Back to Back 51 - A Different and Even More Insane Planet than This One
Comparing Eastern European visions of interplanetary sci-fi-fantasy that get medieval on various arses
Some like to think of film as an entertainment, others as an education, and yet others as some mixture of the two, something to keep you amused while you learn affirming life lessons, a painless growth experience.
Then there are those who see film as an overwhelming force, a passion - in the biblical sense, a suffering and a redemption - to be inflicted on the viewer either by a saturation of intense emotion, or by a swirling nonstop bombardment of kinetic imagery, or as a domineering intimidation brought on by visions of horrific brutalising savagery.
In Russian cinema, they talk of the "chernukha”, a film new wave of grim violent and criminal ‘neorealism’ that came as a liberating force after years of happy socialist realism. It’s a kind of Eastern Punk thing, the counterpart to the New French Extremism that embraced the extreme as a Sadean liberation.
Both of the films considered this week fall into this Eastern European extremist category, both are sci-fi epics with a strong allegorical element, and both seek to overwhelm the viewer by a sustained barrage of non-stop transgressive sensation. One succeeds a lot better than the other, partly because the first one was never finished.
Between the bone and spaceship in 2001, in the unreal space of that hardest of hard cuts, we might situate On the Silver Globe, Andrzej Żuławski’s butchered sci-fi masterpiece. A work every bit as sweaty and unpredictable as Żuławski’s own Possession — a film which set the high watermark for unpredictability and pallid actors — On the Silver Globe offers a complete ethnography of a civilization simultaneously past and future, from its three founders — stranded astronauts from Earth — through several generations of political refinement and myth-building.
Patrick Dahl, at Screen Slate
There are approximately 5 million books, pamphlets, fanzines and websites written about sci-fi movies and shows, and another million publications devoted to Eastern European avant-garde films, but almost nothing at all written about Andrzej Żuławski's abortive science-fiction/fantasy epic On the Silver Globe. On Rotten Tomatoes there are 306 reviews for Longlegs (2024), but only four for this film.
There is, however, an excellent documentary feature, Escape to the Silver Globe (2021), which charts the rise and fall and rise again of this doomed project. Having a film about a film, like the film NotFilm (2020) about Samuel Beckett's film Film (1965), a film, therefore, about a film about film, is sure to raise your work to the status of cult movie no matter how patchy and uneven the work in question.
And after all it's been through there's no doubt that the film is patchy. The auguries were never good: it was abruptly canned by the Polish authorities in 1977 for its subversive equation of political ideology and religion. Way to prove the director's point, Vice-Minister of Culture Janusz Wilhelmi - nothing says "we're very different indeed from religious inquisitions" like shutting down a movie for daring to question the status quo and burning all the copies you can get hold of.
However, it's also possible that the massive overbudgeting and the sprawl of the project contributed in no small measure to its cancellation too. It's comparable in that sense to Jodorowsky's projected Dune movie, which never even got off the ground - but also has a documentary feature about the (non)making of the movie.
On the other hand, it's possible that this cancellation was the best thing to ever happen to the film. It was believed the film was utterly lost, but ten years later Żuławski got to splice together the incomplete reels that had survived with a number of B-reel sequences of contemporary footage along with narrated voice-over to fill in the gaps. Ironically, this radical incompleteness just makes the film better, at least from a certain point of view that favours fragmentary narratives:
The fiasco of On the Silver Globe, a densely layered work that prompts multiple interpretations along with outright bewilderment, further illustrates the problems faced by complex, unconventional aesthetic practices in a political culture for which opacity spelled masked subversion... Żuławski’s insertion of present-day vérité footage into the released version, patching over the lacunae of the sabotaged shoot, ironically makes it an even more fragmentary, dislocated and ‘avant-garde’ work than originally intended.
Jonathan L. Owen "Western Promise", in Kuc & O'Pray (eds), The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film (2014) p98
In the documentary we can see the fevered intensity of Andrzej Żuławski, chewing his lip and demanding more and more intensity from his actors as he dares them to get furious with him so as to produce that desired fire. It explains a lot about not only this film, but his other films, including The Devil (1972) and Possession (1981), both of which include frenzied ecstatic performances that are shamanic and frightening in their intensity.
Realism in the sense of establishing a coherent world or backstory for his characters to inhabit, and emotivity commensurate with what we would recognize as ‘normal’ emotional reactions, mattered not a jot for Żuławski. He was after something titanic (remembering that the Titans preceded the Gods and were the most primitive of mythologies), something utterly savage and primordial. No wonder the suits of Poland's Department of Culture weren't exactly overjoyed by this wild man's output.
At the beginning of the film it's just like Planet of the Apes (1968) if the astronauts in Planet of the Apes were given to spouting snippets of existential philosphy as they are set to expire in the wilderness. I could just see Charlton Heston saying "the parent endows the child with seeds of infinite possibility... we are cowards who have to defend courage... sex, consciousness, carnal beauty, the seeking after love" just before he growls out "damned dirty ape!" But this spewing of wise-sounding abstraction is just the beginning. By the end of the film every single word in "My First Philosophical Dictionary" will be given a thorough airing through many, many repetitions.
