Makes Schindler's List look like Sesame Street

Rating: Null/10 (11 July 2007)

Elem Klimov directs "Come and See". While the film predominantly follows the rites-of-passage journey of a young boy, it is remarkable how often and effortlessly Klimov shifts visual perspective, offering us the objective and subjective states of a wide range of characters and objects.
For example, in one of the films most surreal scenes, several characters are shown guiding a cow across what seems to be open and unguarded terrain. Suddenly a series of intense firefights break out. Several characters are killed, but it is the fate of the cow with which the film is most preoccupied.
The images of the cow standing untouched by the raging skirmish, then struck by a barrage of bullets, and finally of its eyes rapidly shifting and dilating before death, are indicative of "Come and See's" ability to produce indelible images from what are often quite standard war film situations. Like Malick, Klimov is as much interested in the landscape (and the objects and people that inhabit it), as he is in representing the minutiae and widening horror of his protagonist's journey from home to the multiple sites of slaughter and genocide that mar his countryside.
The journey of a wide-eyed innocent across apocalyptic terrain is common territory for the war film (Ichikawa's "The Burmese Harp", Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood", "The Human Condition" etc), but Klimov is going for a much more macabre tone, bludgeoning us with the sheer intensity and sick morbidity of his images.
Unlike, say, "Schindler's List", "Come and See" is also remarkable for its use of abstract colour and sound. This is not a realist film; its shocks and effects are more dreamlike, from the mutedness of its burnished cinematography, to the extraordinary close-ups of several of its characters' impossibly aged faces, to the hyper expressive performances of many of its actors, to the impressionistic and at times almost expressionistic use of sound.
In this context, the title of the film is not just a call for audiences to bear witness, to "see" that which is not imaginable, that which has little visual record, and to get a sense of the physical conditions (the "come" of the title) experienced by those during the war, but a description or pointer towards the more spectatorial expectations of the film. Of course the order "come and see" also functions as an exploitative challenge; "Come and see if you dare!" Indeed, many Chinese war-porn/propaganda films feature eerily similar titles.
The film is essentially an epic journey and many of its images possess an almost Dantesque quality. It can also be seen as a "coming of age" film, a remarkable "coming" or progression (or is it regression?) that is etched upon the utterly transformed face of its central character.
Unsurprisingly, Spielberg screened "Come and See" several times for cast and crew prior to shooting his Holocaust film. "See" would prove a huge influence on Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun", "Schindler's List", "Wr Horse" and "Private Ryan", in its mixture of child-like innocence (lots of dollying in to the shocked children's faces) and brutality. This is the worst aspect of Klimov's legacy, his film opening the doorway for an onslaught of other shock-porn movies - all the way to Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" - all of which pretend to be history lessons and important "humane" testimonies, when in reality they simply use progressions in technology to escalate violence levels, push tolerance levels and are built around a primary need to jolt apathetic, desensitised audiences. Hilariously, as war-porn gets more hard-core, in real life the numbers of genocides, wars and atrocities demonstrably increase, whilst media coverage decreases and public apathy increases. This is the mistake of all "war films": people don't repeat because they forget (the implication being that we must therefore shock ourselves into awareness), we forget because we repeat (see "The Shining"). The human animal needs denial more than food.
So while "Come and See" and its Spielberg imitators lack any real historical depth, complexity, nuance, understanding of human beings, and trade in simple exploitation, they also possess a kind of psychological naivety, perhaps best exemplified by Klimov's final scene, in which a kid essentially refuses to shoot a young Hitler. WW2's engine had little to do with Hitler, but here he's reduced to the genesis of evil, the seed from which WW2 blossoms.
Though commissioned by the Soviet Union as a propaganda piece, "Come and See" was made shortly prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain, a period in which artists had a certain amount of freedom. Klimov's films is thus at times self consciously a meditation on Stalinist war films. In this regard the film literally begins upon the beach where Tarkovsky's "Ivan" ends, from where it attempts to create a new "war narrative", shunting aside Stalinist glorification for a kind of psychological shell shock. The result, though, is basically a Soviet version of "Men Behind the Sun", the infamous Chinese propaganda film in which we're called to bear witness to the activities of sadistic Japanese soldiers. In Klimov's case - the film focuses on the Nazi atrocities in Byelorussia - we leer at sadistic, vile, rapacious, murderous and cowardly Nazis while Communist partisans are portrayed as playful, comradely and righteous people. If a countries leadership willingly sided with the Germans from 1939-41, invaded countries (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland etc) carried out numerous atrocities against other nations and their own people and supported the Gulag system, then the viewer needs to be extremely careful when they view material that has been officially sanctioned by that leadership.
8/10 - Worth one viewing.