Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: This is Rob Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 3: today on Weird House Cinema, we are going to be
Speaker 3: talking about the famous, slash infamous nineteen eighty eight Polish
Speaker 3: science fiction epic On the Silver Globe, directed by Andre Zuofski.
Speaker 3: I first became interested in this movie by reading about it.
Speaker 3: Several film critics and historians that I came across characterized
Speaker 3: On the Silver Globe kind of like the final boss
Speaker 3: of weird movies, as like the ultimate Macdaddy of weird, difficult,
Speaker 3: fascinating films, and it's been described in a lot of
Speaker 3: superlative terms. It's one of the most beautiful, one of
Speaker 3: the ugliest, one of the most astounding, one of the
Speaker 3: most exhausting and utterly bizarre, intensely compelling and impossible to
Speaker 3: follow films ever made. And having seen it now I
Speaker 3: have to agree with all of that. I found this
Speaker 3: film both both amazingly interesting and tiring and difficult to
Speaker 3: the point of annoyance. I have such such strong reactions
Speaker 3: in multiple directions to it, but I'm really glad we
Speaker 3: saw it, and I think it's a film that most
Speaker 3: people should try to see if they can at some
Speaker 3: point just be prepared. You are in for a very long,
Speaker 3: very tiring, highly confusing experience, but it's also extremely rewarding.
Speaker 2: I do want to add a caveat here that it
Speaker 2: is and this is all subjective, of course, it's never boring,
Speaker 2: and it is also not a when we talk about
Speaker 2: films that are, you know, sometimes challenging to watch, this
Speaker 2: film is not a film that is cruel. It's not
Speaker 2: a film that is like daring you to watch it
Speaker 2: or anything of that nature. I mean, there's some there's
Speaker 2: some grizzly moments, there are some you know, there are
Speaker 2: some bloody moments, but it's not one of those those
Speaker 2: films that like has it in for the audience. It
Speaker 2: it wants the audience to go on the journey with it.
Speaker 3: Right right. It is a movie that's difficult, but not
Speaker 3: because it's like Waaldewall torture scenes, though there are some.
Speaker 3: There are some scenes of physical pain and trauma, but
Speaker 3: that's not what the movie is largely about. So despite
Speaker 3: the enormous run time of this movie, I think the
Speaker 3: cut that I saw, which I think is the main
Speaker 3: cut available, was one hundred and sixty six minutes. Was
Speaker 3: that yours? Rob?
Speaker 2: I believe so?
Speaker 3: Yes, so very long movie, two hours and forty six minutes.
Speaker 2: Wrong?
Speaker 3: Am I doing the math right there? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Believe sow forty four to forty six something like that?
Speaker 2: It is, It's not even close. It is the longest
Speaker 2: movie that we have watched for Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: And despite that massive runtime, this film is technically unfinished
Speaker 3: as the original production in the nineteen seventies. We can
Speaker 3: talk more about the production process as we go on,
Speaker 3: but when they were originally shooting this movie, it was
Speaker 3: shut down by Polish authorities in the year nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: seven with roughly twenty percent of the movie yet to
Speaker 3: be filmed, had not been filmed yet, and I understand
Speaker 3: that at one point what was shot the eighty percent
Speaker 3: we have was supposed to have been destroyed, but by
Speaker 3: some miscommunication or stroke of luck, it was not. And then,
Speaker 3: roughly a decade after the production was halted, the still
Speaker 3: existing pieces of the movie were put together by the
Speaker 3: director by Andre Zuowski, with the gaps patched over by
Speaker 3: voiceover narration and in a strange choice, but one that
Speaker 3: I think actually works quite well Tonally, It's kind of
Speaker 3: hard to explain exactly why modern documentary footage unrelated to
Speaker 3: the plot of the film is just shown while director
Speaker 3: is explaining what happens in the unfilmed scenes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is an interesting choice because I've seen other
Speaker 2: unfinished or partially lost films where they'll stitch things together
Speaker 2: with say storyboards or illustrations or something to that effect.
Speaker 2: So this is a choice that it first seemed rather jarring.
Speaker 2: I'm like, what are we doing, what's happening? Why are
Speaker 2: we in contemporary Polish urban environment? Here? Is this supposed
Speaker 2: to be a world of the film? No, it is
Speaker 2: not a world in the film. It is, but it
Speaker 2: is not also completely disconnected from the film, so it
Speaker 2: ultimately ends up working like you're saying, but it is
Speaker 2: a unique choice.
Speaker 3: Often, somehow the documentary film that's paired with the voiceover
Speaker 3: narration seems to connect in a feeling way to what's
Speaker 3: going on, even if it doesn't connect in a concrete way,
Speaker 3: Like there'll be a scene where something is being uncovered,
Speaker 3: and there is kind of the documentary camera seems to
Speaker 3: un cover something in a way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it's and as we'll be discussing, there
Speaker 2: is often a kind of documentary point of view, almost
Speaker 2: found footage vibe to the camera work in the movie proper, Okay,
Speaker 2: So that connects nicely, I think with this added footage
Speaker 2: of these European streets. I'm not sure offhand of these
Speaker 2: I am assuming Polish, but it could have been. These
Speaker 2: could be French streets, because I know Zubowski spent time
Speaker 2: in France as well. Well.
Speaker 3: Even the original footage of the movie, like the first
Speaker 3: third of the movie is like the the Blair Planet Project.
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's filmed via not exactly clear what
Speaker 3: the sci fi devices are, but there's like video diaries,
Speaker 3: so we get tons of point of view shots.
Speaker 2: And the memory of the video diaries and so forth,
Speaker 2: and then there's just a lot there's there's there are
Speaker 2: extensive monologues that are about like the voyeuristic quality of film,
Speaker 2: because you have characters in the in the film that
Speaker 2: are filming things and recording things and documenting things. And
Speaker 2: one character in particular of the old Man, ends up
Speaker 2: ruminating on this for a while, like what does it
Speaker 2: mean that I don't speak? But I absorb and so forth.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot in the film that seems to
Speaker 2: be speaking to a director slash creator's experience, and then
Speaker 2: we see that reflected back into these bits about the
Speaker 2: lost portions of the film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. I mean, for example, there are parts
Speaker 3: where when the characters are looking into one of the
Speaker 3: other characters faces as they're recording a so called video diary,
Speaker 3: like one of them sort of tries to direct for them.
Speaker 3: They say, like turn it off now, you fools, this
Speaker 3: is not the right time or something. But then there's
Speaker 3: another thing that connects to that about the sort of
Speaker 3: metafilmmaking themes of the movie is how many characters throughout
Speaker 3: the plot are described as actors. This is a recurring
Speaker 3: theme that like, well, it'll make more sense once we
Speaker 3: describe the plot that exists. But like a society that
Speaker 3: emerges on another planet as it is colonized by humans,
Speaker 3: and it seems that a major function within the emerging
Speaker 3: society is that of an actor. Somebody who says I'm
Speaker 3: an actor, I'm playing a role, and they'll like look
Speaker 3: into the camera at certain moments and say, how do
Speaker 3: you like my acting?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, in this kind of bohemian, pagan, post apocalyptic
Speaker 2: society that emerges on this alien world. We see important
Speaker 2: roles set aside for of course martyrs and saviors, but
Speaker 2: also ultimately filmmakers and profits and actors.
Speaker 3: And presumably the designers of parade floats, because we get
Speaker 3: those two. Yeah, So we'll probably talk a bit more
Speaker 3: about the production of the movie in a bit here,
Speaker 3: but just to say at the beginning, the production was
Speaker 3: quite famously intense, expensive and challenging. I think demanded a
Speaker 3: lot of the actors, and there are some reports that
Speaker 3: like it was a rewarding but grueling experience. It was
Speaker 3: very expensive and lavish. It was like an extravagant production.
Speaker 3: They shot in many different locations all over the place,
Speaker 3: from the Gobi Desert to the Baltic coast of Poland
Speaker 3: and places in between, I think in the Caucasus mountains.
Speaker 3: It was just supposedly incredibly intense. And then it was
Speaker 3: brought to a conclusion before they had actually finished making
Speaker 3: the movie, because the Polish authorities shut it down for
Speaker 3: some reason. There is dispute about what that reason actually was, like,
Speaker 3: was it related to was it related to supposedly subversive
Speaker 3: themes of the film that the authorities were uncomfortable with.
Speaker 3: Was it related to them going over budget and just
Speaker 3: like it being too expensive or was it one article
Speaker 3: I was reading. I don't know how seriously this suggestion
Speaker 3: is made, but there's a very good article about the
Speaker 3: movie you can look up in Film Comment magazine by
Speaker 3: a writer named Jonathan Romney, who mentions first of all
Speaker 3: that On the Silver Globe is sort of the one
Speaker 3: of the defining examples of a film mode in the
Speaker 3: French expression m audit meaning a cursed film, a film
Speaker 3: that just like doesn't really belong in this world. In fact,
Speaker 3: Romney says that it is. It's a film mode made
Speaker 3: by a director who seemed to specialize in making film mode.
Speaker 3: But also he mentions the possibility that it could have
Speaker 3: been shut down just because people were looking at this
Speaker 3: and like, people can't take like forty more minutes of
Speaker 3: this movie, you know, even the eighty percent we have
Speaker 3: is one hundred and sixty six minutes long, and it's
Speaker 3: and it's so intense. It's going to be it's going
Speaker 3: to be amazing if people sit through this whole thing
Speaker 3: and can take it in all at once.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And you can imagine that some of
Speaker 2: the more aversive qualities, and there's plenty of places you
Speaker 2: can point to in the film that these may have
Speaker 2: been some definite contributing factors to like the order to
Speaker 2: destroy the film, because of course it's one thing to
Speaker 2: cancel something for going over budget, but to say, actually
Speaker 2: we want this erased from the world. And again, like
Speaker 2: you said, thankfully that effort was not fruitful.
Speaker 3: So what we're left with is, in my opinion, a
Speaker 3: really truly fascinating artifact, not necessarily something that's going to
Speaker 3: be fun viewing for your regular movie night, Like you
Speaker 3: need to commit, you need to know what you're getting
Speaker 3: into with this one, But if you're willing to go there,
Speaker 3: it is an amazing film. It exhibits at once a
Speaker 3: weird genius and a deep passion like for all of
Speaker 3: the you know, we'll have some things to say about
Speaker 3: this movie's almost random feeling philosophical monologues, but it is
Speaker 3: clearly a movie made with deep feeling. The feeling is
Speaker 3: just pouring out of it, and it's hard not to
Speaker 3: be infected by some of that. Also, just the textural
Speaker 3: genius of it, all of the costumes and the sets
Speaker 3: and the visual composition is just amazing, but it also
Speaker 3: does have a kind of artistic belligerence to it, like
Speaker 3: it is rob You you mentioned that it's not a
Speaker 3: movie that's like, you know, trying to harm the audience
Speaker 3: by just showing them gross torture scenes and all that.
