we're talking about is the version with these patches and the narration by Zoovski, and the modern documentary footage that is now on the Silver Globe is which is another reason it's a really interesting artistic product. I don't know how I would feel about the movie if I had just seen what it was supposed to
be when he was making it in seventy seven. But okay, so, But to come back to other problems with recapping the plot, it's also just a conceptually confusing story to begin with, because I rob maybe you understood this better than I did. What exactly is the time space relationship of the astronauts in the very opening of the film that I'm going to talk about in just a minute, and also Yasik's culture to the main action of the movie. That's like
the colony on the Silver Globe. Are Yasick and the actress on the same planet as the others or on a different one. They're on the same planet at some point, but do they have to travel to it? I don't know. It becomes really hard to figure out what's going on for me.
There limited understanding is that, Okay, there is contemporary Earth that we see in those missing segment portions that we talked about, but for the film proper, the story proper, we have the Silver Globe planet, and then we have Earth or perhaps Old Earth, which is a very like ruined dystopian world like it is.
It is.
It is a place where humanity is kind of like run out, you know. It's like there's an advanced space program that is still barely chugging along. There's a lot of ruin new like tribal cultures have emerged on the planet, and they're also handing out some sort of weird space drug.
But for the most part, I am to understand. You have to use a spaceship to travel from one world to the next with the caveat that in the latter portion of the film, it's possible you travel there by taking space drugs that the people on horseback give you.
I'm not sure on that, all right. So we cannot possibly do a more scene by scene talk like we do with some movies. This movie is too long, too confusing, too uncertain. There would be too much to talk about. So instead, I think what I'm gonna do is kind of closely narrate the opening, and then we can zoom out and do a loose synopsis of the whole story, and then maybe zoom in on some individual elements that interested us.
All right.
So the first thing we see is wide blankets of snow over mountaintops, and we see trees, the tree tops of a snow dusted conifer forest. The color palette for the whole movie is very moody and cold. It's sort of dominated by blue green and gray. But there is a different look when we get to the planet later. The whole thing is kind of blue green and gray, but the planet itself is going to feel very silvery
according to the title, I guess. But here I think we're looking at Earth and we see on one of the slopes covered in deep snow, surrounded by all these pine trees. A figure on horseback in a bulky, elaborate costume made of furs, pelts, feathers, and sticks is coming down the mountain. And here the narrator comes in, and this is the director Zuofski talking. He says, you will see a film made ten years ago, a shred of a film, a two and a half hour story, one
fifth of which is missing. That one fifth, dating back to nineteen seventy seven, when the film was annihilated, will never be recreated. In place of the missing scenes. You will hear a voice which will briefly explain what was to be. We are bringing on the Silver Globe to an end in the year nineteen eighty seven. So again there's this meta commentary, these almost documentary comments within the
movie itself, now in the form we have it. So on screen, the figure on horseback makes it down the mountain to a flat expanse, and the horse starts to gallop, and the rider's face we don't see. It's covered in a large gray mask. And the figure rides into the courtyard of an empty, dilapidated Polish palace where more figures are dressed in the same style, and they're encamped there. And one interesting thing is we see the hearth there's like a campfire burning and the flames are green.
What did you make of that, Rob, Oh yeah, the green flames. I mean on one level, yeah, the way that the film was filtered or shot, you know, everything has this kind of sort of a bluish tint to it, I guess, this pale blue tint. But also within the context of the film, it feels like, well, this is the maybe the fire of an alien or in this case, perhaps an altered world, because again, Earth itself in this film it seems to be a dystopian, at least semi
post apocalyptic world. Things have not gone well here, world in decline, and to a large extent that is also the case we will find out concerning the Silver Globe. It is also a world in decline, populated by a native species that seems to be in decline as well. So maybe fires just green now.
Yes, I almost took it as something about the atmosphere of the world at this point. Anyway, the rider dismounts and runs up the stairs inside the palace and bursts into this big empty room where two men are resting on cots, and the men here are dressed in a totally different style of clothing from the rest of the camp. All the other people at the camp are dressed in these pelts and feathers and these haunting opaque masks. The two men here are dressed in dirty, well worn green jumpsuits.
They look like, you know, employees of a space center in the science fiction future.
