| On the Silver Globe | |
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DVD cover of the Polart edition |
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| Directed by | Andrzej Żuławski |
| Written by | Andrzej Żuławski Jerzy Żuławski |
| Starring | Andrzej Seweryn Jerzy Trela Iwona Bielska Grażyna Dyląg |
| Music by | Andrzej Korzyński |
| Cinematography | Andrzej Jaroszewicz |
| Release date(s) | February 1989 |
| Running time | 157 minutes |
| Country | Poland |
| Language | Polish |
On the Silver Globe (Polish: Na srebrnym globie) is a Polish film released in 1987, directed by Andrzej Żuławski and adapted from a novel by Jerzy Żuławski.
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A group of astronauts leaves Earth to find freedom. Their spaceship crashes on the Earth-like unnamed planet. Astronauts, equipped with video-recording devices, reaching a seashore, where they build a village. After years, only one member of the crew, Jerzy, is still alive, watching growing of a new society, which religion is based on a mythical tales of an expedition from the Earth. First off-Earth generation is calling him "An Old Man", treating him as a semi-God. The Old Man leaves them and before death sends his video diary in a rocket back to Earth. A space researcher named Marek (Andrzej Seweryn) receives the video diary and travels to the planet. When he arrives, he is welcomed by the cast of priests as the messiah, who can release them of the captivity of the Szerns, indigenous occupants of the planet. Shorty after, Marek organizes an army and enters the city of Szerns. Meanwhile, the priests starts to believe, that Marek was rather an outcast off the Earth, than a messiah, that came to fulfill the religious prophecy.
The novel On the Silver Globe on which the film is based was written around 1900 as part of The Lunar Trilogy by Jerzy Żuławski, who was the granduncle of Andrzej Żuławski. Andrzej Żuławski had left his native Poland for France in 1972 to avoid censorship by the Polish government. Thanks to his critical success with the 1975 film L'important c'est d'aimer, the Polish authorities in charge of cultural affairs reevaluated their assessment of Żuławski. He was then invited to return to Poland and to realize a project of his own choice. Żuławski, who had always wanted to make a film of his grand uncle's novel, saw the offer as a unique opportunity to achieve this aim.
Between 1975 and 1977 Żuławski adapted the novel and wrote the screenplay. The film was shot at various locations, including the Baltic seashore at Lisi Jar near Rozewie, Lower Silesia, the Wieliczka Salt Mine, the Tatra Mountains, the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, the Crimea in the Ukraine and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.[1] In fall 1977 the project came to a sudden halt with the appointment of Janusz Wilhelmi as the vice-minister of cultural affairs. He perceived the battle between the Selenites and the Szerns in the film as a thinly-veiled allegory of the Polish people's struggle with totalitarianism. Consequently Wilhelmi shut down the film project, which was eighty percent complete, and ordered all materials destroyed.
Żuławski went back to France, saying that he was in despair over the loss and waste of so much artistic effort. The reels of the unfinished film were ultimately not destroyed, but preserved, along with costumes and props, by the film studio and by members of the cast and crew. Although Wilhelmi died a few months later in a plane crash the film was only released after the end of communist rule. In May 1988 a version of the film, consisting of the preserved footage plus a commentary to fill in the narrative gaps, premiered at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.[2]
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