Speaker 3: I agree, it's not like that, but it is kind
Speaker 3: of a belligerent film, Like in a way it is
Speaker 3: challenging your attention to single combat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is a film that will philosophically berate you
Speaker 2: and you want to take it all in. You're like
Speaker 2: this because the acting scenes in which we get these
Speaker 2: extended monologues, they're often just just amazing. Like the energy
Speaker 2: of the performance and the severity of the performance is
Speaker 2: just so enthralling. But it is kind of a struggle
Speaker 2: at times to really fall follow all the threads that
Speaker 2: are going on there.
Speaker 3: In that article and film comment, Jonathan Romney describes sort
Speaker 3: of a set of films that don't feel like they
Speaker 3: belong in our world, that feel like they sort of
Speaker 3: come from another place, And he writes quote adhering neither
Speaker 3: to familiar screen aesthetics nor to the customary logic of
Speaker 3: filmmaking economics, they present themselves as free floating, lawless bodies,
Speaker 3: autonomously occupying their own sectors of the filmic cosmos. And
Speaker 3: I think that nails it. That's what this movie feels like.
Speaker 3: It is a free floating lawless body. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean it is difficult to compare this to other films,
Speaker 2: and certainly almost impossible to try to make it adhere
Speaker 2: to the laws of other films and to the framework
Speaker 2: of other films. That it has its own vibe, its
Speaker 2: own rules, and you can't fault it for following that pathway.
Speaker 2: So yes, this is indeed a Polish film, and in
Speaker 2: fact it is our first Polish film on weird House cinema,
Speaker 2: and I have to say it might also be my
Speaker 2: first purely Polish film viewing experience, you know, not counting
Speaker 2: like co productions and of course various films with Polish
Speaker 2: talent or Polish you know, authorship and so forth. So
Speaker 2: we can put another pin in the map and another
Speaker 2: apology to France. We'll get to weird French movies eventually,
Speaker 2: so often we'll throw in an elevator pitch here. I
Speaker 2: don't know that an elevator pitch can really do this
Speaker 2: film justice, so we might have to skip that, but
Speaker 2: it is. It is an epically weird film in multiple ways.
Speaker 2: So it is a it is a it is a
Speaker 2: fitting pit for weird house cinema.
Speaker 3: It's kind of an alternate Book of Genesis set on
Speaker 3: another planet, Like, yeah, like a sci fi book of Genesis.
Speaker 3: Or maybe it's bigger than Genesis. Maybe it's like the
Speaker 3: whole Bible set on another planet. It's really got everything
Speaker 3: it's got. It's got saviors and profits and strife and
Speaker 3: concret quest and loss, and it's got it all.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And aliens. It's got some really cool aliens. Yeah.
Speaker 2: In a way, it reminds me a little bit of
Speaker 2: Paradise Lost, only instead of trying to justify the ways
Speaker 2: of God to man, it's trying to justify the ways
Speaker 2: of man to God by by shouting at God.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, let's go ahead and listen to some trailer audio.
Speaker 2: This is from I'm honestly not sure if this is
Speaker 2: in any way an original trailer. This one was posted
Speaker 2: by the Austin Film Society. This might be more aligned
Speaker 2: with a recent re release of the film, which I'll
Speaker 2: mention here in a bit, but it should give you
Speaker 2: some flavor and you'll get to hear some of the
Speaker 2: Polish language of this film.
Speaker 3: Are we going to hear one of the Sharns talking, Yes.
Speaker 2: We will hear a sharn.
Speaker 4: Esta es. Yeah. Yeah, you still scord, Yeah, you still
Speaker 4: want to be champas of tenty eighteen, station to be
Speaker 4: champs of them or it's your papa a pianetto for
Speaker 4: pretty us.
Speaker 2: All right, So that gives you just a little little taste,
Speaker 2: but insufficient, because this is a film full of sights
Speaker 2: and sounds that I just have to be absorbed over
Speaker 2: the course of nearly three hours, and even the language itself. Again,
Speaker 2: I don't think I'd watched anything in the Polish language before,
Speaker 2: a film in the Polish language before, and this is
Speaker 2: like a lot. There's a lot of Polish language to
Speaker 2: absorb here watching it in Polish with English subtitles, and
Speaker 2: as is often the case, you know, like the rhythm
Speaker 2: and the poetry, all the language seeps into you even
Speaker 2: if you don't you know, understand it, even as you're
Speaker 2: reading it, along with the dialogue and these performances.
Speaker 3: Yeah, obviously I don't speak Polish, but there were little
Speaker 3: moments where like a word I would recognize would like
Speaker 3: hit and lock in. Like, there were many points in
Speaker 3: the movie where somebody would place huge emphasis on the
Speaker 3: word provda meaning truth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.
Speaker 3: There were a few things like that, the word the
Speaker 3: Polish word for earth, which I forget now there are
Speaker 3: parts where that is sort of repeated in fatically and
Speaker 3: it kind of burns in. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that's always an interesting experience in a foreign language film.
Speaker 2: All right, If you would like to see on the
Speaker 2: Silver Globe before we proceed here, well it is. You
Speaker 2: can get it. That's the good news. However, as of
Speaker 2: this recording, there's sadly neither a current legit streaming option
Speaker 2: or a Region A or region free disc as far
Speaker 2: as I'm aware of, but the film has been restored
Speaker 2: in HD. Eureka Video in the UK put out a
Speaker 2: great looking Region B blu ray with a bunch of extras.
Speaker 2: I think we have heard that a Region A or
Speaker 2: some sort of region free release might be on the way,
Speaker 2: but I don't know the details on that or who's
Speaker 2: putting it out.
Speaker 3: I hope they do. I mean, I know this movie
Speaker 3: has been shown in screenings at like art house theaters
Speaker 3: and stuff in recent years, but I don't know who
Speaker 3: is actually working on a disc release that can be
Speaker 3: seen in all your regular players in the US. But
Speaker 3: but yeah, I hope that's coming soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So you watch this on a disc rented
Speaker 2: from Videodrome, and I ended up just watching it on YouTube,
Speaker 2: just because that's the best way I could get it,
Speaker 2: and it ended up getting really good film quality. But
Speaker 2: of course none of that is guaranteed when you're depending
Speaker 2: on YouTube rips of movies. So still looking forward to
Speaker 2: a proper region A or reading free to release in
Speaker 2: the future. All right, Well, let's talk a bit about
Speaker 2: some of the people involved here, and in doing so
Speaker 2: we'll sort of also go through some of the main characters,
Speaker 2: I guess, before getting into the plot. Starting here at
Speaker 2: the top with Andrea Zuwawski, the director and the writer
Speaker 2: screenplay credit on this. He lived nineteen forty through twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: Ukrainian born Polish director and writer who made a career
Speaker 2: of really going against the mainstream and state sensibilities, appealing
Speaker 2: ultimately more to art house tastes, while also working with
Speaker 2: some of the biggest names Polish cinema. He studied cinema
Speaker 2: in France and then served under Polish director Andre Wasta,
Speaker 2: and he directed a pair of nineteen sixty nine TV
Speaker 2: movies which I'll come back to, and then he directed
Speaker 2: a film titled The Third Part of Night in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy one. I haven't seen this one, but I've read
Speaker 2: that it's a rather intense and horrific holocaust drama with
Speaker 2: various dreamlike elements to it. And in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: he's credited with directing two episodes of the Polish Christopher
Speaker 2: Lee hosted horror anthology series Theater Macabre. Though these two
Speaker 2: episodes that he directed seemed to be these same short
Speaker 2: films from nineteen sixty nine, so they might have just
Speaker 2: been repackaged for TV anthology usage, which of course is
Speaker 2: not unheard of with horror anthology series in general.
Speaker 3: Was Christopher Lee hosting an exclusively Polish show or is
Speaker 3: this a show that aired in multiple countries?
Speaker 2: Now? This was a Polish horror thought the series, and
Speaker 2: you know they were able to get Christopher Lee to
Speaker 2: come in probably similar to we were talking recently about
Speaker 2: a small scale Canadian production that brought in Vincent Price
Speaker 2: to do something similar. So they probably brought him in
Speaker 2: for like a day, and he reported all this stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they shot all his segments and then they just
Speaker 3: space him out.
Speaker 2: That would makes sense, and perhaps repackaged some already existing
Speaker 2: films and commissioned some other short works. So yeah, I'd
Speaker 2: love to hear from anyone in any of our Polish
Speaker 2: listeners or listeners with access or memories of Polish television.
Speaker 2: Perhaps you can provide more information about this.
Speaker 3: Nineteen seventy two I think that would have been right
Speaker 3: around the time of the Wickerman. By the way, Wickerman
Speaker 3: is maybe what seventy three? Oh yeah, so you're getting
Speaker 3: that Christopher Lee, which is all the Christopher Lees are great,
Speaker 3: but that's the best one I think.
Speaker 2: All right, So after this, Zuotsky follows it up with
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventy two historical satanic horror film The Devil
Speaker 2: and I also have not seen this one, but apparently
Speaker 2: there's plenty in here to poke Polish authorities, because they
Speaker 2: ended up banning the film in Poland. And in the
Speaker 2: midst of this, Zuotsky moves to France.
Speaker 3: I heard it described as him being basically exiled.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah too, it was too much, so he ends
Speaker 2: up going to France. After this, he makes the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five French romance drama That most Important Thing Love.
Speaker 2: And he returned to Poland for his next project, which is,
Speaker 2: of course the ambitious adaptation of his grandfather's science fiction novels.
Speaker 2: This is On the Silver Globe, shot between nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: six and nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, from what I understand, on the Silver Globe
Speaker 3: is the title of the first of a cycle of
Speaker 3: three science fiction novels that Zuofsky's grandfather wrote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Lunar Trilogy. Yeah, and a little more on
Speaker 2: the grandfather here in just a minute. So we've already
Speaker 2: discussed the problems this production, and we'll probably touch on
Speaker 2: it a bit more. Needless to say, the film does
Speaker 2: not come out in the late seventies. It's going to
Speaker 2: be another decade before it comes out. After for a
Speaker 2: while it may seem that it is completely lost. So
Speaker 2: but he keeps me moving on. You know, He's going
Speaker 2: to keep making films. So Zowski after this point makes
Speaker 2: what might be his best known film internationally, one that
Speaker 2: I think if you've spent any amount of time like
Speaker 2: I have, rummaging around in video rental stores, you've probably
Speaker 2: seen the box out for this one because it has
Speaker 2: like an illustration of a gorgon of a Medusa on
Speaker 2: the cover. This is the nineteen eighty one psycho sexual
Speaker 2: horror film Possession.
Speaker 3: I've never seen this, but I've heard I've heard it
Speaker 3: described actually in kind of similar terms like intense and
Speaker 3: difficult but very good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It stars French actress Isabelle and Johnny sam
Speaker 2: Neil and German actress Margaret Carstensen. And yeah, I was
Speaker 2: reading a little bit. I haven't seen this one either.
Speaker 2: I'm just familiar with it by reputation. And I did
Speaker 2: see some interview segments from sam Neil and also from
Speaker 2: a Johnny who were pointing out that he out this
Speaker 2: was a rewarding but grueling acting experience that they're glad
Speaker 2: they did when they were younger. And these are like,
Speaker 2: you know, decade or two old interviews, so we're not
Speaker 2: dealing with like, you know, current sam Neil reflecting on
Speaker 2: a film from the eighties. This is like nineties or
Speaker 2: early two thousand, Sam Neils reflecting on a film he did.
