As of the writing of this review, there is an extensive lacuna in tablet seven of The Epic of Gilgamesh. As Enkidu has been cursed by the gods and condemned to die, the final moments of his death are instead lost to oblivion; the clay tablets that recorded the character's passing have long ago been eroded by time, as a tide erodes the shore.
There are many such lacunae in Gilgamesh, and over the decades some passages have been restored, but others remain hidden from us. These missing passages do not diminish the beauty of the millennia-old work, but instead humanize it. Seeing the blank lines upon the page is a reminder of the tablets that carried the missing words, and of the iron-age scribes who pressed reeds into clay to write them. As fragments of broken sentences dissolve into emptiness at the end of tablet seven, it becomes impossible to forget that you're drinking from the deepest well of history, and across that incomprehensibly vast aquifer of time is a story we recognize as our own: one about hubris, love, death, and grief. Perhaps nothing in the human spirit ever truly changes.
The lacunae in On The Silver Globe have a similar effect. Almost destroyed by government censorship in the 70s, the gaps between the surviving portions of film, narrated by the director over shaky footage of beaches, sunsets, and bustling crowds, make it impossible to forget the film's history. In a poetic twist of fate, On The Silver Globe is also a film about history, and the breaks in the film itself seem to mirror the jarring gaps in time during the film's found footage first act. The viewer, much like the characters in the film, are left to hold the precious fragments of history that have stubbornly survived the ceaseless passage of time, and decades later we are left with a story that seems eerily familiar.
Towards the end of The Epic Of Gilgamesh, the character of Uta-napishti delivers a monologue in which he ponders the nature of death and grief:
"The Anunnaki were assembled, the great gods.
Mami, maker of destinies, fixed fates for them:
The gods gave humans life and death,
but did not reveal which day you will die."
To Uta-napishti, tragedy and grief are not accidents of the human condition, but an unbreakable thread in the fabric of the human spirit, created by the gods and fixed by their will. Over two thousand years later, Uta-napishti's words seem no less true, and Gilgamesh's grief no less resonant, lending a dark credibility to the epic's message. This grim prognosis exists also in Żuławski's epic. Left to their own devices, we can only look on in confusion and horror as the children of the astronauts begin to recreate martyrdom, heresy, hierarchy, war, and colonialism from first principles. Our frailty and cruelty are not accidents, but chains that no amount of time or space can break. As Żuławski solemnly narrates the final lacuna, one feels as though the story crossed a great river of time, both fictional and real, and yet we can still recognize it. Perhaps nothing in the human spirit every truly changes.