ON THE SILVER GLOBE
The film is based on "The lunar trilogy" by Jerzy Zulawski
You will see a film made ten years ago;
a shred of a film;
a two and a half hour story, one-fifth of which is missing.
That one-fifth dating back to 1977
when the film was annihilated, will never be recreated.
In place of the missing scenes
you will hear a voice which will briefly explain what was to be.
We are bringing "On the Silver Globe"
to an end in the year 1987.
It fell from the clouds... At night...
From on high...
They were close...
They hunted...
They found in the morning... In trees...
It fluttered... Beautiful...
He travelled for two days...
Across the snow... Tired...
He thought: For them...
For sure.
What is it?
He says they saw it fall...
They couldn't have seen...
Maybe they saw a star...
It is an ancient object. It couldn't have fallen now.
It could in the past...
Everybody saw it... Two days ago...
At night...
They found it in the morning... Only for us...
It is fifty, sixty years old.
It's a Small Transmission Module STM.
The way it burned indicates Titanium Beta or the like.
It used to take off from a pad on six propulsion nozzles.
I guess they did not even teach you about it.
Why did it fall right now?
It might have roved to lock in on a target station,
but not for fifty years. Unless...
If they are telling the truth.
They usually don't lie.
One of the older rigs should crack it.
If the brain has not burned up,
it should tell us where it comes from and why.
Tell her not to enter.
This place is packed with sensitive gear.
It will all run wild.
Unless she is coming to see you.
She is not coming to see you, she is coming to take you.
You don't understand. She is mine.
No, it's you are theirs.
Go, dress up warm. It's freezing outside.
Later...
What happens if you run out of all the chemicals?
Freedom perhaps.
They could have killed us and taken the chemicals,
or could have stolen them while we were asleep.
But they haven't. We are the ones who give,
who do not need to take.
Alien like a tree.
We must be explored and domesticated.
Poisoned, approached, swept.
Are we the last of those who retain power,
or the first of those who are defenceless?
Under the hatchway into which two astronauts enter
there is a laboratory.
A huge room filled with machines
listening to the sounds from outer space.
Only one of the oldest machines,
which has remained idle for decades,
can read out what is inside the container
which the astronauts got from a rider.
It is a diary, or rather a series of semitransparent plates
featuring scenes as if taken with a camera.
The opening plates show the flight of a spacecraft -
the pilots lose control over the spacecraft
which crashes in the mountains.
Only a small fragment of this recording remained.
I can see!
The astronauts clamber out of the battered cockpit.
They are amidst mountains and the atmosphere is unbreathable.
They leave the dead body
of the flight commander O'Tamor near the cockpit.
They wheel out land rovers
from their rocket and they ride downhill.
One of the astronauts, Thomas, is injured.
The other rocket following their course
crashes in the mountains and explodes.
Were those who died in it, the Remogners, pursuers or friends?
This planet is an ideal image of Earth.
That is why it has been chosen for the beginning of new life.
But the land rovers heading for the sea
run across a huge heap of debris
reminiscent of some architectural form,
as if a civilization existed here in the past.
While they are near the ruins,
Thomas's temperature goes up and he becomes delirious.
He's seeing phantoms: The dead astronauts,
O'Tamor and the Remogners are coming close,
coming to capture him.
O'Tamor defends him. The Remogners want to chain him.
Come on!
O'Tamor was right. We can breathe.
We shall live...
Wait!
Do you remember a man being born?
The father endows him with seeds of every possibility.
What every man nurtures in him
will watch it grow in him and bring him fruits.
If it is vegetal, he will be a plant;
if it is sensual, he will be an animal;
if it is rational, his being will become divine;
finally if it is intellectual,
he will be an angel or the son of man.
Maybe the time is to say that the Republic is in real danger,
that we are cowards who have to defend courage,
sex, consciousness, carnal beauty, quest of love.
Winning that may become a heroic destiny after all.
But to utter these words is to demonstrate how sad we are,
because the strongest believers among us
have spent their years on talking about fear,
impotence, stupidity, ugliness, self-Iove and apathy...
although we have thus attempted
to take an austere view of this reality
may depend on a decent life,
our work,
our honor
which permits us to express no more
than what we ourselves have seen.
It was...
I did not hear your answers.
I don't believe that any signal could penetrate
the radiation belt enveloping this planet.
While falling, they flashed across a plain.
- Don't pull! - The wave returned and we caught it.
They stood over me...
O'Tamor was walking dead... To take me along...
Maybe what gets reflected and returns
is not only an electromagnetic wave,
but also bions making up the image of the dead...
- Don't pull! - You are delirious!
I know that whatever you say
must carry at least a grain of truth
just because you are capable of saying it.
Put him down!
Don't forget what we escaped,
just to repeat with impunity what we believe in.
Don't forget.
Whatever you say is the truth,
unless you say it...
to impose your will upon us.
I don't believe in anything.
If you say it, you look into yourself.
You are not blind.
That is why you are here with us running away.
Yes, you are dying, brother.
After all, there is truth in everything I say,
if I am capable of expressing it.
Freedom exists and is lying in darkness...
It turns away from the lust of darkness
to lean towards the lust of light.
It embraces light with its everlasting will.
And darkness strives to capture the light of freedom,
but it cannot do that,
because it is centered on its own lust...
and turns to darkness again.
The wind rises. The night is falling.
The drizzle turns into a downpour
and the downpour escalates into a hurricane.
Thomas is dying.
Before he dies, Martha implores to be left alone with him.
She loves him. She clings to him.
She protects him with her body.
The nearby river is rising and breaks its banks.
It's a flood.
Martha!
We have to be moving. We cannot survive here.
No chance, until we reach the seashore where we were to land.
Come on.
No, no!
You are sick. You'll have to be carried.
Turn it off, I am telling you, turn it off, you silly.
