On the Silver Globe

Andrzej Żuławski returned to Polish cinema after a 16-year absence with On the Silver Globe, a film that proved to be the most ambitious and difficult project of his career. The largest Polish production of all time when shooting began in 1976, it was halted in the fall of ’77 by the Ministry of Culture due to its alleged subversiveness, before finally being reconstituted and released after the fall of communism over a decade later. The resulting sci-fi epic follows a group of astronauts who, after crash-landing on the moon, forge a new society. As the first generation dies off, their children devise new rituals and mythologies to structure the emergent civilization, until a politician from Earth arrives and is hailed as the Messiah… An inexhaustibly inventive and absorbing film maudit that quite literally creates a new cinematic world, On the Silver Globe is perhaps the grandest expression of Żuławski’s visionary artistry.