The Difficulties in Getting Poles to the Moon

Whereas the Czechs had been busy inventing the robotic, the Poles had been targeted on conquering the moon. Is that this a joke? No!… nicely, sure. Sorry.

However nonetheless, there’s one thing to that. Whereas 100 years in the past, Czech author Karel Čapek launched the world to the phrase “robotic,” Poles had been studying “Na Srebrnym Globie” (“On the Silver Globe”). First printed in 1903 and changed into a trilogy by 1911, it was a science-fiction novel by Jerzy Żuławski with bother in its genes – handed down by generations, actually.

“On the Silver Globe. The Moon Manuscript” tells the story of the primary human expedition to the moon, seen from the angle of one in every of its members writing the e book as his diary. In a small lunar rover, they journey the huge house of the satellite tv for pc, hoping to discover a hospitable surroundings on the darkish aspect of the moon.

It really works out for them. The survivors of the damaging mission settle within the moon’s ambiance, forming an egalitarian neighborhood. This degrades over time right into a despotic society, having suffered to that from neurodegenerative points – as all of the society’s members have the identical feminine protoplast. The utopic concepts are confronted with dystopic outcomes, including some pessimism to the positivist discourse of the early twentieth century.

Andrzej Żuławski, the Polish-French prodigy

Seven a long time handed, and “On the Silver Globe” turned out to be nonetheless very a lot alive – as there was a director desirous about adapting the e book to display screen. By no coincidence, it was one of the crucial well-known Polish administrators of the time, Andrzej Żuławski. In his mid-thirties when the shoot started, Andrzej Żuławski was the great-nephew of Jerzy, the e book’s writer.

A prodigy youngster of the Polish film college of the time who made his debut as a second director beneath famend director Andrzej Wajda, Żuławski quickly courted scandal for his films. Polish authorities shelved his movie “Satan” for marrying controversial social standpoints with brazenly pornographic depictions. By the point he made his subsequent essential film, he had moved to France. “The Most Necessary Factor: Love” depicts the underground pornography trade. Regardless of his industrial and inventive success, the director returned to Poland and took up his most essential and most problematic work, “On the Silver Globe.”

Andrzej Żuławski’s “2001”

The 2021 documentary “The Escape to Silver Globe” (out there on Netflix as of press date) describes the venture as one of the crucial notable within the Polish cinema golden age of the Seventies. Some interviewees examine it to an ahead-its-time “Star Wars,” although frankly, the scope and thickness of the plot put the (potential) film extra in step with Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Area Odyssey.”

And so far as the cinematography is worried, the closest comparisons can be the wildest David Lynch films. The house colony is, in Andrzej Żuławski’s eyes, the center of darkness. It’s a mad, theocratic society based mostly by itself phrases, having misplaced all connection to its authentic tradition (till the expedition finds them). Theatrical and philosophical, it might have been among the many most essential achievements of Polish haute cinema.

However that was not its destiny for quite a few causes. First off, after literal years of filming, the venture was placed on maintain at some extent when it was round 80 % full. The shoot had already break the bank, with places just like the Mongolian steppe, the Caucasus, and the underground Wieliczka salt mine consuming up the finances.

The actors had been extraordinarily drained – the salt mine scenes alone required a every day stroll, in full make-up and costume, partly bare in very low temperatures, supervised by miners, for a day’s work in an inhospitable location. Żuławski was famously brutal in forcing actors to go far past their consolation zones.

The Silver Globe strikes again

The film was on maintain for over a decade. In 1988, Żuławski, who had chosen to begin his profession anew in France after what he thought-about a humiliating defeat, returned to Poland simply as communism was collapsing to renegotiate the manufacturing.