The sea!
I see the sea!
George,
Thomas is growing up faster than he would on Earth.
At the age of six months, he is of the height of a one year old baby.
George, can it be that we will die out and he will be left alone?
Listen, Martha,
it is a rainy season. It will keep raining.
Six months of waiting is a long time,
you may perish, we may perish,
and then...
Martha, am I right?
Yes.
I've taken the cameras of Martha and Peter.
They no longer bother to record what is happening to us.
I have fused their memories into one, mine.
I erase irrelevant pieces. I keep the gist.
Only this recording makes sense to me.
I must be careful.
It costs them so much.
It costs me so little. Why?
Nothing at all.
I don't demand anything. I don't believe in anything.
I believe only in perfect freedom, ours, mine.
Peter says that long, long ago,
I could be a monk,
because I am not yet a man, but I am already old.
If one is to forget why we are here,
one is like this. I am.
For it is not us that are lost in contemplation of the world.
It is the world that is lost in our contemplation.
Oh, Earth!
You don't wish to learn with me, Tom?
I can breathe without this.
What is Earth really like?
What is it, old man?
Earth is what I feel for you.
You are alive. My father died.
Martha, talk to me,
Martha, say something!
Yes.
Martha, keep silent.
Martha, laugh.
Martha, cry.
Martha, dance,
dance!
Martha, dance,
dance!
You can think only if you believe.
There is no thought without faith.
Only the one who has faith has thoughts.
Thus one must want to know faith.
You can believe only if you have roots.
Only the one can believe who has roots of his own.
Thus one must want to know the roots.
You can have your roots only if you act.
The one who acts has roots.
Thus one must want to know action.
Here, everything is as on Earth.
The same chaos, the same absence of truth.
- The same lie. - You love her.
To love is to want to be absorbed entirely by somebody.
To love is to feel entirely responsible for somebody.
You can also take lasciviously, without love.
In that case, this word carries no meaning.
It turns into evil and hate.
But we have arrived here in order not to hate anybody.
How can you be so happy here,
- you who have nothing here. - I have you.
You have us, you have what we have,
which means nothing. Nothing! Nothing!
George,
you don't even defend yourself.
Oh Earth!
Peter!
I found him here.
One day when the Angel of Death came to Solomon
he looked at one of his courtiers.
"Who is that?" the courtier asked.
"The Angel of Death", replied Solomon.
"It seems he has looked at me.
So tell the wind to take me from here and carry me to India".
And Solomon did it.
Then the Angel of Death said:
"I was looking at him for such a long time, because I wondered.
For I ordered him to deliver his soul from India.
Meanwhile he is here at your side, in your court.
It is true!"
I will have your baby. Yours.
It will be my last baby.
Say nothing for a while.
I want to be at peace with myself this time.
Help me.
So far you haven't let me paint you. Can I do it now?
You could have killed him. Peter.
The moment he wanted to be with me alone for the first time.
A girl...
I see them...
AII...
Yes, like everything...
Not exactly...
I did not understand, either.
But it's dark here.
You are back.
And the Mother?
Mother is dead? Will you die too?
Yes.
- Like Mother? - Yes,
yes.
Still, I will say it. Perhaps incoherently.
I, a free man,
an unimpassioned man,
I am wounded, wounded like an animal.
I suffer like an animal, like Peter...
What I brought along with me was chaos.
Any order, any cheerfulness, clarity, tranquility have gone.
As if with her death a nightmare has come without dreaming,
a dream without wake, a wake without sense.
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.
I will stay with it for as long as I can.
I will go to the mountains,
looking for metal ores which they will use.
I will be thinking.
I'll be thinking.
I will feel melted in you,
oh rock,
oh grass...
I will feel.
I will feel in me your non-human translucence.
Complete cool.
I am nobody.
I have despised the belligerents.
Now I, I myself deserve contempt,
because I am fighting against myself.
There is suffering, but there is no subject of suffering.
There is action, but there is no subject of action.
There is solace, but there is no man to reach it.
There is a road, but there is no one to follow it.
You are back again, Old Man.
Please,
- go on dancing. - You are back again!
I am Ada, Martha's last daughter.
Why would you never die?
Why would you not die?
Why would you not understand what you yourself have given to us?
Why are you not in what exists?
Why are you elsewhere, where nothing exists?
Nothing!
And then fertile mother Martha
begot a thunder with the Moon in heaven.
And she indulged in pleasure to have him stronger than Thomas.
And so she returned swept by the flood and begot fishes,
and animals in forests...
And Peter gave us places to settle and reason and the bow...
Being here you told us always to remember.
Why don't you ever say anything?
Oh Earth!
Earth!
The Old Man said:
Oh! Earth!
I want to record myself more often.
No, no!
Come you, who are poised motionless,
but who are getting closer to me every hour.
She feels the fire.
She serves the fire.
She gives herself to me,
because I control the fire...
I am consecrated to you, who have arrived.
I could marry him. They are afraid of me and him,
because I play Martha, and you and the rain.
Love me.
I love everything.
Say something!
I curse you
in the name of the Old Man.
Say something!
- Say something! - Kill. Kill him.
The Old Man is praying for you.
Something he wanted to draw, for he has forgotten writing.
Maybe evil?
Evil.
Forgive me.
Don't look at me in this picture,
in this garb, in this degradation.
You would not look for me,
had you not found me!
Record it carefully,
for you are recording a half-God-animal.
Did you feel the same fear on Earth, George?
- That's the source of the advent? - Yes.
- Will you go back there? - Nobody returns nowhere,
I told you many times.
You do not have to say the truth to the end.
You are the Old Man. But tell me how you know all that?
Because eternity
is the state of simultaneous possession of everything, Ada.
I am Thomas II, the son of Old Thomas.
Thomas the third.