Yeah. Yeah, And again to be clear, this is Earth. This may not be clear when you're first watching the film, but this is a dilapidated Earth, right.
So these two guys receive the rider, and the rider presents them with an object wrapped in furs that was found in the mountains and brought down with great haste. It is something that should be of interest to them. It's an artifact made of metal, and it looks like it could be part of a spaceship or satellite. A few interesting things about this scene. The people here, who are dressed sort of like astronauts even though they're on Earth,
are obviously like foreigners living among these people. So the riders people are dressed in this elaborate kind of beautiful clothing, and they speak a different language that the astronauts here must translate, and the people are treating the astronauts almost like guests, but there is a division between them. One of the astronauts, the younger one, seems to have kind of a warm relationship with the people, while the older
guide does not. The younger man seems to maybe have a really relationship with one of the women in the group, but the older man gives the people some kind of pellets or pills that they desire, though he says his supply will eventually run out, and the older guy seems
to regard these people with suspicion. He worries that they're going to tamper with his equipment and damage the electronics, which would be catastrophic for them, and he sort of speaks with scorn about the younger man's relationship with the
other people. So when I was first watching this, the way I interpreted it was, oh, Okay, these are astronauts on an alien planet and they're having this tense, kind of different or difficult relationship with the locals who seem to be treating them well, but it's also it's complicated, and so that was one way that sort of made a kind of sense. But then as I realized more as the plot developed, I realized, like, no, these are people on Earth.
Yeah, that's right. It seems to be the case in this film, both on Earth and then ultimately on the alien planet, that humanity has a tendency to descend into this kind of like Bohemian New Pagan sort of tribal structure of life with brilliant costuming. Yes, it is just important to stress how glorious all of the costuming in
this film is. You know, just everything that is worn is grimy and imperfectly fitting of the atmosphere and the character, be it the feather festooned and garments of these riders, or the even the pristine spacesuits of the space travelers, and then also the garments that the descendants of the space travelers end up wearing on the alien world. Clearly a great deal of work and creativity went into the costuming on this picture.
Oh yeah, the costumes are an absolute highlight. But anyway, so coming back to the sea, and so there's a dispute about the origin of this object that the rider brought them. The writer says that they saw it fall from the sky during the night just two days ago, but one of the guys in the astronaut suit says, that's impossible. This thing looks like it was launched into space.
You know, it was burnt. We can see how it was burned in the rocket launch process, and that would mean it had to be fifty or sixty years old. So it sounds like they're saying, you know, there hasn't been a rocket launch in fifty or sixty years. But then they sort of process it. They seem concerned. They're like, if it really is recent, what does that mean. So they decide that the artifact must be analyzed, and when it is analyzed, it will contain some kind of recording.
So they suit up to travel outside, where it is freezing by the way. They put on these ghoulish gas masks, and they go out, passing by what looks like an airfield with pulsing lights on the runway, and then there is a hatch that they used to access an underground bunker. Now Here we reached the first missing scene. We cannot follow the actors into the bunker because that film was either lost or never shot. So instead the narrator comes
in to tell us what happens. The narrator says, under the hatchway into which the two astronauts enter, there is a lab, a huge room filled with machines that listen
to the sounds from outer space. And then meanwhile on the screen, we are shown contemporary footage of crowds moving through what looks like an airport or a subway tunnel in nineteen eighties Poland, and the camera glides over the floor of this huge windowless passageway at about knee height, just looking up at hundreds of busy strangers as they
walk on without noticing. And then the narration goes on saying only one of the oldest machines, which has remained idle for decades, can read out what is inside the container which the astronauts received from the rider. It is a diary, or rather a series of semi transparent plays featuring screens as if shot with a camera. The first shows the journey of a spacecraft, the pilots losing control
crashing it into the mountains. Only a fragment of this recording survives, and then we cut to the inside of a spacecraft cockpit with astronauts in full suits and helmets strapped into their seats in cramped quarters. With this just hell of wires protruding everywhere, and the spacecraft is shaking and rattling. It's obviously going through you know, it's a bumpy ride. And then something happens. The cockpit starts to
fill with what looks like white foam. It's like a bubble bath in there, and one of the astronauts silently writes the word death in chalk on the inner wall of the fuselage. Now I thought this was interesting because Zuofsky tells us in the narration that only a fragment of this recording survives and then shows us this moment
from the spacecraft crashing. But since within the plot the are looking at a degraded film record of events in the past, I think it's genuinely ambiguous whether Zuovsky is saying that only a fragment of this part of his film on the Silver Globe survives and it's this clip that we're about to see, or that the clip is supposed to be only a fragment which survives of the video diary of the semi transparent plates within the plot, And in fact, I would say this is not the
only way in which the events of the story have weird overlaps with the circumstances of the production and restoration and release.
