Come and See

Come and See is a 1985 Soviet anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov and starring Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. Its screenplay, written by Klimov and Ales Adamovich, is based on the 1971 novel Khatyn (Russian: Хаты́нь) and the 1977 collection of survivor testimonies I Am from the Fiery Village (Я из огненной деревни, Ya iz ognennoy derevni), of which Adamovich was a co-author. Klimov had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before he was allowed to produce the film in its entirety.
The film's plot focuses on the German occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, and the events as witnessed by a young Belarusian teenager named Flyora, who joins a partisan unit, and thereafter depicts the Nazi atrocities and human suffering inflicted upon the populace. The film mixes hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and philosophical existentialism with poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes. The film received positive reviews during its initial release and received the FIPRESCI prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. It is the last and most recent film that Klimov directed before his death.
Come and See has received more widespread acclaim in recent years. The portrayal of the horror and brutality of war in the third act has been widely praised by critics, and Kravchenko's performance has been lauded as an excellent instance of child acting. It has since come to be considered one of the greatest films of all time, particularly in the anti-war film genre; in the 2022 Sight & Sound directors' poll of the Greatest Films of all Time, it ranked 41st.
In 1943, Flyora and another Belarusian boy dig up an abandoned SVT-40 rifle from a sand-filled trench to join the Soviet partisan forces. They do so in defiance of their village elder, who warns them that this would arouse the suspicions of the occupying Germans. The boys' activities are noticed by an Fw 189 reconnaissance aircraft, flying overhead.
The next day, partisans arrive at Flyora's house to conscript him, against his mother's wishes. Flyora becomes a low-rank militiaman who performs menial tasks. When the partisans move on, their commander Kosach orders Flyora to remain behind at the camp. Bitterly disappointed, Flyora walks into the forest weeping. He finds Glasha, an adolescent girl working as a partisan nurse. Glasha appears emotionally unstable, and mocks Flyora when he tries to act mature; she taunts that he isn't living, and expresses a want to love and have children. The camp is suddenly attacked by dive bombers and German paratroopers, partially deafening Flyora and forcing the duo to flee into the forest. The two exhibit psychosis, first appearing catatonic and then suddenly playing with manic joy.
Flyora and Glasha travel to his village, only to find his home deserted and covered in flies. Denying that his family is dead, Flyora believes they are hiding on a nearby island across a bog and runs off. Glasha follows, turning her head by chance and seeing a pile of executed villagers behind his house. The two become hysterical after wading through the bog, where Glasha screams at Flyora that his family is dead; Flyora pushes her into the water, then immediately tries to rescue her. Rubezh, a partisan fighter, comes across them and takes them to meet the surviving villagers. The village elder, severely burned by gasoline, tells Flyora of his family's deaths and repeats his warning about digging up the rifles. Flyora attempts suicide out of guilt by submerging his head in the bog, but Glasha and the villagers save and comfort him.
Rubezh takes Flyora and two other men to raid an unguarded warehouse for food; Glasha says she will wait for Flyora to return, but he is despondent. The group finds the warehouse guarded by German troops and are forced to retreat, causing the two companions to be killed by a land mine. Rubezh and Flyora steal a cow from a collaborating farmer, but a German machine gun fires upon them, killing Rubezh and the cow. Flyora attempts to steal a horse and cart from a man to transport the cow, but SS troops appear. The man convinces Flyora to hide his gun and jacket, and takes him to Perekhody village.
The man hurriedly explains a fake identity to Flyora, while an SS Einsatzkommando accompanied by collaborators from the Russian Liberation Army and Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118, surround and occupy the village. Flyora tries to warn the townsfolk that they are being herded to their deaths, but he is forced into a barn church with them. The Germans barricade the doors, and an officer orders the villagers to climb out through a window without their children. Flyora and a young woman with a child exit; the woman's child is thrown back into the church while she is dragged by her hair to be gang raped. German soldiers burn and shoot the church while others applaud, joke around, and engage in hazing. A German officer holds a cocked pistol to Flyora's head to pose for a picture, then abandons him as the soldiers leave.
Flyora wanders away from the scorched village, finding the aftermath of a partisan ambush on the Germans. Flyora recovers his jacket and rifle, only to spot the gang-raped woman, bleeding and stumbling in a fugue state; Flyora recalls Glasha, and her want for love and children. Flyora finds Kosach and the partisans nearby, having captured eleven of the Germans and their collaborators. They all plead for their lives and deflect blame save for a fanatical Obersturmführer, who is unapologetic and claims their genocide will succeed. Kosach makes one collaborator douse the others with petrol, but the disgusted crowd shoots them all before they can be set on fire.
As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle and proceeds to shoot it numerous times. As he does so, a montage of clips from Hitler's life plays in reverse, but when Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother Klara's lap, Flyora stops shooting and cries. A title card informs "628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants". Flyora rushes to rejoin his comrades, and they march through the birch woods while in the meantime a season passes and snow blankets the ground.
