"On The Silver Globe" is not only one of the greatest science and moral fiction movies ever made, it also presents a rare entropic quandary. After his damning second feature "The Devil" equated the Polish government to an imp whispering vile conspiracy in the ear of a shell-shocked prisoner, director Żuławski was cordially invited to get the hell out of Poland and never come back. His permanent exile wasn't to be. When his next film, 1975's French-funded "That Most Important Thing: Love" performed well abroad, the cultural authorities waved a white flag and let the prodigal back in their borders. He knew exactly what he was going to do when he got back home.
He set about adapting his great uncle Jerzy's sci-fi novels, "The Lunar Trilogy," some of the most celebrated and influential European cult tomes ever written. It took him two years to write the script and have it meet the strict dictums set forth by the cultural ministry, and the shoot itself was no picnic. In 1977, with four-fifths of his film complete, Żuławski's production was shut down by Vice Minister of cultural affairs Janusz Wilhelmi and he was kicked out of Poland for a second time. Seems Wilhelmi didn't dig the screenplay's equating state and religious authority, nor its insistence that both are corruptible constructs (caves figure heavily into the action, students of philosophy). The really interesting part comes next. Żuławski rebounded with the deeply wounded and wounding paranoid divorce drama "Possession," which led him down a path of similarly abrasive psychodramas about men in thrall to women—stand-ins for his artistic obsessions—and the political obstacles to their romantic unions. Most conclude with physical and mental breakdowns and murder. In the late '80s, with three such films of shrieking skullduggery under his belt, the former enfant terrible returned to what might have been his masterpiece and put as much of it together as he could, filling in the missing plot points with narration laid over footage of modern Poland. The patchwork "On The Silver Globe" debuted at Cannes in 1988 and has been haunting viewers ever since.
Żuławski, apparently on the wavelength he rode while making this outlandish masterpiece once again, followed it up with an adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov," a stylistic sequel. Both films share an interplay between impossible color and thick, Dutch monochrome, musical invention, a historical-philosophical bedrock, and especially cinematography, which goes tear-assing through scenes of sybaritic suffering as if strapped to a Plymouth Hemi 'Cuda. If just reassembling the film primed him to make "Boris Godunov," what might he have done if he'd been allowed to finish the film in '77? It would have predicted the entirety of the 1980s dystopian trend. Everything & everyone from "The Road Warrior" to Paul Verhoeven, "Cannibal Holocaust" to Piotr Szulkin, Ridley Scott to Terry Gilliam, all appear to owe it a debt, but no one who looks like they might have been influenced by its madcap secrets could have seen a frame of the film until after the vogue for post-apocalyptic yarns had morphed into the cyberpunk trend of the 1990s. Together the two strands, personal and communal, form a tantalizing piece of cinephile string theory. What if this post-punk j'accuse had escaped into the blood stream of the filmgoing public in 1977? Would he have finished adapting the trilogy?
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