Speaker 3: I'm in my Jurassic Park era. Yeah, Jurassic Park and
Speaker 3: Event Horizon. I can't do stuff like Possession anymore. Where
Speaker 3: we were going, we won't need eyes to make films.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, this was Zuotsky's only English language film and
Speaker 2: it was a French West German co production. He followed
Speaker 2: it up with the French drama The Public Woman in
Speaker 2: eighty four, Mad Love in eighty five, though this is
Speaker 2: not related to any other film with the title Mad Love,
Speaker 2: And then after this point, On the Silver Globe was
Speaker 2: finally released in the more or less in the forum
Speaker 2: that we experienced it in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the way he describes it, because he you know,
Speaker 3: it's funny. The version of On the Silver Globe we
Speaker 3: have is mostly just a reconstruction of the film with
Speaker 3: these patches filled in with the modern documentary footage and
Speaker 3: Zuofsky himself narrating the missing scenes. But it's also, I
Speaker 3: don't know, like two percent a documentary, Like there are
Speaker 3: parts where he just talks about what happened with the film,
Speaker 3: especially at the beginning and the end, and so he
Speaker 3: has like a monologue at the beginning that we'll get
Speaker 3: to when we get to the plot section. But I
Speaker 3: think toward the end he talks a bit about what
Speaker 3: happened with the film. Doesn't he say that, you know,
Speaker 3: all of the costumes and the sets and everything were destroyed,
Speaker 3: but that maybe some people were able to hide to
Speaker 3: get a few of them away.
Speaker 2: M yeah. Yeah. And then in the towards the very
Speaker 2: end too, we see his reflection in like a window
Speaker 2: or some glass on the street, and I don't know
Speaker 2: Poland or France wherever he's walking around here, So we
Speaker 2: get this this mirrored glimpse of the director, which which
Speaker 2: I thought was was quite perfect for.
Speaker 3: This portion of the film, and that the any kind
Speaker 3: of bolts away. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So after On the Silver Globe was finally released, he
Speaker 2: would direct six more films, the last being twenty fifteen's Cosmos,
Speaker 2: a French Portuguese thriller that apparently does have some fantastic elements.
Speaker 2: So I'm not sure if it's if we're talking like
Speaker 2: magical realism or sci fi, but I think it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to be defined as like a purely you know,
Speaker 2: speculative picture or anything. All right, So that is the
Speaker 2: director Andre Zuwewski. But then we have Jersey Zuwowski, his grandfather.
Speaker 2: This is the author who wrote the Lunar Trilogy upon
Speaker 2: which this is based. He lived eighteen seventy four through
Speaker 2: no nineteen fifteen. Yeah, he wrote the Lunar Trilogy between
Speaker 2: the years of nineteen oh one and nineteen eleven, so
Speaker 2: these serve as at least in large part, basis for
Speaker 2: the film, though this adaptation certainly seems to update the
Speaker 2: lunar setting and replace it with an alien world. We
Speaker 2: often see this with older science fiction that has been
Speaker 2: translated into latter decades, you know, where we have a
Speaker 2: different understanding of what the cosmos has in store for us.
Speaker 2: And the trilogy was apparently pretty successful. It was beloved
Speaker 2: by a wide Polish readership, including Polish sci fi writer
Speaker 2: Stanislav Limb of Solaris fame. And it's hey, it's also
Speaker 2: available in English translation. I'm not sure at what point
Speaker 2: it enters English translation, but it is out there right
Speaker 2: now and you can pick it up in most formats.
Speaker 2: Jersey Zuwefski's career was cut short as he died of
Speaker 2: typhus during World War One, and this stands out as
Speaker 2: his most well known work.
Speaker 3: Did you read anything about what motivated Andre to adapt
Speaker 3: his own grandfather's novel, like why was he interested in
Speaker 3: doing that? I didn't come across that, but it seems
Speaker 3: like a good question.
Speaker 2: I didn't run across particular reason, but I understand that
Speaker 2: he had long wanted to do it, you know, like
Speaker 2: he felt a you know, obviously a connection to his grandfather,
Speaker 2: the father, and his grandfather's work. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: you know, it's the adaptation seems to from what I
Speaker 2: can tell, it's, you know, it's true to a lot
Speaker 2: of the elements of those of those books, but also
Speaker 2: has this additional philosophical content and also you know, commentary
Speaker 2: on creativity and being a director that do seem to
Speaker 2: originate more with the director here.
Speaker 3: And by philosophical content, I assume there you are referring
Speaker 3: in large part to this film's monologues's it's bold all caps,
Speaker 3: thirty two point font monologues about you know, one must
Speaker 3: if one acts, one has roots and oh god, I
Speaker 3: pulled a couple of quotes in here. Oh, here's here's one.
Speaker 3: I will feel in me, your inhuman translucence. I will
Speaker 3: feel your incomprehensible breath, your absolute coldness, and stuff about
Speaker 3: how like my identity is now you and your identity
Speaker 3: has penetrated my identity and we have become you. Yeah, man,
Speaker 3: I think we got to talk about the actors because
Speaker 3: they are the ones screaming these lines in the surf.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, this is this is a film where pretty
Speaker 2: much every performance is just this existential waltz at the
Speaker 2: edge of sanity. Yeah, and it actually put in my mind,
Speaker 2: I believe it's a fresh air. Interview that I heard
Speaker 2: recently with the actor Emma Stone. Contemporary actor Emma Stone
Speaker 2: was recently in the excellent weird movie Poor Things. But
Speaker 2: she was talking about like the riders of acting and
Speaker 2: about like afterwards, you you may the actor will feel
Speaker 2: often emotionally drained. They need to sort of like come down, reprocess.
Speaker 2: They may be just physically tired, if not from anything
Speaker 2: they're doing, like physically in terms of stunts or anything,
Speaker 2: but just from like the like the raised levels of
Speaker 2: excitement in the body while having to embody these you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes it's you know, often extreme states of human emotion
Speaker 2: and behavior.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when you perform intense emotion deliberately to play a
Speaker 3: role in many ways that that it convinces your brain
Speaker 3: and your body that you're actually having those emotions, and
Speaker 3: so you can't just like turn it off easily after
Speaker 3: the scene's over. For for a lot of actors, you can't.
Speaker 3: So there's sort of a you've got to ramp up
Speaker 3: and then you've got to coast back down after it's over. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And and this is a lot of times, I
Speaker 2: mean that's often going on, if not always going on
Speaker 2: in film, but sometimes it's invisible. This is a movie
Speaker 2: where it's almost impossible to ignore that reality, especially as
Speaker 2: the characters are giving these like these just high intensity,
Speaker 2: extended monologues whilst you know, being waist deep in the
Speaker 2: water or wallowing in the mud or or you know,
Speaker 2: or they're naked or they're you know, covered in blood
Speaker 2: or some other kind of uh uh, you know, additional
Speaker 2: factor is involved here that really just drives home, like wow,
Speaker 2: this this was a commitment.
Speaker 3: I think most of the main cast in this movie
Speaker 3: is very good, but I don't think that with with
Speaker 3: maybe one exception, there really aren't subtle performances there. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is a movie where it's it's fever pitch with
Speaker 3: almost everybody all the time.
Speaker 2: That's right, and the really one of the best examples
Speaker 2: of this is ultimately are our central character. Uh this
Speaker 2: is Andre Severin, who plays Merrik Marek, is a second
Speaker 2: wave astronaut from Earth. Who is received on the alien
Speaker 2: world as a savior and yeah is ultimately I guess
Speaker 2: our central character. Severin was born in nineteen forty six.
Speaker 2: Polish actor of stage and screen as well as a director.
Speaker 2: He is considered one of the greatest Polish actors of
Speaker 2: all time. Highly decorated and respected. His credits go back
Speaker 2: to nineteen sixty five, still active today. Most of his
Speaker 2: credits are Polish or French films, including nineteen eighties The
Speaker 2: Conductor starring Sir John Gilgood and Golum from the same year.
Speaker 2: He also appears in nineteen ninety three's Schindler's List, which
Speaker 2: features several Polish actors. It's a supporting role, but it's
Speaker 2: you know, it's in the top like six or seven
Speaker 2: credits when you look at the films listing on the
Speaker 2: various movie databases. He was also part of the international
Speaker 2: cast for Peter Brook's epic adaptation of the Mahabarata, playing
Speaker 2: the part of Yudistra, one of the Pandava brothers and
Speaker 2: a central character in that. That is also that in
Speaker 2: a way you could compare this production that that particular
Speaker 2: production with on this over globe, because that is a
Speaker 2: very long adaptation of an epic that contains, in this
Speaker 2: case a number of international actors from various countries, but
Speaker 2: they are often engaging in extended monologues that have that
Speaker 2: are very deep and at times challenging to follow in full.
Speaker 2: So Severin here, Yeah, spends a lot of screen time
Speaker 2: at or toppling over that edge of sanity, and even
Speaker 2: the less extreme emotional parts of the performance are he
Speaker 2: is at least emotionally naked, sometimes actually naked. And Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is definitely one of those performances, perhaps aided by
Speaker 2: the close proximity we are too. So many of these
Speaker 2: monologues there is a sense that the actor is not
Speaker 2: just speaking into the middle distance like they are speaking
Speaker 2: at you. They are like sort of clawing their way
Speaker 2: as if as if trying to emerge from this world
Speaker 2: and this picture into your living room or into your cinema,
Speaker 2: et cetera.
Speaker 3: In that article in Film Comment, I mentioned Jonathan Romney
Speaker 3: speaking of multiple characters doing these kinds of high intensity performances,
Speaker 3: But I think he probably has sever and most front
Speaker 3: of mine when he says this quote. The performances are
Speaker 3: flambuoyantly incantatory or declamatory, as if each actor is addressing
Speaker 3: an audience position somewhere over the brow of Yonder Hill.
Speaker 3: Much agonized screaming and mad laughter is called for as
Speaker 3: the actors deliver grandly philosophical or religios discourse and then
Speaker 3: a few sentences later, Bear in mind that much of
Speaker 3: this dialogue is shouted, even screamed, by actors sometimes drenched
Speaker 3: in blood or standing waist high in the sea.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the videodrome gang on letterboxed, a guy by
Speaker 2: the name of John, commented that he quote kept expecting
Speaker 2: klaus Kinsky to stumble into frame Yeah, which I totally
Speaker 2: get that, because I would say that the raw energy
Speaker 2: and madness injected into this and other performances in the
Speaker 2: film are easily comparable to the sort of intensity that
Speaker 2: klaus Kinsky tended to bring to a picture.
Speaker 3: As I often emphasize, I think Kinsky would bring a
Speaker 3: more chaotic evil energy to the proceedings, whereas I don't
Speaker 3: feel that kind of like malice in any of these performances,
Speaker 3: but I do feel that intensity. Yeah, the Kinsky intensity
Speaker 3: is there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right. The next actor of note, and this
Speaker 2: is a character is more important early on. This is
Speaker 2: the character Jersey played by Jersey Trella who lived nineteen
Speaker 2: forty two through twenty twenty two, also known in the
Speaker 2: film as the Old Man.
