Andrzej Zulawski's "On the Silver Globe"

Has anyone else seen this? Holy cow. Perhaps the strangest movie I've ever seen, essentially a 166-minute story of the recreation of the human race and religion on a colonized Earth-like planet, with much of the dialogue consisting of incomprehensible philosophical ravings. I saw a screening on Friday of last year's DCP restoration, which looks fantastic. The film has a unique production history and it's perhaps worth seeing on account of that alone. The director had left his native Poland for France, though after some success there in the mid-70s was invited back to make a film, and he chose to use his uncle's SF novels as source material. But the film was shut down about 4/5 of the way through, and never fully finished. Instead, in 1988, the director completed the story by adding voice-over narration of the missing scenes. For me, this decision probably improved the experience of watching the film, as the narrated portions serve as short breaks from the freneticism that takes place in most of the rest of it. Zulawski refers to the film in the narration as having been "murdered" by the Polish authorities, who reportedly suspected it harbored a subversive message. (It's not hard to see why, given that communist censors are likely to deem subversive anything that comes across as formalistic or abstract, which this film does.) An alternative story holds that it was shut down for going over budget, which also is plausible.

Either way, its history makes it more interesting, and it's very much worth seeing if you have any interest in the category of what we might call art-house SF. There has never been a legitimate U.S. DVD release. Perhaps this restoration will result in a Blu-ray. It would be a shame if it doesn't get transferred.