It's a wordy affair, no doubt, and every action is accompanied by a tremendous amount of philosophizing and emoting all at once, like a lecture on Nietzsche given by a professor tripping balls on acid. This, I believe, is its most serious defect; a case where much less dialogue would have added a great deal to its power, and given the viewer the ability to let the themes sink in from the story and image without being subject to an impassioned thesis and counterthesis of verbal dialectic at nearly all times. One thinks of Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), which explores themes of similar philosophical depth with just a fraction of the verbiage.
There's also a shock when you realize that the conceit is that the film is shot through video recorders worn by the astronauts and then sent back to its planet of origin by automatic return probe. So the first part of the film is - wait for it - found footage! This, a full two decades before that became a common trope in horror and sci-fi movies - though there are of course some similar sequences in Alien (1979) and its sequel. It's a huge breakthrough for genre movies, but the jittery jump-cuts (to suggest digital video, perhaps?) give it also the air of a French New Wave venture. As in all things Żuławski, it's straddling the boundaries between east and west, genre movie and arthouse drama, future and primitive past.
When the original three astronauts give rise to an entire new colony of humans, peopling the vacant beach with a swarming mass of tribespeople in a short time, and then die out, we switch to part two. Marek (Andrzej Seweryn) comes back to the unnamed planet an indeterminate number of years later, and leads a Dune-like holy war between the humans and the bird-people Sherns. This is executed mostly by means of large numbers of extras swarming around in a wood - in fact it took me quite while before I recognized that the swarming-around was actually a battle. The Sherns are in theory the native inhabitants of this planet, making the humans the alien colonizers bent on their eradication, but no matter. There's no doubt about where our sympathies are supposed to lie.
Marek gets caught up in a cult of actors who wish to make everything they see into an improvised theatrical performance - surely the most diabolic of cults ever realized on film - and engages in a very lengthy discussion with a captured birdman. This latter scene is at once hugely embarrassing for all concerned and massively overlong, so even the joy at watching poor Marek have his brain drilled with nihilist insights while writhing on the floor and gurning slowly pales as it goes on and on.
It shows the great weakness of the film as a whole, its unstoppable wordiness. Each encounter gives rise to a tremendous outpouring of dialogue rushed out at top speed. There's no time to savour even the smallest thought about freedom, realization, commitment and love before it's overwhelmed in a torrent of a dozen more such maxims. When the film pauses in its verborrhea and lets the images do their work is when it's at its most effective. But mostly the shouted scraps of dialogue - as if Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Stanislawski had been thrown into a blender - smother the growth of ideas in a welter of pseudobabble.
Finally there are the great set-pieces, which really are wonderful visual extravaganzas: the assault on the bird-people city, a burnt-out post-war ruin; people impaled on enormous stakes on the beach; a return to a dystopian near-earth peopled by nomadic horse shamans and underground technicians who want to trip on their psychoactive substances; a great plain with an abandoned hulk of a building squatting monumentally; a wild drive in a post-apocalyptic hot-rod (years before Mad Max was a thing); last of all a crucifixion scene, grisly and milked for symbolic resonances. All of these are thrown into the mix with great abandon and almost no concern for coherence, either of plot or of theme.
The tragedy of this film, and of Andrzej Żuławski in his most manic phases, is that he believed he had a lot to say about the human condition and tried to say it all at once. But in fact he was a great visual artist, an artist of the moving image in time, and not a great writer. Great writers know how to stem their flow, not let it pour out in an uncontrolled frenzy of babble. Great film writers know how to make their words work in the context of the images that accompany them, not to try to smother them in outpourings of rageful yelling. In his later film Possession (1981) there are moments when words falter and fail, and the images do all the work of communication with the viewer. These are truly powerful, and a sign of his growth as an artist.
The final shot of the 1988 cut of the film is of the director himself, disappointed but unbowed. He had hopes that On the Silver Globe would be his masterpiece, his magnum opus, and it very much wasn't. But that was not down to the suppression by the authorities or impatience of financial backers, and it was likely that if the film had been finished as planned it would have disappeared into the relative obscurity of a Soviet-era sci-fi like Kin-dza-dza! (1986) rather than have achieved immortality. As a broken fragmented would-have-been it likely gathers more grandeur to itself than his bloated chaotic epic ever would have if completed.
— INTERMISSION —
It could be that every single film experience is a struggle for dominance between the film (and the filmmaker who made it) and the viewer, just that most of the time we don't notice because the film is doing everything it can to please the viewer, pander to the viewer's every feeling and belief, and so comes to dominate through flattery and manipulation. Like some kind of Grima Wormtongue sneak, the filmmaker has come to control your perceptions and your emotion, but without ever revealing this mastery, preferring to pose as your humble servitor and entertainer.