I don't understand when you speak like this.
Nobody understands you, not even Ada.
We are afraid to see your face for too long.
I cannot oppose you, Thomas the third.
This place is ever more stuffy, impatient and wistful.
Because you are the Old Man.
Bless me, Old Man.
How?
Old Thomas was sluggish.
He did not try to enlarge the country where we live.
He did not want to know what is beyond and beyond,
as if he was afraid...
Tomorrow the sea will be quiet
and we are crossing to the other side.
There, on the other side, something is looming on bright days.
What if there is no other side?
There must be.
You are right.
It is I who always forget that I know everything,
but I don't understand anything.
- Do you want to see Martha? - I don't need to.
I believe
that mother Martha had created all parts of the world,
and we must explore them, because they are for us.
What are you doing here, Ada?
Be angry with me, Old Man.
Child, child, you are not listening to me.
I know, I know. You cannot say everything.
You will go back there.
Stop raving.
- You are my daughter. - We all are your children
and you showed us what is good and what is bad.
Tell me why we were expelled from Earth?
I,
I am beautiful.
I, I am young.
I can do what nobody can do.
May the blessing of the humans be with you.
Give it.
Enough.
Only the shreds of memory remained.
On the other side,
we found it.
There are huge settlements,
a city like a beehive...
Everybody perished. There... there...
Monsters...
They have wings... Black...
One central eye...
They are flying, flying after me...
To destroy,
destroy the humans...
They are carrying death...
Master, Master!
Master.
It's the wind?
Master... Master... Don't go...
I am better than you
and that is why I will be able to play you.
Earth,
Earth, Earth.
Oh Earth! Oh Earth!
People, rejoice!
The Old Man is leaving.
People!
Is it allowed to take one's own daughter to bed?
If a brother takes the property of his brother,
should his hand be cut off?
Should the dead be given food every day, or only on holiday?
Is the birth of a baby a holiday, even if the baby is blind?
I don't know,
I don't know.
- Don't I know anything! - No, she is not ill.
She is the victory of desire over truth.
And the sick one, the sick one is the one who is playing.
The actor is sick, because he is looking for you in himself.
And he is ugly, although he can see and feel.
So he will not be loved. So he wrings his face
and he is like a bad mirror for beauty.
The actor is the victory of ugliness
over the beauty of the world.
Do you hear?
Do you hear? Do you hear?
They are flying,
flying, flying,
coming!
Come,
you bloodthirsty God!
Alone, in his bizarre suit of half-astronaut, half-god,
George has reached the rocket which crashed in the mountains years ago.
O'Tamor's body is still lying there, as if nothing has happened.
With his last effort, George finds the container
in which he will put the report that he has recorded
on what happened to him, to them, to the people here.
He will aim the mini-rocket across space.
Before he blasts it off,
before he deposits in it the last memory plate,
he is recording his face on it. And tears.
In the tunnel where the two astronauts have watched George's diary,
the screens flicker out, and silence sets in.
"It must be dispatched to the Old Earth"
the senior astronaut says.
He glances at the junior one who is sitting tense, self-absorbed.
"Let's go back to them, home," says the junior one,
"let us rejoice with them, dance, celebrate that we are alive".
"Why are you crying?", asks senior
"Because I don't know who I am".
He silently opens the hatchway above their heads.
Wind sneaks into the tunnel passage
and a girl sneaks in with the wind.
She is the same girl who died with Thomas
the second on the seashore.
So she is not the same, but she is always resembling herself.
Following her into the tunnel come warriors,
stringing their bows.
Many years after, a new spacecraft is arriving
at the same spot where George's rocket crashed.
It is more advanced and it is landing softly.
One man, Mark gets off the spacecraft.
He speaks to the microphones and camera
lens mounted on the rocket's fuselage:
"All is as in the retrieved memo package. "
He glances at George's petrified face.
"They are beautiful, he says,
"a little funny, old-fashioned.
I am coming down to a rendezvous with people. "
There is a crackling noise in his headphones.
"How am I doing?", Mark replies, "I am fine.
Not to be with you, believe that you do not exist? Good idea!
May it not hurt. Kisses for Aza".
He breaks off the connection.
Mark is descending from the mountains.
At the mountains' feet,
where breathing is possible a crowd is swarming.
They are monks,
for generations gazing at inaccessible peaks
where George has gone and where from Mark is descending now.
They have been waiting for him
because the prophecy says that in due time a new,
young God will come, the Victor,
the one who will liberate the people from the terror
of the hideous evil big birds called the Sherns,
the inconceivable and cruel monsters
which flew from across the sea and turned the people into slaves.
"Come on, I am not a Savior" - Mark laughs-
"I am human like you."
The father superior smiles slyly:
"Because you want it this way".
It is not the faith of these downgraded people that enraptures Mark,
but the uprising which breaks out at the news of his arrival.
The Sherns' army
are half-human creatures which the Sherns beget with women.
They are called Morques.
They are beastly, strong and dumb.
They put up stiff resistance. Battles multiply.
The last of the battles takes places on the seashore
where a human settlement is huddled under the ground
and where the high-priest Malahuda lives.
Where is the high-priest?! Where is Malahuda?!
We come to pay tribute... In the lead of the uprising...
- And check... If this is the victor... - lf,
if, if...
Grab him, bind him up, punish him...
I should have killed you.
They mustn't see you wounded, sir.
Hurry!
We shall find the high traitor who has not come to meet half way.
The father of your fiancee, sir,
whom you will fall in love with, because she is your destiny.
- Begone! - Then we will see who was right,
the one who for centuries had waited in the mountains,
or the one who had humbled himself and served!
Get out!
Nor did I realize what I was or what I could learn with ease.
What remained was the ease
of using my own intelligence
which was searching out an adult aim,
while I was still an adolescent.