Yeah, it ends up creating a complex tapestry here.
Anyway, we learned through more narration the spacecraft crashes on a mountaintop on this other planet, an earth like planet which was chosen for its ability to support life. This mission was not just one of exploration, but of colonization. You almost get the sense that the astronauts are trying to escape something on Earth. They're here to start a new life. But I don't know, Rob, did you have the same feeling that It's almost like you wonder if
was this sanctioned? Is this a sanctioned colonization attempt or these astronauts who just managed to get hold of a spaceship and leave on their own accord.
Hard to say, yeah, because it feels like Earth is in bad shape and there's not like a strong central command center that is really in touch with the mission. Once it is sent off. Communication between Earth and the Silver Globe is very tenuous. So yeah, yeah, I don't know that this was necessarily a state sponsored mission so much, but we do learn a little bit more about it as we proceed.
So the commander of the mission is killed in the crash and his body is left behind, and at some point we see I think there are multiple of the cruise remains they end up doing this for, but they create a kind of mountaintop tomb for him. This like a big pile of rocks on which the body is left. And for some reason, up in this upper mountain area, maybe because it's so arid, the body doesn't really decay.
Like we come back and see these bodies later on the mountaintop and they become like preserved, like the body of Linen or something up there, and they are visited later in a religious sense.
Yeah.
Another one of the astronauts on this mission, Tomash, survives but is badly injured. And here we see haunting barren landscapes as the astronauts look down from a mountain into the silver valleys all around. I think this is probably part of the film that was filmed in the Gobi Desert, like in Mongolia.
Yeah, I believe so. Breath taking locations.
Yeah, And the narrator tells us while we look at footage of houses and rooftops shot from the window of a passing car in modern Poland, that the astronauts see another rocket ship crash into the mountains nearby and explode, and they wonder quote were those who died in it with them or after them? Intriguing question. But they come down from the mountains and a couple of surface exploration buggies. These are big all terrain vehicles, and they're heading toward
the ocean. They think they want to set up their colony on the beach with access to the sea. And on the way they pass a formation of rocks that looks deliberately piled together quote like an architectural form, as if this apparently empty planet had once been home to a civilization long in the past, and we will learn that maybe it is still home to a civilization that
they don't know about. Then the narrator tells us that in missing footage, the injured astronaut Tamash hallucinates while riding in back of one of these buggies across the desert. He believes that he sees the ghosts of dead astronauts trying to capture him and chain him up for what purpose. He doesn't know. That is one missing scene I kind of wish we had. I would like to see the astronaut ghosts.
Feel like an adaptation of a pac Man.
Also, the other astronauts are a woman named Marta and two men named Pyotr in Jersey, so we watched them swing between bouts of ecstasy and terror in their new environment. The philosophical monologues begin almost immediately, and they are raving about the divine potential of human nature, like, oh, what is the seed of man?
This?
If the seed has a sense to it, it is an animal. If the seed has reasoning to it, it is a man. If the seed has what intellect to it, it is an angel or the son of man. And it just I was like trying to follow this. At first, I was like, what exactly is he talking about? And then I just had to get used to like, Oh, it's just going to be like this.
Yeah, a lot of it is just going to sort of roll off of your brain. But in a way it's you know, it's like it's like a poetic lyric to a song that you're maybe not supposed to really understand beat for beat, but if you sort of pick up on half of it, I feel like you're probably doing pretty well. I don't know if the experience is different if you were a native, a Polish speaker, and this film is speaking directly to you without translation and subtitles.
But and certainly I would love to hear from anyone out there who has had that experience. But I don't know. I have my doubts. I feel like the contents of these monologues are so thick and philosophical and poetic that it would be difficult to follow everything beat by beat unless you had multiple viewings of this film.