Speaker 3: So this is the actor Jersey playing the character Jersey
Speaker 3: based on the novel written by Jersey.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, And I don't think that is an accident here,
Speaker 2: because this character is the filmmaker. This is a filmmaking
Speaker 2: first wave astronaut to the alien planet who yeah, shares
Speaker 2: his first name with the author and also seems to
Speaker 2: echo various ideas about filmmaking that align the character with
Speaker 2: the director. And he also becomes a demigod.
Speaker 3: He's interesting in that. So we haven't gotten much into
Speaker 3: what the plot of the movie is, and there will
Speaker 3: be difficulties with ever explaining it fully. But yeah, So
Speaker 3: it is a movie about Earthlings colonizing another planet and
Speaker 3: founding a new culture there. And one thing that I
Speaker 3: think is interesting is that we see this character Jersey
Speaker 3: is one of the original astronauts who creates this colony,
Speaker 3: and he is the one who remains the most aloof
Speaker 3: from the emerging culture that is created, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean. Yeah, he's the filmmaker, but he's also for
Speaker 3: a long time depicted as resistant to becoming fully integrated
Speaker 3: into the culture that comes into being.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like he wants to observe, he wants to film,
Speaker 2: he doesn't speak, becomes this person of mystery to the
Speaker 2: descendants of these first wave astronauts to the alien planet,
Speaker 2: in part because he doesn't die. He's like the oldest
Speaker 2: person anyone knows of on this white Don't you die? Yeah,
Speaker 2: So he's like this, you know, this this immortal, this
Speaker 2: haunted immortal that keeps filming things, but also doesn't really
Speaker 2: share anything. It stands apart from this society.
Speaker 3: This is the character I mentioned. This seems like the
Speaker 3: only actor in character that's actually not at eleven the
Speaker 3: whole time.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, and he's still going to drill right into
Speaker 2: your soul with you know, at times kind of mumbly monologues,
Speaker 2: you know, looking right into the camera. But yeah, certainly
Speaker 2: subdued compared to the other performances. So Trela here was
Speaker 2: a Polish actor with credits going back to nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 2: including seventy three's The Hourglass Sanatorium, eighty six is Gagag
Speaker 2: Glory to the Heroes, nineteen ninety four's Three Colors White
Speaker 2: and what is This two thousand and one's Quovadas. This
Speaker 2: is a film that pops up for a number of
Speaker 2: people involved in this film. All right, The next character
Speaker 2: is and I could be wrong with this, I believe
Speaker 2: Asol and she is played by Grausner Dalagh born nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty four. So this character is one of the human
Speaker 2: descendants of the alien world. She becomes Merrick's lover. This
Speaker 2: is a Polish actress with credits going back to seventy
Speaker 2: nine and continuing on through at least twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: Looks like she did a fair amount of German TV
Speaker 2: and cinema as well. This is another intense performance.
Speaker 3: She's really intense and quite good. I think this is
Speaker 3: one of the characters who plays an actor and looks
Speaker 3: into the camera and says, what do you think about
Speaker 3: my acting?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So great, great performance here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The next one, okay, this is the next character is
Speaker 2: a third wave human astronaut to the planet.
Speaker 3: This is this character is where I start getting confused
Speaker 3: about whose relationship to what where is he when? I
Speaker 3: don't know? We can talk about that later. But this
Speaker 3: is Yasick.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yasick is played by Valdemar Kownowski born nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 2: another Polish actor. He played the Witcher's father in the
Speaker 2: original Polish adaptations of the Polish Witcher fantasy novels.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, So for.
Speaker 2: A lot of you out there, Yeah yeah, Even if
Speaker 2: you haven't seen a Polish film, you've in all likelihood
Speaker 2: seen something that originated in Polish literature of one form
Speaker 2: or another. Be that something like Solaris or something like
Speaker 2: the Witcher series.
Speaker 3: Ah, the shared DNA between on the Silver Globe and
Speaker 3: the Witcher wouldn't be great. If the Witcher showed up
Speaker 3: on this planet.
Speaker 2: Oh man, he'd find plenty to do.
Speaker 3: He's like, I'll take care of your shurns for a price.
Speaker 2: All right. The next character is Marta. Marta is a
Speaker 2: first wave human astronaut to the alien planet and ultimately
Speaker 2: I believe the mother to all human descendants there.
Speaker 3: That's right. She's the Eve of the interplanetary Adam and
Speaker 3: Eve and Jersey trio.
Speaker 2: Played by Iwana Bilska born nineteen fifty two, an award
Speaker 2: winning actress with credits from nineteen seventy eight till today,
Speaker 2: including two horror films of possible interest. One is nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty three, She Wolf which is said to be pretty great,
Speaker 2: and twenty fifteen's The Lure, a Mermaid movie that I've
Speaker 2: also read good things.
Speaker 3: About, a scary Mermaid movie, I think.
Speaker 2: So I don't know a lot about it, but I
Speaker 2: just did like preliminary glancing around looking at some reviews,
Speaker 2: and people seem to like it, so color me interested.
Speaker 2: But anyway, her performance here as Marta, the mother of
Speaker 2: humans on this alien world, another intense performance. As we'll
Speaker 2: discuss with this character. This is basically the first wave
Speaker 2: astronauts almost immediately to send this kind of bohemian pagan
Speaker 2: waltz with madness. It's you know, it's like it's going
Speaker 2: into going to another planet seems to just intrinsically trigger
Speaker 2: just a philosophical conundrum, to say the least for any
Speaker 2: space traveler. You know, it's like in Event Horizon, you
Speaker 2: go into space and you turn into hell Raiser, And
Speaker 2: in this movie, you travel to another planet and you
Speaker 2: are just instantly unmoored from your understanding of self or world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like you arrive on the Silver Globe and
Speaker 3: you are deeply troubled by the question of what it
Speaker 3: means to act.
Speaker 2: All right, A couple of other actors I'll mention more
Speaker 2: in passing. I don't have extensive notes on them, but
Speaker 2: Jersey Graalek plays Peter. Peter is the one or the
Speaker 2: other of the three first wave human astronauts the alien
Speaker 2: planet who seems to have the most pronounced descent into
Speaker 2: raving madness.
Speaker 3: Though he is the primary atom of all of the colonists,
Speaker 3: so he's like the father of many of the do
Speaker 3: people on this Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and graphically of nineteen forty six through twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: then I believe the first daughter of Marta is the
Speaker 2: character Ada, played by Helsbitta Karovska born nineteen forty three
Speaker 2: is another Polish actress with extensive Polish film credits. Oh
Speaker 2: and then we also have a character that is called
Speaker 2: the actress because she is an actress, but not an
Speaker 2: actress on the alien world. She is an actress on Earth,
Speaker 2: which should we be calling Earth Old Earth? In the
Speaker 2: film they talked about Old Earth a little bit.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've been thinking of it as Earth and
Speaker 3: the Silver Globe.
Speaker 2: I guess, all right, So this is the Denizen of
Speaker 2: Earth and she is played by Christina Janda born nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty two. Award winning Polish actress, best known for nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine's Interrogation, in which she starred and one Best
Speaker 2: Actress at the Kinds Film Festival. Other films include nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty six's Leputa, nineteen ninety five's Pesca, and two thousand
Speaker 2: and fives A Few People a Little Time. She was
Speaker 2: also in the Polish sci fi films The War of
Speaker 2: the World's Century from nineteen eighty, Synthesis from eighty four,
Speaker 2: and nineteen eighty five's Oh b oh Ba The End
Speaker 2: of Civilization.
Speaker 3: This is the one on Earth who Yasick is her lover,
Speaker 3: and Marek was her lover, but they got rid of
Speaker 3: him by sending him to another planet.
Speaker 2: Correct, that is, okay, the primary connection between these characters.
Speaker 2: And we get to see some drama play out between
Speaker 2: her and Jossick on Earth, and it's she's not in
Speaker 2: it a lot, but she has this kind of like
Speaker 2: noir ice queen actress type with that kind of like
Speaker 2: old fashioned hat, you know. And she also, like everybody
Speaker 2: in this film, looks visibly pale, in part due to
Speaker 2: I think just like the way they shot or processed
Speaker 2: the film. So if she has a real ice queen vibe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she looks like she would be stumbling into the
Speaker 3: private detective's office with a cigarette and a holder, saying,
Speaker 3: you know, my husband, I need you to but she
Speaker 3: she also there's a great scene where she's trying to
Speaker 3: run over Yossick with a car in the middle of
Speaker 3: the desert, and.
Speaker 2: That great space car or future dystopian future hot wheels
Speaker 2: car is pretty great.
Speaker 3: I think this is the scene where Yosick says in
Speaker 3: the end, every reduction to physiology is the fascism of
Speaker 3: the soul.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course, I've always thought that that's also where
Speaker 2: we get to in some of these scenes. This is
Speaker 2: when we get to hear the most of the prog
Speaker 2: rock section off the score.
Speaker 3: Bet you didn't think you'd get that, huh. Yeah. So
Speaker 3: it's not until the last quarter of the movie that
Speaker 3: the electric guitars come in and you get some rock music.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so fitting that. The final person in the
Speaker 2: production we're going to talk about here is Andre Korzinski,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen forty through twenty twenty two, highly successful
Speaker 2: Polish composer who worked with Zuofsky on eleven of his films,
Speaker 2: including The Devil and Possession. So the Devil score I
Speaker 2: listened to a little bit of this has a kind
Speaker 2: of psychdelic rock and kind of like chaotic jazz percussion
Speaker 2: vibe to it, and Possession has which again I haven't seen,
Speaker 2: I just was listening to portions of the score has
Speaker 2: like a stronger synth than disco vibe to it, but
Speaker 2: with also a lot of flute, kind of jazz flute vibe.
Speaker 2: I guess you might call it jazz clute on classical
Speaker 2: notes and flute. And then on the silver globe, I
Speaker 2: don't know. I guess you might say it leans more
Speaker 2: towards a kind of serious sci fi ambiance for a
Speaker 2: lot of the score, but then has these very noticeable
Speaker 2: splashes of prog rock, especially later in the picture. Nice Now.
Speaker 2: I don't believe this score has ever been released, but
Speaker 2: Finders Keepers Records put out The Devil just last year,
Speaker 2: and they have been before that. I believe they put
Speaker 2: out the score of Possession, so you never know. Again,
Speaker 2: He's a he was a highly successful, pretty famous Polish composer,
Speaker 2: and these scores are are very interesting, so I think
Speaker 2: there is an audience for them.
Speaker 3: Okay, is it time to talk about the plot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's venture into space to the.
Speaker 3: Extent we can. Let's start with some disclaimers. This is
Speaker 3: not like an just abstract art house film without a plot.