The most stupid thing is to fail to understand one's own charm.
- Who are you? - We are actors, sir, saints.
We must not take part in battles nor die with people...
nor cross the thresholds. We serve, sir.
You are human.
It's good. I can play you.
Why are you crying, child?
Our underground state, sir...
where we have gathered for centuries to celebrate the promise of your coming.
Sects were established here of suicides and flagellants...
poets and iconoclasts... Here the monks wrote prophesies.
Up there was the abyss of darkness, so dark as the soul of man...
For the soul of man accepts the Shern, justifies his actions...
talks to him as if it was dreaming awake.
This is your church, sir...
Sir, they are moving out!
But they are ridiculous.
Defenceless.
A defenceless is strong,
good is bad, beautiful - in worms.
Is that all, the end?
The Shern Aviya has not been caught, sir.
Now reinforcements will fly from across the sea.
Mark visits the high-priest
who hands over power and tells him about his daughter lhezal
consecrated to the victor and the cult of the Old Man.
The young warrior Yeret is in love with lhezal.
"It was me who talked to the Sherns,
begging them to reduce the size of tribute.
I bargained for human lives
and I tried hard to grasp the meaning of lawlessness,
the absurdity of their way of life" says Malahuda.
He is tired. " The faith is coming to an end" - he says -
"since you have come. Now reality is beginning".
I am alone.
A prince in the middle of an icy room built in icy space.
I carry my own space in me.
I am carrying it to an absurd country at an absurd time.
As if the entire world, the big one and the one inside me
merged into a hateful vision of their bodies
looking for meaning in one another,
the meaning which the bodies cannot accommodate.
Do not look there, sir.
The Sherns caught children. They did to them...
Their mothers said
that the Sherns wanted to see a demon inside a human being,
- to see how the soul leaves the body... - And you put up with that?
There is no way to understand them, sir.
The Morques say that their nearness is poetic nearness.
But it stinks here!
Don't laugh, sir.
The Sherns have each an eye in the centre
of their foreheads and they speak with that eye.
Keeping silent, they speak,
they say that this is beautiful:
We are defective, they say.
We cannot direct the evil in ourselves,
- nor the force. - They are killing you.
Perfunctorily.
You won't understand why they let some live,
while exterminating others.
- Didn't you negotiate with them? - They don't negotiate, sir.
Until they realized that they could take women,
they had swarmed this place. At that time they still could fly.
Now they are lying around, watching.
They play with that eye of theirs. We can feel it.
Across the thickest walls we feel anxiety.
- Then we see everything. - Everything!
Nothing! Nothing!
Nothing, sir. There is a sect of scientist who claim
that they are not there,
that they are only a reflection of ourselves
called out from the dark.
They are what?
I don't know.
- Do you believe them? - No, sir.
And do you believe in me?
Who are you?
A man.
Hours of lead.
Nights of lead.
Lead in the heart. The heartache turned into lead.
Thoughts of lead, of nothing, of lead.
The lead cancer eating my body, fluid as an amoeba.
An amoeba in my selfishness,
in its right to search out the places of greater delight.
She's playing a woman sir, the one you had left to come here.
What?!
You did leave her, sir.
- The one you had left to come here. - How do you know?!
It's in the prophecy.
- Don't remember! - What?!
The high-priest's daughter, sir. She is asking you not to return.
- Where?! - To Earth, sir.
Fear the signs of fornication, the signs of decay,
the rotten signs of blindness on the fallen body of a woman...
Don't fear what is, because there is only what you do not feel.
It is terrible to be caught in the hands of the living God!
Aza!
- And thus I shall be called, sir. - Lhezal!
Aza!
I want to go up the mountain and be left alone,
without you.
I knew you would come.
If you are an intelligent being, as they say, you are curious.
You think: Who is that man? Where is he from?
I saved your life. I did not denounce you.
They would have beaten you dead and I would not have learned anything.
Maybe you will talk to me instead.
After all I will comprehend who you are.
I hear.
I am trying to understand.
You are me. I am you.
Everything is identical.
Even when I think I am talking to myself, I am talking to you.
Even when I think I am talking to God, I am talking to you.
You are the gateway, you are the tunnel way,
you are the light of the ultimate threshold.
This is bullshit.
How? How?
What with?
What is this? I don't know this notion. I don't know this.
I don't comprehend this.
That we are brothers... that we together...
You have changed the track of thought.
You've been only a step away. I have been...
Now I see only flashes...
You say... No...
Light...
Why do you repeat... God...
why death.
Why resurrection.
Come back!
You are the survival, because you are not closed,
because you resolve in your power the time
and the air and the contradiction that we are, the animals.
I am an animal among the animals. A wolf in the forest.
The one who has devoured all is the only one.
Only he endures. Those he has devoured are meagre.
One must bleed them
to get the nightmare off the chest
and to have cold return to the realm of cold.
Excellent, excellent.
How do you know? Why do you repeat her name?
Aza!
What does she hold against me? That she had succumbed to me,
while I have never entirely succumbed to her?
When am I entire?
I, in whom an eternal battle of darkness fights.
You, come here!
Aviy!
Oh Martha! ...People!...
The Victor!
Keep on talking to me... monster,
damn you!
Leave it!
- Chain him. I will talk to him! - Were you alone in a Shern's company?
- She caught him. - Maybe the signs will appear on her!
- Enough! I give the orders here! - Sir, the law says that such woman...
I am the law here.
I take her in my care. She is mine.
I didn't know what bliss is.
I don't know how it is not to take responsibility for oneself.
Everything here is yours, sir, you liberate.
How do you feel facing the Victor, louse?
I shall serve him with all might until doom.
The Victor is unjust...
You are standing over the captive evil.
Let the good be good,
even suffering...
Yes, yes, yes.
I am tired,
- Hush! - Tired.