I agree with that. So the narrative continues to cut between lost segments that are narrated by Zuofski and film shots of the actors struggling with condition on the planet. They're at one point hit by a hurricane and swept into a flood current, nearly drowned. Then they are stranded on a vast mud flat, with Marda quite movingly still clutching Tomasha's dead body after he passes away, so like the implication is that she clung to him the whole
time they were struggling to survive the flood. Again, most of this part of the movie seems to be shot in point of view. Shots like these are the video diaries that we saw being received from space earlier, And I guess here is a good point to kind of zoom out and recap the plot with a little more distance. So what happens after this is that the remaining astronauts Marta, Pyotr, and Jersey will go on to found an extraterrestrial kind of Swiss family Robinson base on the beach on the
beach of this world. So we see them building, or in fact, we don't see a lot of the building process. They just suddenly have these like huts and structures and underground layers, these tunnels they've dug out, and fence posts, and they have tools and weapons, and they have clothing
that they've created. They start to sort of change their appearance to be I don't know, Like they make tattoos and markings on their faces and their skin, and they wear these new styles, and they set about having children. They become a sort of Adam and Eve trio of this new generation of humans. So they learn that the humans born on the new planet grow and mature at an accelerated pace. It's something about the planet and its atmosphere,
I guess. So it seems that within a few years the children, the first generation of children they have, are already reaching adulthood and then again, sort of like the Adam and Eve story, there is an unrealistic proliferation of new humans from these three progenitors.
With you.
They don't really get into this deeply, but a lot of implied incest mythological incests. Yes, So the astronauts and the children that grow up on the Silver Globe, interestingly do not seem to reproduce the old the Earth culture that they come from, and instead they create a new Neolithic culture with their own emerging styles of clothing and art, their own technology, and their own religious beliefs and customs. And this is what I thought was one of the
most interesting things about the movie. It was just the idea that, like, so they land, and I think what you normally see in a sci fi movie is just that like adults land on another planet and they are inculturated in the culture they come from and they just sort of like reproduce that in the new place. But here instead they're shown like making a new, previously non existent human culture from scratch.
Yeah, there's like a just a break from the previous culture. You know, it's like almost like a visiting the other plant is in and of itself an intense psychedelic experience that changed completely, changes how you relate to yourself and your world. And so yeah, they seem to just sort of create wholesale this new pagan bohemian society. Like you said, they start engaging in all these different forms of face painting and or tattoos, intricate braiding of hair and so forth.
There's one thing I love of what they do with the bodies of the dead, Like there is this little island off the shore of the beach where they live, and the island has these huge standing stones on it, like it like this offshore stone hinge. And I don't know exactly how that was created or if they found it that way, but it becomes a kind of island
of the dead where. Yeah, after Pyotr and Marta die, I think Jersey the one remaining original astronaut, now the old man who's revered is kind of a prophet and a demi god by the new generations of humans their children. He takes the bodies of the other two dead astronauts and puts them back into their astronaut suits which they have not been wearing, and then takes them out to this island of the dead. With the standing stones and like leaves them there. Is that what happened?
I believe?
So?
Yeah, And now that you mentioned Island of the Dead, like it's not, you know, one to one looking like Boukland's Island Isle of the Dead painting, But there is something to the asymmetry of the island that does kind of match up with that painting. So I don't know, maybe that I don't know if this is a reference to that painting or that painting and this particular shot are both sort of referencing the same thing, like deep in the Bowels of the human mind?
Now, is it? At some point around here after Marta and Pyotr de that some of the Silver Globe humans lead an expedition across the ocean and canoes to see what's on the other side, and then only one of them comes back alive, saying they were attacked by something over the water.
I think, yeah, divisions begin to occur.
You know.
There seem to be like a faction that are like, we're good here, and the other faction is like, we need to cross the ocean and see what's there. Claim what's there? You know, they're expansionists. But only one comes back because they're like there are like cities of stone, there, vast cities, and there are these winged creatures and they
killed most of us. And so now we have we have a hint of some sort of indigenous civilization here, some sort of alien life form, and so far first contact has not gone well.