Speaker 3: The movie does have a plot. It has a concrete
Speaker 3: story that I think can in principle mostly be followed,
Speaker 3: but it is quite difficult to follow for reasons at
Speaker 3: multiple levels. For one thing, there there's a lot of
Speaker 3: stuff in the movie that does not really advance the action,
Speaker 3: does not move the plot forward. There are the weird
Speaker 3: philosophical monologues, which are interesting though they can themselves be
Speaker 3: difficult to follow, but they don't seem to often affect
Speaker 3: what happens between the characters moving on. They're more kind
Speaker 3: of reflections of inner thoughts that, to varying extent, seem
Speaker 3: connected to what's happening in the plot, though sometimes they
Speaker 3: seem totally unconnected. Another problem is who is who? I
Speaker 3: could not always keep the characters and their correspondence as straight.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you have the same problem, but
Speaker 3: I would be wondering, like, wait, is this the same
Speaker 3: person who was just in the last scene? And sometimes
Speaker 3: I'd rewind it and try to figure it out, and
Speaker 3: other times I was just like I don't know.
Speaker 2: I would highly suggest having the Wikipedia plot summary for
Speaker 2: this on your phone handy just to glance at now
Speaker 2: and again. That's what I did, and I found that
Speaker 2: it helped immensely. Yeah, probably not entirely necessary, but if
Speaker 2: you're suddenly like, wait, who is this character? What is
Speaker 2: he doing? You can just sort of get up to
Speaker 2: speed and then you're good to go.
Speaker 3: We also have the missing segments that we get narrative
Speaker 3: explanation to tell us what goes on there. In fact,
Speaker 3: I would say it's probably easiest to follow the parts
Speaker 3: of the plot that are just being narrated by the
Speaker 3: director because there's less confusion about what's happening than when
Speaker 3: you're actually watching it acted out.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: And I didn't expect this to be the case, because
Speaker 2: the first time there was one of these segments, I
Speaker 2: was kind of like, oh man, it's a shame we
Speaker 2: don't get to see that, and you know, what they're
Speaker 2: describing sounds very visual. By the end of the movie,
Speaker 2: there is one scene in particular that I was almost
Speaker 2: kind of glad that I didn't see, because by that
Speaker 2: point you have been completely indoctrinated into the visual and
Speaker 2: sonic world of this picture, so anything he describes to you.
Speaker 2: You can basically simulate it in your head. You know
Speaker 2: what the characters look like, you know what the set
Speaker 2: looks like in many cases, so you can piece it together.
Speaker 2: So it weirdly like works really well later in the picture,
Speaker 2: to the point where you almost feel like you saw
Speaker 2: the scene that was missing.
Speaker 3: I agree, and in fact, I think we should consider
Speaker 3: ourselves as reviewing not the movie that was intended to
Speaker 3: be made in nineteen seventy seven, but the product that
Speaker 3: exists now. The movie we're talking about is the version
Speaker 3: with these patches and the narration by Zoovski, and the
Speaker 3: modern documentary footage that is now on the Silver Globe
Speaker 3: is which is another reason it's a really interesting artistic product.
Speaker 3: I don't know how I would feel about the movie
Speaker 3: if I had just seen what it was supposed to
Speaker 3: be when he was making it in seventy seven. But okay, so,
Speaker 3: But to come back to other problems with recapping the plot,
Speaker 3: it's also just a conceptually confusing story to begin with,
Speaker 3: because I rob maybe you understood this better than I did.
Speaker 3: What exactly is the time space relationship of the astronauts
Speaker 3: in the very opening of the film that I'm going
Speaker 3: to talk about in just a minute, and also Yasik's
Speaker 3: culture to the main action of the movie. That's like
Speaker 3: the colony on the Silver Globe. Are Yasick and the
Speaker 3: actress on the same planet as the others or on
Speaker 3: a different one. They're on the same planet at some point,
Speaker 3: but do they have to travel to it? I don't know.
Speaker 3: It becomes really hard to figure out what's going on
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 2: There limited understanding is that, Okay, there is contemporary Earth
Speaker 2: that we see in those missing segment portions that we
Speaker 2: talked about, but for the film proper, the story proper,
Speaker 2: we have the Silver Globe planet, and then we have
Speaker 2: Earth or perhaps Old Earth, which is a very like
Speaker 2: ruined dystopian world like it is.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 2: It is a place where humanity is kind of like
Speaker 2: run out, you know. It's like there's an advanced space
Speaker 2: program that is still barely chugging along. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of ruin new like tribal cultures have emerged on the planet,
Speaker 2: and they're also handing out some sort of weird space drug.
Speaker 2: But for the most part, I am to understand. You
Speaker 2: have to use a spaceship to travel from one world
Speaker 2: to the next with the caveat that in the latter
Speaker 2: portion of the film, it's possible you travel there by
Speaker 2: taking space drugs that the people on horseback give you.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure on that, all right. So we cannot
Speaker 3: possibly do a more scene by scene talk like we
Speaker 3: do with some movies. This movie is too long, too confusing,
Speaker 3: too uncertain. There would be too much to talk about.
Speaker 3: So instead, I think what I'm gonna do is kind
Speaker 3: of closely narrate the opening, and then we can zoom
Speaker 3: out and do a loose synopsis of the whole story,
Speaker 3: and then maybe zoom in on some individual elements that
Speaker 3: interested us.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 3: So the first thing we see is wide blankets of
Speaker 3: snow over mountaintops, and we see trees, the tree tops
Speaker 3: of a snow dusted conifer forest. The color palette for
Speaker 3: the whole movie is very moody and cold. It's sort
Speaker 3: of dominated by blue green and gray. But there is
Speaker 3: a different look when we get to the planet later.
Speaker 3: The whole thing is kind of blue green and gray,
Speaker 3: but the planet itself is going to feel very silvery
Speaker 3: according to the title, I guess. But here I think
Speaker 3: we're looking at Earth and we see on one of
Speaker 3: the slopes covered in deep snow, surrounded by all these
Speaker 3: pine trees. A figure on horseback in a bulky, elaborate
Speaker 3: costume made of furs, pelts, feathers, and sticks is coming
Speaker 3: down the mountain. And here the narrator comes in, and
Speaker 3: this is the director Zuofski talking. He says, you will
Speaker 3: see a film made ten years ago, a shred of
Speaker 3: a film, a two and a half hour story, one
Speaker 3: fifth of which is missing. That one fifth, dating back
Speaker 3: to nineteen seventy seven, when the film was annihilated, will
Speaker 3: never be recreated. In place of the missing scenes. You
Speaker 3: will hear a voice which will briefly explain what was
Speaker 3: to be. We are bringing on the Silver Globe to
Speaker 3: an end in the year nineteen eighty seven. So again
Speaker 3: there's this meta commentary, these almost documentary comments within the
Speaker 3: movie itself, now in the form we have it. So
Speaker 3: on screen, the figure on horseback makes it down the
Speaker 3: mountain to a flat expanse, and the horse starts to gallop,
Speaker 3: and the rider's face we don't see. It's covered in
Speaker 3: a large gray mask. And the figure rides into the
Speaker 3: courtyard of an empty, dilapidated Polish palace where more figures
Speaker 3: are dressed in the same style, and they're encamped there.
Speaker 3: And one interesting thing is we see the hearth there's
Speaker 3: like a campfire burning and the flames are green.
Speaker 2: What did you make of that, Rob, Oh yeah, the
Speaker 2: green flames. I mean on one level, yeah, the way
Speaker 2: that the film was filtered or shot, you know, everything
Speaker 2: has this kind of sort of a bluish tint to it,
Speaker 2: I guess, this pale blue tint. But also within the
Speaker 2: context of the film, it feels like, well, this is
Speaker 2: the maybe the fire of an alien or in this case,
Speaker 2: perhaps an altered world, because again, Earth itself in this
Speaker 2: film it seems to be a dystopian, at least semi
Speaker 2: post apocalyptic world. Things have not gone well here, world
Speaker 2: in decline, and to a large extent that is also
Speaker 2: the case we will find out concerning the Silver Globe.
Speaker 2: It is also a world in decline, populated by a
Speaker 2: native species that seems to be in decline as well.
Speaker 2: So maybe fires just green now.
Speaker 3: Yes, I almost took it as something about the atmosphere
Speaker 3: of the world at this point. Anyway, the rider dismounts
Speaker 3: and runs up the stairs inside the palace and bursts
Speaker 3: into this big empty room where two men are resting
Speaker 3: on cots, and the men here are dressed in a
Speaker 3: totally different style of clothing from the rest of the camp.
Speaker 3: All the other people at the camp are dressed in
Speaker 3: these pelts and feathers and these haunting opaque masks. The
Speaker 3: two men here are dressed in dirty, well worn green jumpsuits.
Speaker 3: They look like, you know, employees of a space center
Speaker 3: in the science fiction future.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And again to be clear, this is Earth.
Speaker 2: This may not be clear when you're first watching the film,
Speaker 2: but this is a dilapidated Earth, right.
Speaker 3: So these two guys receive the rider, and the rider
Speaker 3: presents them with an object wrapped in furs that was
Speaker 3: found in the mountains and brought down with great haste.
Speaker 3: It is something that should be of interest to them.
Speaker 3: It's an artifact made of metal, and it looks like
Speaker 3: it could be part of a spaceship or satellite. A
Speaker 3: few interesting things about this scene. The people here, who
Speaker 3: are dressed sort of like astronauts even though they're on Earth,
Speaker 3: are obviously like foreigners living among these people. So the
Speaker 3: riders people are dressed in this elaborate kind of beautiful clothing,
Speaker 3: and they speak a different language that the astronauts here
Speaker 3: must translate, and the people are treating the astronauts almost
Speaker 3: like guests, but there is a division between them. One
Speaker 3: of the astronauts, the younger one, seems to have kind
Speaker 3: of a warm relationship with the people, while the older
Speaker 3: guide does not. The younger man seems to maybe have
Speaker 3: a really relationship with one of the women in the group,
Speaker 3: but the older man gives the people some kind of
Speaker 3: pellets or pills that they desire, though he says his
Speaker 3: supply will eventually run out, and the older guy seems
Speaker 3: to regard these people with suspicion. He worries that they're
Speaker 3: going to tamper with his equipment and damage the electronics,
Speaker 3: which would be catastrophic for them, and he sort of
Speaker 3: speaks with scorn about the younger man's relationship with the
Speaker 3: other people. So when I was first watching this, the
Speaker 3: way I interpreted it was, oh, Okay, these are astronauts
Speaker 3: on an alien planet and they're having this tense, kind
Speaker 3: of different or difficult relationship with the locals who seem
Speaker 3: to be treating them well, but it's also it's complicated,
Speaker 3: and so that was one way that sort of made
Speaker 3: a kind of sense. But then as I realized more
Speaker 3: as the plot developed, I realized, like, no, these are
Speaker 3: people on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. It seems to be the case in
Speaker 2: this film, both on Earth and then ultimately on the
Speaker 2: alien planet, that humanity has a tendency to descend into
Speaker 2: this kind of like Bohemian New Pagan sort of tribal
Speaker 2: structure of life with brilliant costuming. Yes, it is just
Speaker 2: important to stress how glorious all of the costuming in
Speaker 2: this film is. You know, just everything that is worn
Speaker 2: is grimy and imperfectly fitting of the atmosphere and the character,
Speaker 2: be it the feather festooned and garments of these riders,
Speaker 2: or the even the pristine spacesuits of the space travelers,
Speaker 2: and then also the garments that the descendants of the
Speaker 2: space travelers end up wearing on the alien world. Clearly
Speaker 2: a great deal of work and creativity went into the
Speaker 2: costuming on this picture.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the costumes are an absolute highlight. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so coming back to the sea, and so there's a
Speaker 3: dispute about the origin of this object that the rider
Speaker 3: brought them. The writer says that they saw it fall
Speaker 3: from the sky during the night just two days ago,
Speaker 3: but one of the guys in the astronaut suit says,
Speaker 3: that's impossible. This thing looks like it was launched into space.
