![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Finding the Psyche of the Director
I'm currently trudging through The Lunar Trilogy, a set of Polish sci-fi novels written in the first decade of the 1900s by Jerzy Zulawski, and later adapted into one of my favorite Eastern Bloc films of all time, the immaculate and oneiric On The Silver Globe.
My love of the film motivated me to pick up the trilogy (which thankfully has a recent English translation); On The Silver Globe is an infamously erudite film, due in part to Andrzej Żuławski's dense and manic filmmaking style, but also due to the fact that the film was never finished at all—the Polish government stopped the film's production in 1977 and ordered the prints destroyed. What survives is over three hours of footage, preserved in secret by cast and crew. The few lacunae, punctuating the film like cracks in a cuneiform tablet, are narrated by the director over B-roll footage.
I had hoped that the book would illuminate what portions of the film I still can't quite understand, and my efforts in this regard have been mixed. The chaotic, florid dialog and cryptic metaphors are all Andrzej, save for one which crosses over to the book.
There is a persistent ocular motif in the film, which extends to one of the many impenetrable monologues:
"I was taught that the eye of the world, which is watching me, is the same eye with which I am watching the world. This eye is neither cheerful nor evil, neither feeling nor expectant. It is indifferent, like water."
There is a metaphorical eye in the book as well. It is the Earth:
"Earth seems to have changed into an open, merciless and cautious eye that is stubbornly staring at us, surprised at our running away from it with our bodies, the first of its children to do so."
I always feel an odd sort of spiritual connection with a filmmaker when I come across things like this. The same story, the same words, across decades of time and half a world away, making it to us both.
My love of the film motivated me to pick up the trilogy (which thankfully has a recent English translation); On The Silver Globe is an infamously erudite film, due in part to Andrzej Żuławski's dense and manic filmmaking style, but also due to the fact that the film was never finished at all—the Polish government stopped the film's production in 1977 and ordered the prints destroyed. What survives is over three hours of footage, preserved in secret by cast and crew. The few lacunae, punctuating the film like cracks in a cuneiform tablet, are narrated by the director over B-roll footage.
I had hoped that the book would illuminate what portions of the film I still can't quite understand, and my efforts in this regard have been mixed. The chaotic, florid dialog and cryptic metaphors are all Andrzej, save for one which crosses over to the book.
There is a persistent ocular motif in the film, which extends to one of the many impenetrable monologues:
"I was taught that the eye of the world, which is watching me, is the same eye with which I am watching the world. This eye is neither cheerful nor evil, neither feeling nor expectant. It is indifferent, like water."
There is a metaphorical eye in the book as well. It is the Earth:
"Earth seems to have changed into an open, merciless and cautious eye that is stubbornly staring at us, surprised at our running away from it with our bodies, the first of its children to do so."
I always feel an odd sort of spiritual connection with a filmmaker when I come across things like this. The same story, the same words, across decades of time and half a world away, making it to us both.