There's also a section in here, I think it's a little earlier where there are random explosions everywhere that are never explained, but just I love the effects. They're just like, you know, explosives planted under the soil, so they just start popping up from the beach and the surrounding land in the forest. It's just exploding and you never understand why.
Yeah, it's just a weird alien world where we don't know if this is seismic chemical or it's stuff falling from the sky, but it creates chaos and death.
Before the final of the Astronauts, before Jersey dies, he makes a pilgrimage to the mountaintop where the Astronauts originally landed, and I think this is when he sends off his video diaries to return to Earth.
Which is I guess what they're talking about. Having received at the top of the picture.
That's how I took it as well. Yeah, so a new batch of astronauts from Earth they receive this message and some are sent to the planet. Maybe just one is sent or multiple are scent I don't know. We only really encounter one, and that is Marek played by Andre Severin, who is going to become sort of the main character of the movie going forward. When Marek arrives, he is welcomed by a religious order that has arisen among the humans, and he is treated as a long
prophesied messiah figure. And it's going to fall to Merrick to lead the humans against a terrifying and mysterious alien enemy known as the Shurns. Now, what are the Shurans?
Oh?
Boy, I loved the Shurans. They were so creepy. It's kind of unclear to me exactly what their origin is. I think they are just supposed to be the indigenous inhabitants of this planet, but it also seemed possible to me that they were created by humans in some unclear I don't know exactly.
Yeah, they are some sort of humanoid bird person that was slash perhaps still is capable of flight, and they also are psychic. They have some sort of telepathic abilities, and in this I feel like this might have been connected, might have been partially inspired by the writings of Edgar Reisberg, where we have at one point we have we have a psychic winged alien species that features into the plots
of some of his world. But yeah, these creatures have some sort of telepathic ability, and also later on we learned some sort of like cybernetic enhancement that is a part of how they are expressed. Yeah, there will be monologues about this.
Yeah. Oh, but you know, you could get the wrong idea by hearing that these are bird like creatures, because you might be imagining like big, beautiful feathery wings, and it's not quite like that. It's more like they are humanoids draped in shaggy modeled cloth and caked in mud, hobbling stiffly around on two feet, sort of like scarecrows with heads covered by scary burlap bags. They're covered in you know, just filth and cobwebs, but they do have
hidden bird like anatomy underneath underneath it all. So they have like the sort of angel wings coming off of their backs, and then the lump of a beak just protruding in the front of the face, but always, like I said, sort of under a burlap sack or something. And then these dark recesses that contain no visible eyes. They are so creepy looking.
Yeah, reminded me. There's a certain sketchy esque quality to them. And they also reminded me of the Beast from the nineteen seventy eight Check Beauty and the Beast film that we watch for Weird House a while back.
So at this point, the Sharns are a hated foe of the humans on the Silver Globe. They are oppressing and enslaving the humans. And then I think also they are mating with humans to create a type of terrible hybrid offspring called the Mortase, which seem to function kind of like undead soldiers. Almost.
Yeah, definitely. There's a scene later on where we see a whole bunch of them together that have been kind of like collected and imprisoned.
So anyway, the new astronaut Marek is brought into the culture and politics of the human faction here.
Uh.
There is the woman named Hazel who is destined by prophecy to be his lover, I think, But she's also like an actress and is brilliantly acting out the part that has been prophesied for her. But then they do genuinely fall in love with each other. And then there are priests and monks who I sort of understood as
each trying to manipulate Merick for his perceived power. We also see Merrik presiding over battles against the Mortes in the in the Shurans, writing what looks like a parade float through the middle of the field of combat while his adoring minions slay their enemies.
Yeah, there's a lot of religious zeal and in this, this feeling of just of a crusade here that at times made me, you know, it made me think of doune In in the The Rise of the Messiah character in Dune, the Rise of paul A Treades and as Malatib and so, yeah, there's a frenzied energy to this is like getting everybody worked up to and into it to go on these these campaigns against the shern So
it's it's really like splendid cinematic stuff. I should also know that there are a number of scenes here that take place in some sort of vast cave complex.
Yeah, I think it was shot in an abandoned salt mine.
Ah, that absolutely makes sense because you see like parts of the cavern are augmented clearly, and you see like, you know, clear human structures of some sort, but in a very like alien decayed way. That works perfectly for the film.
