ON THE SILVER GLOBE ft. The Premiere of Gavin Gamboa's Multimedia Overture!

The Philosophical Research Society is proud to present one of the most astounding and unusual science fiction epics ever made – visionary director Andrzej Żuławski’s legendary masterpiece ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988)! Rarely screened, this momentous event will be preceded by the world premiere of acclaimed composer, multimedia practitioner, and information designer Gavin Gamboa’s audio/visual overture “W Srebrnym Planie (Within the Silver Plane),” a piece inspired by and fascinatingly integrating Żuławski’s mesmeric odyssey – created especially for this screening at PRS! Gamboa’s brilliant work “seeks to unpack, from a bird’s eye view, the entire film as a graphical tiled mosaic that becomes the DNA for an image-sonification performance making audible the frames themselves” and must be seen and heard to be believed!

Based on the early 1900s novel by Jerzy Żuławski, the director’s grandfather, ON THE SILVER GLOBE tells the tale of a crew of earthly expats, who, after fleeing our world, crash on an uninhabited Earth-like planet where the astronauts then attempt to create a new society. Generations later, a video diary from one of its founders – concerned with the state of their society – is received back home on Earth, prompting the dispatch of a scientist who, upon arrival, is perceived as a messiah by the planet’s inhabitants.

Originally filmed from 1976 to 1977, the production of Andrzej Żuławski’s visionary opus ON THE SILVER GLOBE was shut down by Poland’s cinema-disdaining vice minister of cultural affairs who, concerned with its massive budget and potential critique of the People’s Republic, expelled the director from his homeland and ordered all negatives of the film be destroyed. Distraught and in exile, the director exorcised suicidal ideations by creating what has become his best known film, the supernatural, psychosexual, paranoia-and-hysteria drenched drama POSSESSION (1981). After nearly a decade of making films abroad in Germany and France, it was discovered that, miraculously, the reels of his unfinished epic – as well as its props and costumes – had been stashed away by the film’s studio and members of its cast and crew, and in 1985 Żuławski was able to return to Poland to complete ON THE SILVER GLOBE's production. Over a decade after initial filming was halted, it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to immense acclaim.

Join us for this special chance to catch one the most haunting, visually striking, singular, and immersive sci-fi films made on the big screen, accompanied by the brilliant Gavin Gamboa’s ingenious and original multimedia overture – only at PRS!

Dir. Andrzej Żuławski, 1988, 166mins, Unrated (Mature Audiences), Polish w/ English subtitles, Color, Digital.

Special Thanks to Agnieszka Drążek of Fixafilm and to Daniel Bird for his help.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT ON SREBRNYM PLANIE (WITHIN THE SILVER PLANE)

There are an absence of linguistic aphorisms at one's disposal when trying to describe the experience of watching Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe, which struck me like a lightning bolt after initially watching it for the first time during the early years of the COVID-19 global pandemic. On the one hand, you are immediately shocked into a primeval mode of understanding and unable to form comprehensions of what you are witnessing; on the other hand, the traces leave their marks indelibly in the psyche, as they do on the skin of actual survivors of lighting strikes, in fractal-like diseminations. When I was invited to participate in a new screening of the film held at the PRS I wanted to present something that could trace the lines of the film itself, or rather the lightning that I experienced, rather than merely accompany it as an overture with a piece of through-composed or improvised music. A methodology was devised to take a bird's eye view of a large subsection of the film's individual frames chronologically from beginning to end and then downsample the color information in each of those individual frames so that the pixel data becomes 2000-byte text strings comprised of numerical sequences. These sequences are then used to generate a stream of musical data that we can listen to as we move through the grid of frames, one by one, forming alchemical isomorphs of the visual content with new sonic entities, ones that make themselves heard as well as seen as they undergo this process of transformation. It is my hope then that the performance will remain inextricably linked to the intrinsic components of the celluloid, and allow for a critical dissection of its contents in our perspectival memory as well as inform a pre-intuited and abstracted grasping of the film's merits before viewing it in its totality. Hence the title of my piece Within the Silver Plane, envisions and de-visions the latent elements contained and hidden within the flatness of the single frame.

ARTIST’S BIO

Gavin Gamboa is a multimedia practitioner and information designer whose work fuses premeditated music composition, free improvisation and esoteric software to form a multifaceted stylistic praxis. Born in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico he composes for a variety of ensembles and performs internationally as a pianist with programs which include new works and those of the classical repertory. He has performed in Los Angeles, Seattle, Mérida, Berlin, and has accompanied Erykah Badu with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and tenor León de Castillo in Vienna. His work has been featured at Transart Festival (Bolzano IT), Międzynarodowe Spotkania Teatrów Tańca (Lublin PL), Cultura Mazatlán (Mazatlán MX), Pacific Standard Time LA/LA (Los Angeles US), and his opera with filmmaker E. Elias Merhige Polia & Blastema was premiered at Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O22, with successive screenings at Offscreen Film Festival (Brussels BE) and E’trange Festival (Paris FR). Additional works for film made in collaboration with the conceptual artist David Lamelas have screened at The Getty (Los Angeles US), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago US), and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires AR). He is currently based in Los Angeles.

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