Speaker 3: You know, it was burnt. We can see how it
Speaker 3: was burned in the rocket launch process, and that would
Speaker 3: mean it had to be fifty or sixty years old.
Speaker 3: So it sounds like they're saying, you know, there hasn't
Speaker 3: been a rocket launch in fifty or sixty years. But
Speaker 3: then they sort of process it. They seem concerned. They're like,
Speaker 3: if it really is recent, what does that mean. So
Speaker 3: they decide that the artifact must be analyzed, and when
Speaker 3: it is analyzed, it will contain some kind of recording.
Speaker 3: So they suit up to travel outside, where it is
Speaker 3: freezing by the way. They put on these ghoulish gas masks,
Speaker 3: and they go out, passing by what looks like an
Speaker 3: airfield with pulsing lights on the runway, and then there
Speaker 3: is a hatch that they used to access an underground bunker.
Speaker 3: Now Here we reached the first missing scene. We cannot
Speaker 3: follow the actors into the bunker because that film was
Speaker 3: either lost or never shot. So instead the narrator comes
Speaker 3: in to tell us what happens. The narrator says, under
Speaker 3: the hatchway into which the two astronauts enter, there is
Speaker 3: a lab, a huge room filled with machines that listen
Speaker 3: to the sounds from outer space. And then meanwhile on
Speaker 3: the screen, we are shown contemporary footage of crowds moving
Speaker 3: through what looks like an airport or a subway tunnel
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighties Poland, and the camera glides over the
Speaker 3: floor of this huge windowless passageway at about knee height,
Speaker 3: just looking up at hundreds of busy strangers as they
Speaker 3: walk on without noticing. And then the narration goes on
Speaker 3: saying only one of the oldest machines, which has remained
Speaker 3: idle for decades, can read out what is inside the
Speaker 3: container which the astronauts received from the rider. It is
Speaker 3: a diary, or rather a series of semi transparent plays
Speaker 3: featuring screens as if shot with a camera. The first
Speaker 3: shows the journey of a spacecraft, the pilots losing control
Speaker 3: crashing it into the mountains. Only a fragment of this
Speaker 3: recording survives, and then we cut to the inside of
Speaker 3: a spacecraft cockpit with astronauts in full suits and helmets
Speaker 3: strapped into their seats in cramped quarters. With this just
Speaker 3: hell of wires protruding everywhere, and the spacecraft is shaking
Speaker 3: and rattling. It's obviously going through you know, it's a
Speaker 3: bumpy ride. And then something happens. The cockpit starts to
Speaker 3: fill with what looks like white foam. It's like a
Speaker 3: bubble bath in there, and one of the astronauts silently
Speaker 3: writes the word death in chalk on the inner wall
Speaker 3: of the fuselage. Now I thought this was interesting because
Speaker 3: Zuofsky tells us in the narration that only a fragment
Speaker 3: of this recording survives and then shows us this moment
Speaker 3: from the spacecraft crashing. But since within the plot the
Speaker 3: are looking at a degraded film record of events in
Speaker 3: the past, I think it's genuinely ambiguous whether Zuovsky is
Speaker 3: saying that only a fragment of this part of his
Speaker 3: film on the Silver Globe survives and it's this clip
Speaker 3: that we're about to see, or that the clip is
Speaker 3: supposed to be only a fragment which survives of the
Speaker 3: video diary of the semi transparent plates within the plot,
Speaker 3: And in fact, I would say this is not the
Speaker 3: only way in which the events of the story have
Speaker 3: weird overlaps with the circumstances of the production and restoration
Speaker 3: and release.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it ends up creating a complex tapestry here.
Speaker 3: Anyway, we learned through more narration the spacecraft crashes on
Speaker 3: a mountaintop on this other planet, an earth like planet
Speaker 3: which was chosen for its ability to support life. This
Speaker 3: mission was not just one of exploration, but of colonization.
Speaker 3: You almost get the sense that the astronauts are trying
Speaker 3: to escape something on Earth. They're here to start a
Speaker 3: new life. But I don't know, Rob, did you have
Speaker 3: the same feeling that It's almost like you wonder if
Speaker 3: was this sanctioned? Is this a sanctioned colonization attempt or
Speaker 3: these astronauts who just managed to get hold of a
Speaker 3: spaceship and leave on their own accord.
Speaker 2: Hard to say, yeah, because it feels like Earth is
Speaker 2: in bad shape and there's not like a strong central
Speaker 2: command center that is really in touch with the mission.
Speaker 2: Once it is sent off. Communication between Earth and the
Speaker 2: Silver Globe is very tenuous. So yeah, yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: know that this was necessarily a state sponsored mission so much,
Speaker 2: but we do learn a little bit more about it
Speaker 2: as we proceed.
Speaker 3: So the commander of the mission is killed in the
Speaker 3: crash and his body is left behind, and at some
Speaker 3: point we see I think there are multiple of the
Speaker 3: cruise remains they end up doing this for, but they
Speaker 3: create a kind of mountaintop tomb for him. This like
Speaker 3: a big pile of rocks on which the body is left.
Speaker 3: And for some reason, up in this upper mountain area,
Speaker 3: maybe because it's so arid, the body doesn't really decay.
Speaker 3: Like we come back and see these bodies later on
Speaker 3: the mountaintop and they become like preserved, like the body
Speaker 3: of Linen or something up there, and they are visited
Speaker 3: later in a religious sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another one of the astronauts on this mission, Tomash, survives
Speaker 3: but is badly injured. And here we see haunting barren
Speaker 3: landscapes as the astronauts look down from a mountain into
Speaker 3: the silver valleys all around. I think this is probably
Speaker 3: part of the film that was filmed in the Gobi Desert,
Speaker 3: like in Mongolia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe so. Breath taking locations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the narrator tells us while we look at
Speaker 3: footage of houses and rooftops shot from the window of
Speaker 3: a passing car in modern Poland, that the astronauts see
Speaker 3: another rocket ship crash into the mountains nearby and explode,
Speaker 3: and they wonder quote were those who died in it
Speaker 3: with them or after them? Intriguing question. But they come
Speaker 3: down from the mountains and a couple of surface exploration buggies.
Speaker 3: These are big all terrain vehicles, and they're heading toward
Speaker 3: the ocean. They think they want to set up their
Speaker 3: colony on the beach with access to the sea. And
Speaker 3: on the way they pass a formation of rocks that
Speaker 3: looks deliberately piled together quote like an architectural form, as
Speaker 3: if this apparently empty planet had once been home to
Speaker 3: a civilization long in the past, and we will learn
Speaker 3: that maybe it is still home to a civilization that
Speaker 3: they don't know about. Then the narrator tells us that
Speaker 3: in missing footage, the injured astronaut Tamash hallucinates while riding
Speaker 3: in back of one of these buggies across the desert.
Speaker 3: He believes that he sees the ghosts of dead astronauts
Speaker 3: trying to capture him and chain him up for what purpose.
Speaker 3: He doesn't know. That is one missing scene I kind
Speaker 3: of wish we had. I would like to see the
Speaker 3: astronaut ghosts.
Speaker 2: Feel like an adaptation of a pac Man.
Speaker 3: Also, the other astronauts are a woman named Marta and
Speaker 3: two men named Pyotr in Jersey, so we watched them
Speaker 3: swing between bouts of ecstasy and terror in their new environment.
Speaker 3: The philosophical monologues begin almost immediately, and they are raving
Speaker 3: about the divine potential of human nature, like, oh, what
Speaker 3: is the seed of man?
Speaker 4: This?
Speaker 3: If the seed has a sense to it, it is
Speaker 3: an animal. If the seed has reasoning to it, it
Speaker 3: is a man. If the seed has what intellect to it,
Speaker 3: it is an angel or the son of man. And
Speaker 3: it just I was like trying to follow this. At first,
Speaker 3: I was like, what exactly is he talking about? And
Speaker 3: then I just had to get used to like, Oh,
Speaker 3: it's just going to be like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of it is just going to sort
Speaker 2: of roll off of your brain. But in a way
Speaker 2: it's you know, it's like it's like a poetic lyric
Speaker 2: to a song that you're maybe not supposed to really
Speaker 2: understand beat for beat, but if you sort of pick
Speaker 2: up on half of it, I feel like you're probably
Speaker 2: doing pretty well. I don't know if the experience is
Speaker 2: different if you were a native, a Polish speaker, and
Speaker 2: this film is speaking directly to you without translation and subtitles.
Speaker 2: But and certainly I would love to hear from anyone
Speaker 2: out there who has had that experience. But I don't know.
Speaker 2: I have my doubts. I feel like the contents of
Speaker 2: these monologues are so thick and philosophical and poetic that
Speaker 2: it would be difficult to follow everything beat by beat
Speaker 2: unless you had multiple viewings of this film.
Speaker 3: I agree with that. So the narrative continues to cut
Speaker 3: between lost segments that are narrated by Zuofski and film
Speaker 3: shots of the actors struggling with condition on the planet.
Speaker 3: They're at one point hit by a hurricane and swept
Speaker 3: into a flood current, nearly drowned. Then they are stranded
Speaker 3: on a vast mud flat, with Marda quite movingly still
Speaker 3: clutching Tomasha's dead body after he passes away, so like
Speaker 3: the implication is that she clung to him the whole
Speaker 3: time they were struggling to survive the flood. Again, most
Speaker 3: of this part of the movie seems to be shot
Speaker 3: in point of view. Shots like these are the video
Speaker 3: diaries that we saw being received from space earlier, And
Speaker 3: I guess here is a good point to kind of
Speaker 3: zoom out and recap the plot with a little more distance.
Speaker 3: So what happens after this is that the remaining astronauts Marta, Pyotr,
Speaker 3: and Jersey will go on to found an extraterrestrial kind
Speaker 3: of Swiss family Robinson base on the beach on the
Speaker 3: beach of this world. So we see them building, or
Speaker 3: in fact, we don't see a lot of the building process.
Speaker 3: They just suddenly have these like huts and structures and
Speaker 3: underground layers, these tunnels they've dug out, and fence posts,
Speaker 3: and they have tools and weapons, and they have clothing
Speaker 3: that they've created. They start to sort of change their
Speaker 3: appearance to be I don't know, Like they make tattoos
Speaker 3: and markings on their faces and their skin, and they
Speaker 3: wear these new styles, and they set about having children.