Yeah, there are beautiful, beautiful, ugly sets in these caves and in the mines that are so good and just generally that this movie uses. It chooses the locations of its shots very well. You know, it's almost always framed in an interesting place. And it's interesting the way that these settings seem to have changed the culture of the humans, because we see them doing stuff down in the subterranean
settings that we don't see them doing above. Like in the subterranean setting is where they keep their prisoners, Like they take the leader of the Shurns prisoner and they've got him captive there, and they've got all these mortas as prisoners. But it's also the only place we see the humans like engaging in orgies. There seems to be some kind of ritual orgy going on that's like hundreds of people sort of writhing about naked on the ground, their bodies like painted gray and blue.
I think it and I may be wrong in this, but I think the idea is that these are humans who have been like psychically touched by the shurn in some way that is like, you know, they've kind of just fallen off into just unending desire and they're like writhing on the floor the cavern in a way that feels like directly inspired by the Gustaf Door illustrations for Dante's Inferno. And and I believe Purgatory as well. Maybe I'm more specifically thinking of scenes from Purgatory.
Absolutely, yeah, I can see that link.
At one point, we have characters walk across them even like they are not only on the floor, but they are the floor of the cavern.
Yeah. Yeah, So, as I said in this section, Marek does fall in love with Iol, but he also seems plagued by bad memories of failed relationships on Earth. And as you alluded to earlier, this character Marek is always operating right at the brink of madness, Like he is giving these incredibly powerful, passionate monologues, but he is not
doing well emotionally, yeah, from the get go. So Marek eventually leads his forces in an assault on the schern homeland across the sea, which strangely looks like it could be the war torn ruins of a Polish city.
Yeah, yeah, it is. It definitely has that feel to it. And you know, obviously that was probably more or less how they shot it. They use some sort of like fittingly gray section of some Polish city and they just dirtied and grimed it up a lot. But I guess it's fitting for the film in that it's again, even the world of the Silver Globe is a world in decline,
like Sharan civilization is in decline. There's at least at some point mentioned that they have lost the ability to fly am I remembering that correctly, though, then there are it seems like there are instances where they do fly, so they Again it's like one civilization in decline attempting to topple another civilization decline in decline on this strange world.
Yeah. But also Mark is strangely affected by like the persuasive powers of the Shurans, like the Sharon leader who he captures and talks to, kind of gets in his head in a way, And when he's on campaign attacking the Sharn homeland, he has these weird moments where he I don't know exactly how to interpret everything emotionally, but like, there's a part that we don't get to fully see, but it is told to us in one of the narrated segments that he goes into like a cathedral in
the Sharn city, and the cathedral is full of these like lock boxes containing Sharn brains, And yeah, so what's going on here?
Something to do with the complex nature of Sharn existence that they are augmented cybernetic beings. Maybe the brains are from another species and the brains are like remotely controlling the bird bodies. I don't know, it's very complex. I wish we would have gotten those brain scenes.
Yeah too, but yeah, it is.
It's a lot. Now that being said, just because the Sharn set Merrick off, everything seems to set Merrick off. If you were to ask Merrik, do you want cream and sugar with your coffee, it would probably result in a fifteen minute monologue about, oh, well, to put the coffee in the cream into the coffee is to make my coffee into something that I did not have before, And it would keep going on and it would just be again be at the edge of just complete collapse. The whole time.
I don't know if the monologu would even mention coffee, it might set off a monologue is like, in order to understand you must I destroy you.
Yeah.
Also, okay, so there's the campaign part. When Marrek eventually returns to the Earthling colony across the sea after the attempted conquest, he finds the beach uh oh full of heretics impaled on stakes there is an inquisition going on, and he is next, and then we work our way up to the final, really the final set piece of the movie, which is that Mark gets crucified.
If there is like a BINGO card for extravagant art house epics, I feel like this is definitely on there, like crucifixion of central character, and it's uh yeah, it's bloody and horrifying. Though it does come after the scene where we encounter like a good dozen or so heretics impaled on the beach in what is a grizzly scene. Like, you know, at this point, we're over two hours into
the film and we've seen a lot. We've seen a lot, a lot of blood and stuff, but this this I was not quite prepared for how grizzly these sections are and.