Listen.
You've taken me. I am yours.
I would be consecrated to you even if you did not come.
Then everybody would take me.
I would be a woman of the temple
and the children that I would bear would be killed.
I accept everything you do. I am you.
I am what you are.
- Do you love Yeret? - I love you. Nobody.
I came here out of the frailty of the heart.
I was betrayed by a woman I loved, the only one for whom...
for whom nothing seem to matter anymore.
Such is the power others have over us.
What have I? Who have I... What am I?
One blow with a knife was enough for a dark balloon to break loose
and begin to drift away and the traveller
who thus far has built for him a cocoon out of air alone,
saw the dark of the night and began to scream:
I am in the prison of my own freedom,
in the hell of the one who is watching...
I can afford to love you and that woman.
Be.
Don't think!
It will not hurt me!
And yet I am alive! Alive!
You must not tell anybody what happened here.
Yes.
- I was mindless. - If you wish, sir.
- I am weak. - Yes.
I am a man...
from Earth.
I am the one who has taken you inside me.
You are of two minds, sir.
You have not finished your work, and you hesitate whether to go back.
I know who you want to talk to, sir.
My father, to have him off your way
and to Shern Swiny because he opposes you.
Do you feel disgraced? Spurned?
I love you, sir, as nobody ever will.
...one who has arrived from There, from the depth of faith.
From beyond life, from beyond death and resurrection:
The Old Man. From today the absence of this faith
will be punished with all severity...
Worthless are those who do not believe... The faithful...
Now either a retaliation by the Sherns...
or our fire across the sea...
May the white Shern hands never take our women away.
To arms, you faithful!
To the troops of Yeret! To the troops!
I am sure that you understand...
Yesterday was the night, the heat of battle. Today it is different.
I have come to ask you...
They are getting ready to cross the sea.
However cruel and inhuman you are,
there must be some truth in you, your truth...
I'd like to talk to you... They tell me about your crimes.
I don't know...
Tell me
if we reflect the transformation of the visible into the invisible?
I believed that any extremes of faith and illusion
were equally unjustified and unimportant,
and that in the depth of everybody, there is goodness.
Everything is truth.
There is a grain of truth in everything what exists...
I am to do what I like... As anyone...
You are saying it with such contempt.
I can feel your hatred, indifference... Why?
Across the sea, the city is beautiful, sweet and rich.
I am not asking you about it. I am asking you this:
You said that everything has a name,
an ulterior principle. What is the answer.
Where is the place
where everything unites and becomes one. Does it become?
Keep on talking. It's beautiful.
I don't understand a word. I feel fear. Chaos. Darkness.
I can hear. It's the motion of water. No, of the night,
no, it's the motion of the motion, the motion of the will.
What do you want to say?
Irrationality. Slavery.
A kind of ritual human murders as the objective?
Cruelty as a virtue? Inertia of the totality.
Then why do you spit on me?
You give me nothing but contempt
and contempt can take you nowhere.
I can hear... its power over me is infinite.
Whose power? Whose power?!
You are an animal.
- You are an animal and yourself. - So you talk!
No, it's you hear...
- So why are you talking? - Because you give me food.
So, do you want to live?
I don't know. What do you think? Am I alive?
You are an animal... So you are alive...
Is it only the animal in you that is alive?
What about that which lives through the animal?
I, I don't understand.
You are an animal and so am I.
I am consistent. You are not.
I am a reflection of what is in you.
You are not a reflection of what is in me.
I want to know one thing only. Earth, the planet you come from.
- What is it? - A Star, you see? A star.
I forgot.
Their conceit, rush to death,
my death, for I see myself in them.
The image of her in the ecstasy of love... impaled on him,
screaming. You say... within. To get inside.
To exerete. The same. Infinity is within.
I don't love. Loving is inward...
Not a person, not things, not myself.
By loving everything, you are everything and you are unconcerned.
You come in contact with the existence of truth,
with the name of animality without which you would not be...
Oh, I see. Beyond words. Truth... evil...
they signify nothing.
I yearn for this pain... this flow.
Now I feel melted. Rock...
Water! I feel your non-human transparence. Total cool...
I am a nobody.
I have always been a nobody.
I hated and despised the reconciled ones.
Now I, I am the most despicable.
Because I have come to terms with myself.
I will not change anything in the world.
My illusion is not even a ripple on the world's cool, metallic surface.
I can see... It is an ocean.
You are showing its beauty to me.
Speak slower,
speak slower!
It is opening.
Slower. I am in the doorway.
Slower, it hurts.
So much beauty it hurts.
I was taught to be intelligent, efficient, cool...
to conquer... I have no feelings.
Who? How?
What am I to do?
Unbind myself... These irons break your wings...
Worms are eating your skin... You are beautiful... You are divine...
I love you. Master... I want to vanish in your wisdom.
He wants to take you!
It's God!
You hear something which does not exist at all...
He doesn't say anything you wouldn't know...
- I can hear this! - This God is in you, God!
How... How do you know this? Woman?
I am playing it... I know it.
I can feel birth and death, truth and untruth of everything.
She lied and committed adultery there for months.
You are only beginning to learn about others.
You are only beginning to perceive... to sense...
The only important things is what you demand from yourself.
You are too wise for me.
He is speaking to you... singing you.
I can feel it from the anxiety in me.
He is laughing at you... He is saying...
saying that you have never taken and you will not take
because you are dry and dead... and you are not alive at all,
because you are an object created by objects,
and you don't know the name nor the meaning...
Neither you know anything about yourself...
- a blind man... a weakling. - No... no!
Take him!
I've been learning...
for many years. You know, victor,
constrained by my duties
on sleepless and doubt-ridden nights
I thought that as I would be going and learning,
I would turn inside out my whole life like a glove.
Oh... Oh...!