Speaker 3: They become a sort of Adam and Eve trio of
Speaker 3: this new generation of humans. So they learn that the
Speaker 3: humans born on the new planet grow and mature at
Speaker 3: an accelerated pace. It's something about the planet and its atmosphere,
Speaker 3: I guess. So it seems that within a few years
Speaker 3: the children, the first generation of children they have, are
Speaker 3: already reaching adulthood and then again, sort of like the
Speaker 3: Adam and Eve story, there is an unrealistic proliferation of
Speaker 3: new humans from these three progenitors.
Speaker 4: With you.
Speaker 3: They don't really get into this deeply, but a lot
Speaker 3: of implied incest mythological incests. Yes, So the astronauts and
Speaker 3: the children that grow up on the Silver Globe, interestingly
Speaker 3: do not seem to reproduce the old the Earth culture
Speaker 3: that they come from, and instead they create a new
Speaker 3: Neolithic culture with their own emerging styles of clothing and art,
Speaker 3: their own technology, and their own religious beliefs and customs.
Speaker 3: And this is what I thought was one of the
Speaker 3: most interesting things about the movie. It was just the
Speaker 3: idea that, like, so they land, and I think what
Speaker 3: you normally see in a sci fi movie is just
Speaker 3: that like adults land on another planet and they are
Speaker 3: inculturated in the culture they come from and they just
Speaker 3: sort of like reproduce that in the new place. But
Speaker 3: here instead they're shown like making a new, previously non
Speaker 3: existent human culture from scratch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's like a just a break from the previous culture.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like almost like a visiting the other
Speaker 2: plant is in and of itself an intense psychedelic experience
Speaker 2: that changed completely, changes how you relate to yourself and
Speaker 2: your world. And so yeah, they seem to just sort
Speaker 2: of create wholesale this new pagan bohemian society. Like you said,
Speaker 2: they start engaging in all these different forms of face
Speaker 2: painting and or tattoos, intricate braiding of hair and so forth.
Speaker 3: There's one thing I love of what they do with
Speaker 3: the bodies of the dead, Like there is this little
Speaker 3: island off the shore of the beach where they live,
Speaker 3: and the island has these huge standing stones on it,
Speaker 3: like it like this offshore stone hinge. And I don't
Speaker 3: know exactly how that was created or if they found
Speaker 3: it that way, but it becomes a kind of island
Speaker 3: of the dead where. Yeah, after Pyotr and Marta die,
Speaker 3: I think Jersey the one remaining original astronaut, now the
Speaker 3: old man who's revered is kind of a prophet and
Speaker 3: a demi god by the new generations of humans their children.
Speaker 3: He takes the bodies of the other two dead astronauts
Speaker 3: and puts them back into their astronaut suits which they
Speaker 3: have not been wearing, and then takes them out to
Speaker 3: this island of the dead. With the standing stones and
Speaker 3: like leaves them there. Is that what happened?
Speaker 2: I believe?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And now that you mentioned Island of the Dead,
Speaker 2: like it's not, you know, one to one looking like
Speaker 2: Boukland's Island Isle of the Dead painting, But there is
Speaker 2: something to the asymmetry of the island that does kind
Speaker 2: of match up with that painting. So I don't know,
Speaker 2: maybe that I don't know if this is a reference
Speaker 2: to that painting or that painting and this particular shot
Speaker 2: are both sort of referencing the same thing, like deep
Speaker 2: in the Bowels of the human mind?
Speaker 3: Now, is it? At some point around here after Marta
Speaker 3: and Pyotr de that some of the Silver Globe humans
Speaker 3: lead an expedition across the ocean and canoes to see
Speaker 3: what's on the other side, and then only one of
Speaker 3: them comes back alive, saying they were attacked by something
Speaker 3: over the water.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, divisions begin to occur.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: There seem to be like a faction that are like,
Speaker 2: we're good here, and the other faction is like, we
Speaker 2: need to cross the ocean and see what's there. Claim
Speaker 2: what's there? You know, they're expansionists. But only one comes
Speaker 2: back because they're like there are like cities of stone, there,
Speaker 2: vast cities, and there are these winged creatures and they
Speaker 2: killed most of us. And so now we have we
Speaker 2: have a hint of some sort of indigenous civilization here,
Speaker 2: some sort of alien life form, and so far first
Speaker 2: contact has not gone well.
Speaker 3: There's also a section in here, I think it's a
Speaker 3: little earlier where there are random explosions everywhere that are
Speaker 3: never explained, but just I love the effects. They're just like,
Speaker 3: you know, explosives planted under the soil, so they just
Speaker 3: start popping up from the beach and the surrounding land
Speaker 3: in the forest. It's just exploding and you never understand why.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just a weird alien world where we don't
Speaker 2: know if this is seismic chemical or it's stuff falling
Speaker 2: from the sky, but it creates chaos and death.
Speaker 3: Before the final of the Astronauts, before Jersey dies, he
Speaker 3: makes a pilgrimage to the mountaintop where the Astronauts originally landed,
Speaker 3: and I think this is when he sends off his
Speaker 3: video diaries to return to Earth.
Speaker 2: Which is I guess what they're talking about. Having received
Speaker 2: at the top of the picture.
Speaker 3: That's how I took it as well. Yeah, so a
Speaker 3: new batch of astronauts from Earth they receive this message
Speaker 3: and some are sent to the planet. Maybe just one
Speaker 3: is sent or multiple are scent I don't know. We
Speaker 3: only really encounter one, and that is Marek played by
Speaker 3: Andre Severin, who is going to become sort of the
Speaker 3: main character of the movie going forward. When Marek arrives,
Speaker 3: he is welcomed by a religious order that has arisen
Speaker 3: among the humans, and he is treated as a long
Speaker 3: prophesied messiah figure. And it's going to fall to Merrick
Speaker 3: to lead the humans against a terrifying and mysterious alien
Speaker 3: enemy known as the Shurns. Now, what are the Shurans?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Boy, I loved the Shurans. They were so creepy. It's
Speaker 3: kind of unclear to me exactly what their origin is.
Speaker 3: I think they are just supposed to be the indigenous
Speaker 3: inhabitants of this planet, but it also seemed possible to
Speaker 3: me that they were created by humans in some unclear
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they are some sort of humanoid bird person that
Speaker 2: was slash perhaps still is capable of flight, and they
Speaker 2: also are psychic. They have some sort of telepathic abilities,
Speaker 2: and in this I feel like this might have been connected,
Speaker 2: might have been partially inspired by the writings of Edgar Reisberg,
Speaker 2: where we have at one point we have we have
Speaker 2: a psychic winged alien species that features into the plots
Speaker 2: of some of his world. But yeah, these creatures have
Speaker 2: some sort of telepathic ability, and also later on we
Speaker 2: learned some sort of like cybernetic enhancement that is a
Speaker 2: part of how they are expressed. Yeah, there will be
Speaker 2: monologues about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, but you know, you could get the wrong
Speaker 3: idea by hearing that these are bird like creatures, because
Speaker 3: you might be imagining like big, beautiful feathery wings, and
Speaker 3: it's not quite like that. It's more like they are
Speaker 3: humanoids draped in shaggy modeled cloth and caked in mud,
Speaker 3: hobbling stiffly around on two feet, sort of like scarecrows
Speaker 3: with heads covered by scary burlap bags. They're covered in
Speaker 3: you know, just filth and cobwebs, but they do have
Speaker 3: hidden bird like anatomy underneath underneath it all. So they
Speaker 3: have like the sort of angel wings coming off of
Speaker 3: their backs, and then the lump of a beak just
Speaker 3: protruding in the front of the face, but always, like
Speaker 3: I said, sort of under a burlap sack or something.
Speaker 3: And then these dark recesses that contain no visible eyes.
Speaker 3: They are so creepy looking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, reminded me. There's a certain sketchy esque quality to them.
Speaker 2: And they also reminded me of the Beast from the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy eight Check Beauty and the Beast film that
Speaker 2: we watch for Weird House a while back.
Speaker 3: So at this point, the Sharns are a hated foe
Speaker 3: of the humans on the Silver Globe. They are oppressing
Speaker 3: and enslaving the humans. And then I think also they
Speaker 3: are mating with humans to create a type of terrible
Speaker 3: hybrid offspring called the Mortase, which seem to function kind
Speaker 3: of like undead soldiers. Almost.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. There's a scene later on where we see
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of them together that have been kind
Speaker 2: of like collected and imprisoned.
Speaker 3: So anyway, the new astronaut Marek is brought into the
Speaker 3: culture and politics of the human faction here.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: There is the woman named Hazel who is destined by
Speaker 3: prophecy to be his lover, I think, But she's also
Speaker 3: like an actress and is brilliantly acting out the part
Speaker 3: that has been prophesied for her. But then they do
Speaker 3: genuinely fall in love with each other. And then there
Speaker 3: are priests and monks who I sort of understood as
Speaker 3: each trying to manipulate Merick for his perceived power. We
Speaker 3: also see Merrik presiding over battles against the Mortes in
Speaker 3: the in the Shurans, writing what looks like a parade
Speaker 3: float through the middle of the field of combat while
Speaker 3: his adoring minions slay their enemies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of religious zeal and in this,
Speaker 2: this feeling of just of a crusade here that at
Speaker 2: times made me, you know, it made me think of
Speaker 2: doune In in the The Rise of the Messiah character
Speaker 2: in Dune, the Rise of paul A Treades and as
Speaker 2: Malatib and so, yeah, there's a frenzied energy to this
Speaker 2: is like getting everybody worked up to and into it
Speaker 2: to go on these these campaigns against the shern So
Speaker 2: it's it's really like splendid cinematic stuff. I should also
Speaker 2: know that there are a number of scenes here that
Speaker 2: take place in some sort of vast cave complex.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was shot in an abandoned salt mine.
Speaker 2: Ah, that absolutely makes sense because you see like parts
Speaker 2: of the cavern are augmented clearly, and you see like,
Speaker 2: you know, clear human structures of some sort, but in
Speaker 2: a very like alien decayed way. That works perfectly for
Speaker 2: the film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are beautiful, beautiful, ugly sets in these caves
Speaker 3: and in the mines that are so good and just
Speaker 3: generally that this movie uses. It chooses the locations of
Speaker 3: its shots very well. You know, it's almost always framed
Speaker 3: in an interesting place. And it's interesting the way that
Speaker 3: these settings seem to have changed the culture of the humans,
Speaker 3: because we see them doing stuff down in the subterranean
Speaker 3: settings that we don't see them doing above. Like in
Speaker 3: the subterranean setting is where they keep their prisoners, Like
Speaker 3: they take the leader of the Shurns prisoner and they've
Speaker 3: got him captive there, and they've got all these mortas
Speaker 3: as prisoners. But it's also the only place we see
Speaker 3: the humans like engaging in orgies. There seems to be
Speaker 3: some kind of ritual orgy going on that's like hundreds
Speaker 3: of people sort of writhing about naked on the ground,
Speaker 3: their bodies like painted gray and blue.
