The 9th greatest film of all time.

Rating: 10/10 (11 February 2014)

What is it, where is it, how will it affect me? After finding an old rifle, a young boy joins the Soviet Army and experience the horrors of World War II. There's a popular story that's told regarding this film. It goes as follows: at a premier, there was an elderly German woman seated near the back of the audience who, half way through the screening, stood up and boldly declared: "I was a Wehrmacht officer during the invasion of the Soviet Union, and I can declare that everything you see in this film is completely true!". In studying war films, realism is a factor that features heavily in dictating the acclaim a film is given, and to what extent it can be a true success of the genre. Idi I Smorti's raw, sombre, horrifying, damaging and empirically sound content elevate it to divine upper reaches amidst the 'war film' niche to any historian or intellectual immediately. About a third of the way through the film Klimov, a Stanlingrad survivor, juxtaposes the historical face of dismay that the newly deafened young protagonist conjures, something that could speak louder than the script of any American take at the unparalleled devastation war brings, with a solemn, indifferent and colourful stalk (crane-like bird) that followers him through the deadpan lowland setting. It's a piece of camera work that brought me trauma and introspection. Stylistically, Idi I Smorti is superior to its western peers of the era, even though it is shot in a grainy aspect ratio, this only intensifies what Klimov is trying to accomplish with his work. In terms of substance, the way Klimov uses two strangers: a teenage boy and a teenage girl, their families ravaged and piled naked behind their home, cling together under mosses and ferns in a marshland forest, whilst the thick drones of German aircraft fly noir overhead, is something that hits especially hard to all that witness it. Following the boy's journey, through constant loss, fugue, blood, wrath and decadence is perfectly formed and perfectly balanced, all the way up to the final scene, where he shoots a series of portraits of Hitler as a series of montages display a rewind in his advance, starting with the burning villages of the boy's homeland and distancing further and further from such local horrors. But after what he occur has seen across rural Belarus, he cannot bring himself to shoot the portrait of the infant Hitler on his mother's lap. We feel at one with the character at this moment and his experiences of war are hammered home harder than any moment in any film that has ever produced. Idi I Smorti is real, undisturbed, pure film making that the likes of 'The Godfather' and 'Citizen Kane' can't match.