Look!
I always thought there were two ways.
As if playing this what we play for real
did not give me any satisfaction. Now I have it.
- Tell me how...! What am I to do? - You know well,
certainly you do, if you took my daughter
and made her a woman.
The Sherns. What do you know?
You cannot beat the Shern in you.
Victor, you have probably experienced it yourself.
If you could not beat one,
how are you going to beat thousands?
As you see, I am playing
and making room for you.
You are to act.
The hope will return when you are gone.
- What is hope? - Hope is...
the faith in materializing the form with oneself.
Groping in the dark.
I am yearning.
Everything endures. I endure.
I increasingly think about closing my eyes
and abstaining from everything.
I, an eunuch in the landscape of despair.
Sir, we'll cross the sea.
I gave you gunpowder, ammunition. You can go by yourselves.
But sir, it is you who they worship,
in whom they believe, for whom they are waiting.
- I'll give her back to you. - You need a woman, sir.
Why does a Shern carry in him the riddle of chaotic behaviour.
Why does evil act selectively and why is its methodicalness absurd?
Although it is only what I can think,
understand or utter, the most absurd,
the most cruel thing I can afford.
What about courage?
We come to inquire about your designs, sir?
The designs are laid down in the prophecy.
It's long-past knowledge. Why are you asking?
Sir, you must appear before the people in all ceremony.
The unclear rumor has spread in the town that the sea did not come apart
when you looked at it. Sir, it's necessary to levy taxes.
We need metal,
saltpetre,
manpower.
You have decided, sir.
People of low faith. Can it be otherwise?
Am I not right, gentle?
You have all knowledge, sir.
World!
What have I done not to comprehend you?
- Are you satisfied? - Sir, we are absorbing you.
You are in us like marrow in the bones,
- What did you say? - Like the cause in existence.
Nothing, nothing, sir. You let us rejoice.
They are playing... That at first the Shern out of vanity
created the world which seemed ideal for him.
But when he looked up,
he saw the light which he did not create himself.
Then he returned to his homeland. And then his masculine creative power
turned into the feminine readiness.
Oh, sir, how hard I am trying!
Gentle Malahuda, her father,
is seen hanging around town at nights. He derides you,
- undermines the faith of the people. - What does he say?
That peace will return only after you are gone...
I did not come to bring peace, but war.
- Gentle Rhoda... - Who?
A scholar, sir.
He improved the weaving plant, invented the fuel for the flame,
- measured the length of the roads... - What does he say?
He claims there is no Earth, there has never been the Old Man,
that everything is silent and empty.
And that only we exist and the Sherns who are like animals.
So where do I come from, in his opinion?
He says you are like a worm, sir,
- that you came up to the surface... - So why did I come?
You did not come,
you were expelled.
- Where is Yeret? - Yeret is leading the parade.
The Morques we have caught will be slaughtered in your honour, sir.
You did not tell me that you have caught somebody.
- Not somebody, sir, something. - You don't instruct me, fool.
Nobody will be killed here without my consent.
Well, yours is all knowledge, sir.
Indeed you are a man. I recognize your anger.
I am being carried by the river of love.
It may be disgrace, betrayal and pain,
but it encompasses good and evil.
It is good, if it is love.
But... after all, the only thought which sets the thoughts in motion,
the only fidelity which gives a form
to something which is the chaos of churning biology,
it's fidelity to the pre-determined goal...
Only it gives the feeling that the emptiness of this chaos
can be spanned with the braces of one's own making.
Certainly... but everything is of my own making and so is the understanding
that everything is everything, that it is a well without echo and bottom.
Did you like me?
Sir, stand on her. Give her dignity back.
They will kill me!
Leave me alone!
What?!
Morques,
I don't believe you descend from your fathers alone...
You must have something human in you after your mothers.
I am appealing to what is human in you.
Morques, your lives will be spared, if you join us,
if you go with us.
Morques!
Mother, mother...
chains...
child... mother.
Kill nothing, you - nothing.
Oh Shern.
Everything - pain. Sleep - pain.
Day - pain. Fear.
Quiet, Shern. I - Shern.
When the Shern sings. I - animal.
You - less. You - death.
I - the bow. Trees. Grass.
I - see - Morque. You - fear. I - the run.
Alone. I go.
I far. You near. You fear - pain.
Weight. You - voice. I - silence.
We - go away, perish, float.
You - Shern. Let him sing.
I see the earth, grass, forest.
I feel the warm air over the lane...
The flight of two grey birds which I associate with death...
It means... I feel fear?
Unbind Aviya!
Lhezal has just asked to bring him here.
What?
Whoever will know the world, will find a corpse.
And who finds a corpse,
will have the world not worthy of him.
Elem wants to burn them in pyres.
He is right, sir.
They already are nothing.
A Shern's touch burns out their sex.
When they still speak, they speak about the delight as great
as to be hideous, sir. The Shern touches in them
what is their essence,
darkness itself and he opens it even more,
fills it up, clears up.
You sound as if you yourself...
I know nothing, nothing.
What do you want?
What am I to do? How am I to defend myself?
I didn't know that there can be a love so great.
On Earth things are different.
- Is there day and night? - Yes.
- White and black? - Yes.
- Love and hate? - There is no killing on Earth.
There is killing when there is living.
No.
What do you feel?
Joy and the power of fulfillment.
You teach me something which I did not know.
I feel love.
But now only my body is suffering.
The pain that I feel is only physical.
I can touch it. I also can,
oh, new art, tell myself; turn your thoughts away from her.
May she not be present so that you don't suffer.
Thus, through my pain-swollen body,
the soul is shaping up smoothly, soothingly,
and, I would say, not-materially.
The soul does not suffer.
I recognize unconcern in it, like in a warm river.
My soul and I identify.
She was beautiful and famous?
