Come and See

The 1980s are, along with the 1930s, the only decade in the archive with nothing in it. So is the Soviet Union. So is war as a genre — the archive has Japanese jidaigeki, German expressionist science fiction, Italian neorealism, a Swedish religious allegory, French crime, American gangster cinema, a Hong Kong romance, an Iranian docufiction hybrid and Korean black comedy, but not one film that is directly about war.

Come and See fills all three slots at once: the 1980s, the Soviet Union, war.

It pairs with today's other selection, Pather Panchali: 1955 against 1985, thirty years apart; one following a family through a Bengali monsoon, one following a boy across scorched Belarus. They have more in common than they look — both use a child as their vantage point, both rely on non-professional or first-time performers, and both were very nearly never made. The first was shot on and off for nearly three years; the second was blocked by Soviet film censors for eight.

And there is a sharper reason. Both films ask the same question: when history rolls over an ordinary person, where should the camera stand? Pather Panchali stands back, with long takes and the distance of a whole village. Come and See presses against the face, with Steadicam and extreme close-ups. Put together, today's two films are the most extreme pair of answers to that question.

1943 年，白俄罗斯。

一个叫 Flyora 的少年和另一个男孩在战壕里挖东西，挖出了一支步枪。他们想加入游击队。第二天游击队真的来了，Flyora 被带走，编进林中的民兵营地。他在名单上写下自己的名字，还没开过一枪。

游击队主力出发作战之后，营地里只剩下他、一个叫 Glasha 的少女护士和少数几个人。德军俯冲轰炸机和伞兵来了。Flyora 在爆炸和泥水里往回跑，跑回自己的村子——村子已经被清空了，房子还在，人没了。

从这里开始，影片把他带进一次比一次更深的场面：抢粮、被围，以及一座被赶满了人的谷仓。

（剧情到这里为止。这部片子的结构和它的力量是同一件事：你跟着他一步一步走，不提前知道下一步是什么。）

A script blocked for eight years

Elem Klimov was born in Stalingrad in 1933. His wife was the director Larisa Shepitko. In 1977 he and the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich began the screenplay — Adamovich had been a Belarusian partisan as a boy and later recorded survivors' testimony in documentary form.

Goskino, the Soviet state film committee, blocked the script for eight years. The objection was not political but aesthetic: the censors called it 'dirty aesthetics' and 'naturalism'. In 1979 Larisa Shepitko was killed in a car crash and Klimov had to finish her last film, Farewell (released 1983), which pushed the project back further. Only in 1984 was he allowed to shoot — and by his account he made no substantive concessions.

The one enforced change was the title. Klimov had wanted Kill Hitler; it became Come and See. The title comes from Revelation 6, where a voice says 'come and see' as the seals are opened and the horsemen bring war, famine, plague and death.

Aleksei Kravchenko, fourteen years old

Klimov wanted 'a simple boy fourteen years of age'. He cast Aleksei Kravchenko, and before shooting brought in a hypnotist to work with the boy using autogenic training. Klimov later said that handled badly, 'his acting could have had a very sad ending — he could have landed in an insane asylum.'

The shoot lasted nine months and was filmed in chronological order. Kravchenko has said he went through extreme exhaustion and hunger under a strict diet, and that when he returned to school afterwards he was 'not only thin, but grey-haired'.

That last part needs correcting, because the story is widely repeated: his hair was not permanently whitened. The crew used a special silver 'Interferenz' paint over a real silver dye, and because it was so hard to remove he had to keep the colour for a while after filming ended.

Live ammunition

The production used large quantities of live ammunition rather than blanks. Kravchenko has said that in the 'cow' sequence bullets passed within about four inches (ten centimetres) of his head. There was almost no protection on set: for the sequence in which dive-bomber ordnance is detonated, the camera crew had only a concrete slab roughly 1.5 metres high and 5 metres wide.

Klimov's staging is deliberately fragmented and discontinuous, using dolly zooms at moments of revelation to disorient the viewer. The cinematographer Aleksei Rodionov worked in natural tones with heavy Steadicam, giving the image an immediacy and a surreal imbalance at the same time.

Sound

The original score, by Oleg Yanchenko, is rhythmically amorphous — closer to a sustained drone than to music. The film also leans heavily on pre-existing music, used in ways that refuse to console: Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube, the Soviet wartime song 'The Sacred War', the Russian folk song 'Korobeiniki', the Tannhäuser overture and the Ride of the Valkyries, and, for the scene in which Glasha dances, a song from Grigori Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. The partisans' march through the forest at the end is scored with the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem.

This is music that ordinarily belongs to the side of civilisation. Placed next to a massacre, it stops being a comfort.

The ending

The ending is the most discussed passage in the film. Flyora fires at a portrait of Hitler — an image Klimov composited from two photographs, of Klara Hitler and of Adolf Hitler. Then comes reversed archive footage: Hitler's life runs backwards until the image is of him as an infant on his mother's knee. Flyora stops firing and weeps.

A title card follows: '628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants.'

Reception

The film premiered on 9 July 1985 in competition at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival, where it won the festival's Golden Prize and the FIPRESCI prize. It opened theatrically on 17 October 1985 and drew 28.9 million admissions in the Soviet Union, the sixth-highest box office of 1986.

Rotten Tomatoes records 90% from 60 reviews, averaging 9.2/10. In the Sight & Sound polls it placed 104th among critics and 41st among directors in 2022, and 154th among critics and 30th among directors in 2012. Empire's 2008 list of the 500 greatest films put it 60th; its 2010 list of the 100 best films of world cinema put it 24th. Roger Ebert added it to his 'Great Movies' series on 16 June 2010, calling it 'one of the most devastating films ever about anything'.

Klimov said the film's impact was such that ambulances were sometimes called for particularly sensitive viewers.

Come and See was the last film Klimov directed before his death in 2003. In 2001 he said: 'I lost interest in making films… Everything that was possible I felt I had already done.'

In 2017 the film was restored under the supervision of Karen Shakhnazarov and won the Venice Classics award for Best Restored Film.