At least one of the impaled guys is a real actor. I'm not they actually impaled him, but they have him up on a really high up stake, sitting there and delivering lines. I don't know how they achieved that effect.
Yeah. These not to get too graphic, but these these are these poles are they're impaled on, are like dripping with the ruptured entrails of the people who have been impaled. It's very graphic, and yet there's like this kind of almost Monty Python esque I'm not Dead yet kind of vibe to it, because you have a guy on top of this thing giving an extended monologue, and then another similar feel when we get our main character hauled up on a form of a crucifix.
Now there's something I haven't even mentioned yet, which is that the last like third to a quarter of the movie, while the Marek plot is going on, it's also intercutting with the plot of the actress and Yasik, who are I think they are lovers, and the actress was once Mak's partner, but they sent Marek away to another planet so that she and Yasick could be together.
Yeah, there was like a love triangle and the solution was to send him off. He comes to the planet becomes its savior, but then at the same time on the planet, he's returned from this campaign across the ocean. And I believe it's implied that the campaign has not been entirely successful. It has perhaps been you could perhaps
view it more accurately as a retreat. And at this point there is definitely a schism in the culture here on the Silver Globe, where some people were like her, are saying, I don't think he is the savior, And I've kinda got this vibe that he was not. He did not come here, He was exiled here, right, And that's why you have all these heretics impaled on the beach.
Right, there's this other religious figure who we are told says that Mark was not sent to them as a savior. He is a worm expelled from below. But then so, oh, I forget how this even happens. Somehow, Yossick and the actress arrive on the Silver Globe planet and they're there like with the other humans, for the crucifixion in the end, and there's a very they take on kind of religious the trappings of religious figures.
Yeah, I could not find a really adequate explanation of this. I looked around and I found other people online trying to figure this out as well. Like they do they travel on a spaceship and we just don't see it. Maybe do they just take weird drugs and magically travel here. Possibly there might be some third option I'm missing, but at any rate, they arrive.
I just wanted to mention a frame that I included right here at the end for us Rob which is toward the end of the movie. One character. Wait, is this the character of the actress who is shown with the with like a flesh eating disease at the end?
Oh, I thought this was Azel.
Oh, okay, it might be okay, Yeah.
For she is, assuming I'm correct here, she has now has some sort of a strange kind of like space leprosy thing going on. It's you know, grotesque and beautiful at the same time.
Yeah, And so she has that she wears like a veil over her face but it's uncovered and she has these sores and then it Yasik is just standing there next to her and says how much can one endure?
Uh?
And I have to feel like maybe that was the director talking about both the making of the movie and your watching of it.
Yeah, how much can one endure about what one hundred and sixty six minutes.
There's so much we haven't talked about, but I feel like we've got to cut it off at some point, So I think maybe we're we're getting there. I don't know if you have anything else you want to hit on.
Oh, I mean, I just have to say again, it's the costuming, the setting, the the just exhausting in a good way, performances. You know, it's just so much creative energy went into this thing, and you know, thank goodness it survived. What a tragedy it would have been if all of this work, regardless of the quality of the final film or what we have of the final film, if all of that work had gone to waste and
an audience didn't get to experience it. You know. Yeah, but I do think that there was the result of it here. It's again, I was never bored throughout the whole thing. At times, I was exhausted and certainly challenged by the content, but it is a phenomenal film viewing experience, and I do recommend it to anyone out there who likes a weird jaunt into just another cinematic realm.
It might not be for everyone, but it is a remarkable piece of filmmaking absolutely.
All right, Well, we're going to go and close it out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Do you have a pass concerning on the Silver Globe or perhaps a future concerning on the Silver Globe? Right in, we would love to hear from you also, you know, certainly, especially with this being our first Polish film, if we have you know, listeners from Poland or of Polish descent, or just you know, film fans who have more familiarity
with Polish cinema than we do. Right in, we'd love to hear from you about this movie or about you know, other films from Polish cinema and Polish creators, directors and featuring Polish actors we might consider in the future. Yeah, we'd love to hear it. Just as a reminder. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast feed with core episodes of the podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays dealing with topics you know, scientific and cultural. On Mondays
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