Yes.
You never loved her.
What is this for?
For your going tomorrow.
To pay homage to what is and not to reject anything of what is not.
The tangibility of evil which we see around.
The submission to the narrow labyrinths
of one's own sensual passion.
The belief in the importance of those who wield power over us
means the creation of evil, calling evil from the dark,
transforming onself into a killer gland which believes that everything is its property.
Why are you concerned with a woman, sir?
Holiness enters a man as he gains histeric purity of the visitation.
- Visitation of what? - The Shern,
sir.
What if the Shern is evil, while I am God for you.
What is greater and more tranquil than God?
There will be great heat after a long night.
- It's time to move, victor. - Guard her, remember, preserve.
You feel it?
Feel it?
Those who have not showed their faith...
treacherous women...
Those who have hidden their sons from the expedition
and those who have not paid the taxes... I remember you.
- What is your name? - Sevim, sir.
- What were you? - A priest.
Will you serve?
Against whom, sir?
The sea is tranquil and a gentle breeze is propelling the ships.
Before they reach their goal, they come across a floating tree
trunk on which Actor and scholar Rhoda are drifting,
because they have been expelled for their lack of faith.
Scholar is looking at Mark with contempt.
"You do not exist at all" - he exclaims.
- "You have not come at all". Mark replies:
"If I die, go in the mountains and find my rocket.
Get in, seal the hatch and press one button.
The red one. "
- "Rely on me, sir". Actor exlaims.
- "I will transmit you".
"My oxygen helmet
is in the monastery of Expectant Brethren at the feet of the mountains" - Mark says.
"You are sly" - Rhoda replies.
"You are leaving me in the middle of the sea,
while you talk about the mountains. "
- "Yes" Mark answers. "Our odds are the same".
Mark!
Do you hear me? Mark!
Aza!
The next step,
the next doorstep which I will have to occupy with all of me
is death?
- Speak. - Still nothing.
What if I didn't want to ask you about it?
When her truth speaks, her darkness speaks.
And clear is only that which is being formulated against itself.
- Speak. - Still nothing.
What if I didn't want to ask you about it?
There.
I must know.
There, there...
Here,
- not there. Here. - There. I must see.
Ultimately, every reduction to physiology
is the fascism of the soul.
It is shrinking instead of growing,
just as if everything came down
to the judgement that while living, man does nothing.
And only a cripple
or a dead man creates.
"Master Jack",
the porters says, standing at attention before him.
Dressed in the same garb as him,
members of the audience are sitting in a huge dilapidated hall.
They are leaning, their eyes riveted to Aza
who is standing and singing in one brightly-lit end of the hall.
The hall acoustics is fine.
Aza is singing what the actors are playing:
About themselves, about their divine self-love. I, Me, I.
Jack shuts his eyes,
takes a few steps back, stumbles and runs out.
- What is going on with you? - A mistake.
That quack gave me some nasty stuff.
No news from Mark?
We sent him there to make our love stronger.
- Yes. - Now.
- Now is ever. Now. Here. Ever! - Love, love, we make love.
In a few months
your girlishness, beauty and youth have disappeared.
You have grown old and your face scares me.
For any push to the end brings matter to the self-explosion,
as if beyond a certain barrier there was a pulp
with death at the bottom.
Again you are one of many.
You are taking part in an auction.
You exist through your love affair.
But you don't know that it is not you who sets the price,
the value in this market,
that the hand which fumbles inside you
and which cruelly turns your glands inside out,
is the hand of the very principle of the market,
the murderous hand or eye
which finds the pleasure in seeing how the actors,
lustful like dogs, are wearing out.
Ceiling-high metal office
cabinets are standing in rows in an aisle.
The drawers,
hundreds of identical drawers are filled with electron tubes
similar to old radio-set valves.
All tubes are the same. Mark bends down over them.
The Sherns swoop down on him. Mark is firing his weapon.
A still shining eye creeps out to the floor from the head
of a killed Shern and Mark repeats silently after its final glint:
"That is all".
Thousands of Shern eyes,
thousands of Shern brains are laying in the drawers, waiting.
Mark looks at the murals on the temple walls.
They are rotten and time-mellowed, but readable,
they depict Sherns in thrones, posing, pompous,
holy Sherns gazing up at the highest,
supreme Shern and still higher into the clouds, with adoration.
Mark's lips silently articulate the words:
"Home". "Home".
Aza,
are you crazy?!
I am crazy! I am crazy!
You see,
you can arrive at a state in which you must admit,
submit, let your guts out,
as if recognizing that this is just inside,
and that the sight of your entrails means giving up the secret,
exposing and discarding your ego...
without remainder.
You,
and if not you, then who?
I?
We are pleased with your coming, sir,
...but you had gone so many and you are coming back so few!
War, diseases.
We were told by Yeret, who you sent in advance,
that you have done all in the human power,
the human power and nothing beyond it.
- Where is Yeret? - But he is at your side.
We sent him back with reinforcements, as you demanded.
Don't you remember?
- I was sick. - So we heard.
What for?
For the lack of faith, of course.
The faith does not call for the gift of grace,
- but life alone does. - Why did we retreat, sir?
We should have held out to the end for man, to the end.
It is said:
Who comes to know oneself, comes to know God.
I already know who I am.
And you, brother?
Secret killings have been rife since your left, sir.
People are in panic. You have retreated.
- Their anger will be terrible. - Where is lhezal?
Lhezal!
Get up! Get up!
You are the only man without a secret.
You speak about it, but you don't believe.
You are like an animal following a scent.
Still the same.
You are an actress playing the value of the feeling,
its transience.
You are a biology
speculating about the mystery through your belly
into which you lead the heat which you in turn take to be yourself.
Because we are sinful and dead. We call from the depth.
