Review of On the Silver Globe

I suspect this may be a kind of fake. It's all that remains of a film whose production was stopped in the middle: a science fiction film that, to judge from this paste-up, might have been something like Stalker done in the style of Weekend. Unfortunately, the sequences that were never shot included virtually all of the science fiction and most of the action, so that two-thirds of what's left concentrates on three people trekking through barren landscapes and going crazy into the camera, as in Blair Witch Project. I found it difficult to track the progress of their degeneration, which all seemed very much the same. Based on this, I'm not surprised the Polish film bureaucrats canceled the production, only that it took them as long as it did. Now the extant footage has been edited into what the DVD case calls a reconstruction. But is it really? Or is it a new construction using the old materials? What made me begin to suspect this was that throughout the film, while the director summarizes the unshot sequences in voice-over, the screen shows what seem to be outtakes, but the last of them closes on a shot of the director, taken contemporaneously. So were the other interpolated sequences shot then or forty years ago? And if forty years ago, were they to have gone in where we see them or elsewhere, and as we see them or in some other form? Or were they just scrap? Much of the rest consists of long tracking shots of scenery, which also look like outtakes. And the film is edited in a style now fashionable--with series of multiple cuts on the same angle, a few seconds apart--which I don't remember being the fashion forty years ago. This made me wonder whether the director had cut the film as he would today, rather than as he would have back when. I also wonder whether he had done so partly to disguise the incompleteness of the available material. And where did the music come from? If the film was never finished, it can never have been scored; and to me the music sounds new, too. So all in all I don't know how to judge the "reconstruction" on the basis of what it was to have been because I don't know how much I'm seeing of that. If the gaps could have been bridged with staged readings of the missing portions of the script, maybe read by the surviving actors, the film might come together into something; as it is, it seems to be little more than what another, better known film was deliberately intended as and named for: ashes of time.