Speaker 2: I think it and I may be wrong in this,
Speaker 2: but I think the idea is that these are humans
Speaker 2: who have been like psychically touched by the shurn in
Speaker 2: some way that is like, you know, they've kind of
Speaker 2: just fallen off into just unending desire and they're like
Speaker 2: writhing on the floor the cavern in a way that
Speaker 2: feels like directly inspired by the Gustaf Door illustrations for
Speaker 2: Dante's Inferno. And and I believe Purgatory as well. Maybe
Speaker 2: I'm more specifically thinking of scenes from Purgatory.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, yeah, I can see that link.
Speaker 2: At one point, we have characters walk across them even
Speaker 2: like they are not only on the floor, but they
Speaker 2: are the floor of the cavern.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So, as I said in this section, Marek
Speaker 3: does fall in love with Iol, but he also seems
Speaker 3: plagued by bad memories of failed relationships on Earth. And
Speaker 3: as you alluded to earlier, this character Marek is always
Speaker 3: operating right at the brink of madness, Like he is
Speaker 3: giving these incredibly powerful, passionate monologues, but he is not
Speaker 3: doing well emotionally, yeah, from the get go. So Marek
Speaker 3: eventually leads his forces in an assault on the schern
Speaker 3: homeland across the sea, which strangely looks like it could
Speaker 3: be the war torn ruins of a Polish city.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is. It definitely has that feel to it.
Speaker 2: And you know, obviously that was probably more or less
Speaker 2: how they shot it. They use some sort of like
Speaker 2: fittingly gray section of some Polish city and they just
Speaker 2: dirtied and grimed it up a lot. But I guess
Speaker 2: it's fitting for the film in that it's again, even
Speaker 2: the world of the Silver Globe is a world in decline,
Speaker 2: like Sharan civilization is in decline. There's at least at
Speaker 2: some point mentioned that they have lost the ability to
Speaker 2: fly am I remembering that correctly, though, then there are
Speaker 2: it seems like there are instances where they do fly,
Speaker 2: so they Again it's like one civilization in decline attempting
Speaker 2: to topple another civilization decline in decline on this strange world.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But also Mark is strangely affected by like the
Speaker 3: persuasive powers of the Shurans, like the Sharon leader who
Speaker 3: he captures and talks to, kind of gets in his
Speaker 3: head in a way, And when he's on campaign attacking
Speaker 3: the Sharn homeland, he has these weird moments where he
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly how to interpret everything emotionally, but like,
Speaker 3: there's a part that we don't get to fully see,
Speaker 3: but it is told to us in one of the
Speaker 3: narrated segments that he goes into like a cathedral in
Speaker 3: the Sharn city, and the cathedral is full of these
Speaker 3: like lock boxes containing Sharn brains, And yeah, so what's
Speaker 3: going on here?
Speaker 2: Something to do with the complex nature of Sharn existence
Speaker 2: that they are augmented cybernetic beings. Maybe the brains are
Speaker 2: from another species and the brains are like remotely controlling
Speaker 2: the bird bodies. I don't know, it's very complex. I
Speaker 2: wish we would have gotten those brain scenes.
Speaker 3: Yeah too, but yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: It's a lot. Now that being said, just because the
Speaker 2: Sharn set Merrick off, everything seems to set Merrick off.
Speaker 2: If you were to ask Merrik, do you want cream
Speaker 2: and sugar with your coffee, it would probably result in
Speaker 2: a fifteen minute monologue about, oh, well, to put the
Speaker 2: coffee in the cream into the coffee is to make
Speaker 2: my coffee into something that I did not have before,
Speaker 2: And it would keep going on and it would just
Speaker 2: be again be at the edge of just complete collapse.
Speaker 2: The whole time.
Speaker 3: I don't know if the monologu would even mention coffee,
Speaker 3: it might set off a monologue is like, in order
Speaker 3: to understand you must I destroy you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, okay, so there's the campaign part. When Marrek eventually
Speaker 3: returns to the Earthling colony across the sea after the
Speaker 3: attempted conquest, he finds the beach uh oh full of
Speaker 3: heretics impaled on stakes there is an inquisition going on,
Speaker 3: and he is next, and then we work our way
Speaker 3: up to the final, really the final set piece of
Speaker 3: the movie, which is that Mark gets crucified.
Speaker 2: If there is like a BINGO card for extravagant art
Speaker 2: house epics, I feel like this is definitely on there,
Speaker 2: like crucifixion of central character, and it's uh yeah, it's
Speaker 2: bloody and horrifying. Though it does come after the scene
Speaker 2: where we encounter like a good dozen or so heretics
Speaker 2: impaled on the beach in what is a grizzly scene. Like,
Speaker 2: you know, at this point, we're over two hours into
Speaker 2: the film and we've seen a lot. We've seen a lot,
Speaker 2: a lot of blood and stuff, but this this I
Speaker 2: was not quite prepared for how grizzly these sections are and.
Speaker 3: At least one of the impaled guys is a real actor.
Speaker 3: I'm not they actually impaled him, but they have him
Speaker 3: up on a really high up stake, sitting there and
Speaker 3: delivering lines. I don't know how they achieved that effect.
Speaker 2: Yeah. These not to get too graphic, but these these
Speaker 2: are these poles are they're impaled on, are like dripping
Speaker 2: with the ruptured entrails of the people who have been impaled.
Speaker 2: It's very graphic, and yet there's like this kind of
Speaker 2: almost Monty Python esque I'm not Dead yet kind of
Speaker 2: vibe to it, because you have a guy on top
Speaker 2: of this thing giving an extended monologue, and then another
Speaker 2: similar feel when we get our main character hauled up
Speaker 2: on a form of a crucifix.
Speaker 3: Now there's something I haven't even mentioned yet, which is
Speaker 3: that the last like third to a quarter of the movie,
Speaker 3: while the Marek plot is going on, it's also intercutting
Speaker 3: with the plot of the actress and Yasik, who are
Speaker 3: I think they are lovers, and the actress was once
Speaker 3: Mak's partner, but they sent Marek away to another planet
Speaker 3: so that she and Yasick could be together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was like a love triangle and the solution
Speaker 2: was to send him off. He comes to the planet
Speaker 2: becomes its savior, but then at the same time on
Speaker 2: the planet, he's returned from this campaign across the ocean.
Speaker 2: And I believe it's implied that the campaign has not
Speaker 2: been entirely successful. It has perhaps been you could perhaps
Speaker 2: view it more accurately as a retreat. And at this
Speaker 2: point there is definitely a schism in the culture here
Speaker 2: on the Silver Globe, where some people were like her,
Speaker 2: are saying, I don't think he is the savior, And
Speaker 2: I've kinda got this vibe that he was not. He
Speaker 2: did not come here, He was exiled here, right, And
Speaker 2: that's why you have all these heretics impaled on the beach.
Speaker 3: Right, there's this other religious figure who we are told
Speaker 3: says that Mark was not sent to them as a savior.
Speaker 3: He is a worm expelled from below. But then so, oh,
Speaker 3: I forget how this even happens. Somehow, Yossick and the
Speaker 3: actress arrive on the Silver Globe planet and they're there
Speaker 3: like with the other humans, for the crucifixion in the end,
Speaker 3: and there's a very they take on kind of religious
Speaker 3: the trappings of religious figures.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could not find a really adequate explanation of this.
Speaker 2: I looked around and I found other people online trying
Speaker 2: to figure this out as well. Like they do they
Speaker 2: travel on a spaceship and we just don't see it.
Speaker 2: Maybe do they just take weird drugs and magically travel here.
Speaker 2: Possibly there might be some third option I'm missing, but
Speaker 2: at any rate, they arrive.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to mention a frame that I included
Speaker 3: right here at the end for us Rob which is
Speaker 3: toward the end of the movie. One character. Wait, is
Speaker 3: this the character of the actress who is shown with
Speaker 3: the with like a flesh eating disease at the end?
Speaker 2: Oh, I thought this was Azel.
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, it might be okay, Yeah.
Speaker 2: For she is, assuming I'm correct here, she has now
Speaker 2: has some sort of a strange kind of like space
Speaker 2: leprosy thing going on. It's you know, grotesque and beautiful
Speaker 2: at the same time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so she has that she wears like a
Speaker 3: veil over her face but it's uncovered and she has
Speaker 3: these sores and then it Yasik is just standing there
Speaker 3: next to her and says how much can one endure?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 3: And I have to feel like maybe that was the
Speaker 3: director talking about both the making of the movie and
Speaker 3: your watching of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how much can one endure about what one hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty six minutes.
Speaker 3: There's so much we haven't talked about, but I feel
Speaker 3: like we've got to cut it off at some point,
Speaker 3: So I think maybe we're we're getting there. I don't
Speaker 3: know if you have anything else you want to hit on.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, I just have to say again, it's
Speaker 2: the costuming, the setting, the the just exhausting in a
Speaker 2: good way, performances. You know, it's just so much creative
Speaker 2: energy went into this thing, and you know, thank goodness
Speaker 2: it survived. What a tragedy it would have been if
Speaker 2: all of this work, regardless of the quality of the
Speaker 2: final film or what we have of the final film,
Speaker 2: if all of that work had gone to waste and
Speaker 2: an audience didn't get to experience it. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but I do think that there was the result of
Speaker 2: it here. It's again, I was never bored throughout the
Speaker 2: whole thing. At times, I was exhausted and certainly challenged
Speaker 2: by the content, but it is a phenomenal film viewing experience,
Speaker 2: and I do recommend it to anyone out there who
Speaker 2: likes a weird jaunt into just another cinematic realm.
Speaker 3: It might not be for everyone, but it is a
Speaker 3: remarkable piece of filmmaking absolutely.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, we're going to go and close it
Speaker 2: out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there.
Speaker 2: Do you have a pass concerning on the Silver Globe
Speaker 2: or perhaps a future concerning on the Silver Globe? Right in,
Speaker 2: we would love to hear from you also, you know, certainly,
Speaker 2: especially with this being our first Polish film, if we
Speaker 2: have you know, listeners from Poland or of Polish descent,
Speaker 2: or just you know, film fans who have more familiarity
Speaker 2: with Polish cinema than we do. Right in, we'd love
Speaker 2: to hear from you about this movie or about you know,
Speaker 2: other films from Polish cinema and Polish creators, directors and
Speaker 2: featuring Polish actors we might consider in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we'd love to hear it. Just as a reminder. Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast feed
Speaker 2: with core episodes of the podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays
Speaker 2: dealing with topics you know, scientific and cultural. On Mondays
Speaker 2: we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short
Speaker 2: form episode and on Fridays, we set aside most serious
Speaker 2: concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
Speaker 2: House Cinema. If you want to see a list of
Speaker 2: all the films we've covered over the years, go to
Speaker 2: letterbox dot com. It's L E T T E R
Speaker 2: B O x D dot com. It's a fun website
Speaker 2: for film fans in general, but we have a profile there.
Speaker 2: Our profile name is weird House, and we have a
Speaker 2: list of everything we've covered and sometimes a peek ahead
Speaker 2: at what's coming out next.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
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