Let us creep to the grace of your resurrection,
melt in your goodness
and experience your mercy in order to attain resurrection
together with you,
mystery, because we are small and dead.
Lhezal!
Why are you hiding?
I missed you so much!
I waited.
I knew that only my fidelity mattered... my chastity...
- and our mutual attachment. - Why don't you let me touch you?
- Your words are so indistinct. - Maybe we are sick, sir...
sick of evil and passivity.
Maybe we live momentarily like an ulcer. And you want to rearrange our destiny.
Maybe I am a disease turning towards the new...
- unfamiliar freshness. - I don't understand you!
Sweet are my embraces, remember, sir?
My, they are nothing compared with the delight which the whole body can feel...
if it wants, if it is in rapport with the feelings.
I am a body, sir!
Splitting.
The idea of splitting. Self-consciousness in splitting.
There is duality of nature here and duality of life.
The thought of duality is part of my nature.
It's the contradiction between form and desire...
Between the answer and the language of darkness.
Hence I am God.
- I am God. - Come, sir.
Sir!
Sir,
your spacecraft. Sir.
The Expectant Brethren saw it rise on a column of fire...
I don't want to see any more. I want to know.
I want to be there.
You - here. There - nothing.
Nothing is there.
Everything is here.
You may die.
I beg you.
I am not afraid of dying.
The sea!
We must change their cruel laws, expel the priests,
give an equal share to the people, destroy false hopes.
- They will not agree. - Then we alone will do it.
The guns.
Against whom?
The city,
the city.
Oh, they are right, sir.
Blessed be him who was before he became.
And you shall become those who are passing by.
The Shern Aviy sits above Marek's head.
He is watching, curious
and jeers: "Hail, brother".
"Without that eye which somebody had programmed for you,
which perhaps you yourselves programmed
when you still could think" - says Mark.
The Shern answers: And who has programmed you? ".
"Who am I?"- Asks Mark.
The Shern churns some dirt in his claws against the wooden cross
and replies: "You are this".
"Will I ever emerge from this darkness"- asks Marek.
"It does hurt, brother, doesn't it? "- answers Aviy.
Jack fires at him. The Shern drops down on the sand,
revolving more and more slowly,
like a dying spring toy. He keeps repeating:
"Love, love, love."
Force, my force, you have left me!
Who?!
What?!
Why?!
Welcome...
grace.
How much can one accept?
How great is the mercy to be felt?
How much can you afford not to change into a Shern yourself.
In a casino, astronauts are playing roulette and at baccarat.
Jack is passing by listening to shreds of conversations.
Somebody says: "He was not to blame.
He was an animal among animals, a wolf in the forest".
Somebody else reacts: "Soul has its abode not in the brain,
but in the form. " A third voice:
"The Angel symbolizes the transfiguration
from the visible into the invisible which we are accomplishing. "
Television screens along one side of the hall flick to life,
showing the pictures registered by the camera mounted on Mark's rocket.
The camera apparently is stimulated to action by an outside motion or human body warmth;
the scholar Rhoda and the Actor are crawling towards the rocket,
sharing an oxygen helmet.
Jack is shouting to them, but they don't hear.
Scurrying by George's dead body,
the Actor and Rhoda enter the rocket.
The casino manager grabs Jack by the arm, saying:
"Master,
they are looking for you. Strikes, demonstrations.
The conspiracy of Gnostics... Those, who know, should..."
At one end of the baccarat table lhezal is seated,
wearing Aza's dress.
She is laughing provocatively, looking at Jack.
She is surrounded by admirers.
The face of Jack's assistant appears on the screens.
Master, we have a signal.
Keep talking.
Where's Marek?
Who sent you?
We can see you.
There is white, round-shaped light over you.
There is the eye which can see us.
Speak to the eye...
We are going to Earth's interior
where resides the truth
and the happiness of man
and the explanation of all mysteries.
Because we are right since ever... since ever...
Right. Right. Right...
- He's gone mad. - No, he is performing.
Master, we can bring them over to us.
They are close enough,
master.
Let them fly.
Where to, master?
To Old Earth.
Jack turns his back to the screen.
Very slowly he is sinking to his knees
and bending down to the ground.
It's the heart stroke. Jack is dying.
The astronauts rush to help.
They are pounding his chest with fists. Nothing doing.
From the corner of the hall, master Jack is watching his death.
The astronauts are struggling to revive his body
and nobody pays attention when he is walking out the casino.
It is dark outside.
There are bonfires far out in the steppe.
Over the bonfires the tribe is sitting. The same tribe.
There is Rider there and there is a girl with eyes in her palms,
so very much like lhezal. Jack is coming up to her.
She rises to her feet and opens her arms.
The camera moves into the darkness of her body.
Her even heart-beat becomes audible.
A moment later,
the hoof-beats of a horse riding away.
The final shot of this film
recorded in the screenplay was the following:
428. Long shot. 3 metres.
In the dawning light:
A horse without a rider galloping across the steppe.
Under the decision of the vice-minister of culture
undersecretary of state for Polish cinema,
the shooting of the film "On the Silver Globe"
was broken off in the spring of 1977.
At that time the film crew were staying on the Baltic seacoast
and the entire suite of decorations and costumes
needed to complete a 2-year-old production
had been finally created and awaited the film crew in Wroclaw,
Lower Silesia, in the Masuria Lake District and in the Caucasus Mountains.
All these decorations, costumes and props were destroyed.
Film studio workers, wardrobe specialist and art designers
have preserved for many years in warehouses
and their private apartments
whatever they managed to salvage from the destruction.
I'm finishing this film thinking about them.
Meanwhile the small drama of this film
and the grand and hopefully dignified drama of our life
will continue to intertwine
in a common mosaic of successful flights and crash landings.
My name is Andrzej Zulawski,
the director of the film "On the Silver Globe".
Starring: