On The Silver Globe

Andrzej Żuławski, 1988

Wandering cosmonauts, lunar escape, and the return voyage. The serialized attempts to colonize the moon are recounted through a dysfunctional narrative, riddled with angels of god and man. Repeated, unexpected crash-landings on the moon breed a new civilization wrought in images of their past: the victory over the moon reinstalls humanity's exports - religion, violence, war. It is hard to be a god: intergenerational trauma spirals downwards, and each iteration of lunar-humanity is further militant, degenerate and human - a domestic alienness (or: indigenous occupants). Speculative origin stories approach the zero point of falling stars. As memories are relayed back to the other present, Earth’s inter-dimensional interference traces back a desire to prevent the future: a few more cosmonauts arrive to the scene only to capitulate further to the co-emergent animality on the ground. Cross-pollination breeds both civil war and new “life,” old messiahs and tangential Earths in the ‘ideal’ image of the one prior.