It's only when films refuse to pander in this way that we really perceive that struggle going on, and try to fight it with every fibre of our being. When instead maybe we should just surrender to it, let it bully us, at least for the time being. Let that nagging ego of ours take a break, and float in someone else's sensibility for a while. We can always bring our own very important and transcendent feelings and beliefs back into play once the film is over.
Aleksei Gherman's last film is one of those ones which makes no bones about its aim to bully you with images and sounds until your own little self is gone and you're just swimming in the extremity of his restless grungy world like an ameoba floating on a puddle of piss. After his punkish and Felliniesque post-Soviet political hell epic Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) was released, people debated for may years whether it was a masterpiece or a disaster. The correct answer is both: it's a masterpiece about disaster, where the disaster is Russia and the whole cruel pitiless world beyond.
Hard to be a God is even more of the same thing. It's easy to be fooled by all the grimy goofiness and evil slapstick into thinking it's a kind of nightmarish loony toon about a medieval world with stakes being shoved up people's arses - as in On the Silver Globe. But it's so much more than that: it's actually a dystopian vision of what might occur if/when our grip on simple intellectual curiosity is loosened and our humanity fades to a slender thread that can't sustain the weight of so much ignorance and savagery. In other words, the horrorshow of Arkanar is not a far-off fantasy planet. It's here, today, in our world.
So that's two reasons to hate this magnificent film: it's refusing to pander to you with even the slimmest type of optimistic message or sympathetic gesture, happy instead to bully you into submission; and it's holding a brutal mirror up to our world, where hideous atrocity is either condemned or condoned depending on whose side is doing it. But it's still great fun, despite all the nastiness, the chernukha "blackstuff" beloved of Russian underground directors like Gherman. In fact there's a lot of grotesque beauty on display, in the finest Fellini tradition.
Each shot is a vision of pandemonium: a depthless chiaroscuro composition in which dogs, chickens, owls and hedgehogs appear on virtually equal terms with the bewildered humans, who themselves are semi-bestial. The camera ranges lightly over this panorama of bedlam, and characters both important and unimportant will occasionally peer stunned into the camera lens, like passersby in some documentary... Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.
Peter Bradshaw review in The Guardian 6 August 2015
Not sure what 'depthless' means in this context, since Gherman's compositions are always deep focus with a lot of depth on display, exactly like the canonical deep focus of Citizen Kane - maybe 'depthless' is supposed to mean precisely that? Or maybe Bradshaw, wobbly at the best of times on technical cinema aspects, is just completely confused. This would comport with the classic British amateur enthusiast approach to film and arts generally, which brooks no technical understanding. That aside, the description is accurate, the impression of a chaotic (though in fact meticulously planned) surge of movement quite faithful to the Hard to be a God experience, which is a total immersion in the usually confusing action.
But it is exhausting, this constant movement through spaces where nobody moves forward but in circles, so there's always a huge swirl like a dance around a scene's location and a return to where we started before whatever plot action there may be (never very much) is resolved. Meanwhile we're assaulted by strange and ghastly things poked in our faces, heads that pop into frame to stare like curious or hostile observers of us, the viewers, in a very rude and intrusive turnabout from the accepted conventions, and all those various liquids - blood, piss, rain, and bucketfuls of snot - shot out of noses, wiped up with fingers and just dripping constantly or being hawked back in the throat.
There's a constant in Khrustalyov and in Hard to be a God, and I imagine it's a constant of Gherman's work and world view generally. Just as the protagonist of the earlier film is part of the Soviet elite, mixing at the highest levels of Stalinist bureaucracy, so in this film Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik) is considered a god by most of the common folk, and by even the elite Grey Guards a powerful magician and lord. So there's a dynamic going on in both films of "intimate superiority": the powerful leader is not set apart from the common people he dominates, but very much in the closest possible contact with them. It appears that Gherman sees this as a characteristic of the Russian social structure, this dominance exerted so powerfully at close-quarters.
If we compare it with more traditional power-dynamics of space, like the Italian fascists of Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) - or even his much later The Last Emperor (1987) - the contrast is clear. For the Mussolini fascists as for the Qing Chinese empire, power is exerted by wide-open spaces where the persons to be dominated have a lot of physical negative space to remind them of the huge gulf in power. But according to Gherman, the Russian-style strongman, whether Stalinist apparatchik or interplanetary interloper, is there right in his underlings' faces, bullying them with a finger up their nostrils or a hand clasping their genitals. It's all very up-close and intimate, this particular kind of tyranny.
A certain tendency in film criticism of this masterwork sees a strong influence either of Andrei Tarkovsky, for example the medieval grimness and beauty of Andrei Rublev (1966), and/or the much wilder style of Żuławski in On the Silver Globe. There is indeed a strong influence visible in both films, as there is from Fellini's intricate mise-en-scène arrangements and camera movements. Less common is an actual discussion of what all this grotesquerie actually means.
But I think it's clear enough that it is, like nearly all sci-fi/fantasy, about our own time. That the conditions for "enlightenment" and even slightly civilized conduct are precarious enough, and that a regression to the vile medieval world of Arkanar could be just around the corner for us too if we forget what it is to be human and humane.