Klimov co-wrote the screenplay with Ales Adamovich, who fought with the Belarusian partisans as a teenager. According to the director's recollections, work on the film began in 1977:
The original Belarusian and Russian title of the film derives from Chapter 6 of the Book of Revelation, where in the first, third, fifth, and seventh verse is written "Ідзі і глядзі" in Belarusian (English: "Come and see", Greek: Ἔρχου καὶ ἴδε, Erchou kai ide and "Иди и смотри" in Russian) as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Chapter 6, verses 7–8 have been cited as being particularly relevant to the film:
To prepare the 14-year-old Kravchenko for the role, Klimov called a hypnotist with autogenic training. "[Kravchenko's acting] could have had a very sad ending. He could have landed in an insane asylum," Klimov said. "I realized I had to inject him with content which he did not possess," "This is an age when a boy does not know what true hatred is, what true love is." "In the end, Mr. Kravchenko was able to concentrate so intensely that it seemed as if he had hypnotized himself for the role."
For eight years, filming could not begin because the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) would not accept the screenplay, considering it too realistic, calling it propaganda for the "aesthetics of dirtiness" and "naturalism". Alongside this, the death of Klimov's wife Larisa Shepitko, also a filmmaker, in 1979 forced him to first complete the work she began on what was to be her next film, Farewell; it would finally be released in 1983. Eventually in 1984, Klimov was able to start filming without having compromised to any censorship at all. The only change became the name of the film itself, to Come and See from the original, Kill Hitler (Klimov also says this in the 2006 UK DVD release).
The film was shot in chronological order over a period of nine months. Kravchenko said that he underwent "the most debilitating fatigue and hunger. I kept a most severe diet, and after the filming was over I returned to school not only thin, but grey-haired." Contrary to what some rumors suggest, though, Kravchenko's hair did not turn permanently grey. In fact, a special Silber Interference Grease-Paint, alongside a thin layer of actual silver, was used to dye his hair. This made it difficult to get it back to normal, so Kravchenko had to live with his hair like this for some time after shooting the film.
To create the maximum sense of immediacy, realism, hyperrealism, and surrealism operating in equal measure, Klimov and his cameraman Aleksei Rodionov employed naturalistic colors and lots of Steadicam shots; the film is full of extreme close-ups of faces, does not flinch from the unpleasant details of burnt flesh and bloodied corpses, and the guns were often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks. Kravchenko mentioned in interviews that bullets sometimes passed just 4 inches (10 centimeters) above his head (such as in the cow scene). Very little protection was provided on the set. When the dive bombs were detonated the camera crew only had a concrete slab 1.5 meters tall and 5 meters wide to protect them. At the same time the mise-en-scène is fragmentary and disjointed: there are discontinuities between shots as characters appear in close up and then disappear off camera. Elsewhere, the moment of revelation is marked by a disorienting zoom-in/dolly-out shot.
The original soundtrack is rhythmically amorphous music composed by Oleg Yanchenko. At a few key points in the film classical music from mainly German or Austrian composers are used, such as The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II. The Soviet marching song "The Sacred War" and Russian folk song "Korobeiniki" (Vadim Kozin) (lit. '"Pedlars"') are played in the movie once. During the scene where Glasha dances, the background music is some fragments of Mary Dixon's song from Grigori Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. At the end, during the photographic montage, music by Richard Wagner is used, most notably the "Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walküre.
At the end of the film, the partisans walk through a winter woodland to the sound of Mozart's Lacrimosa before the camera tilts towards the sky and the ending credits appear. Film critic Roger Ebert commented on this scene as follows:
Come and See had its world premiere in the competition program at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival on 9 July 1985. It was theatrically released on 17 October 1985, drawing 28.9 million viewers and ranking sixth at the box office of 1986. It grossed $71,909 in the United States and Canada, and $20.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of nearly $21 million, plus nearly $1.3 million with home video sales.
In 2017, the film received an official restoration overseen by Karen Shakhnazarov. It won the Venice Classics Award for Best Restored Film, and was also shown in several European independent cinemas again.
Initial reception was positive. Walter Goodman wrote for The New York Times that "The history is harrowing and the presentation is graphic ... Powerful material, powerfully rendered ...", and dismissed the ending as "a dose of instant inspirationalism," but conceded to Klimov's "unquestionable talent." Rita Kempley, of The Washington Post, wrote that "directing with an angry eloquence, [Klimov] taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness that Francis Ford Coppola found in Apocalypse Now. And though he draws a surprisingly vivid performance from his inexperienced teen lead, Klimov's prowess is his visual poetry, muscular and animistic, like compatriot Andrei Konchalovsky's in his epic Siberiade." Mark Le Fanu wrote in Sight & Sound that Come and See is a "powerful war film ... The director has elicited an excellent performance from his central actor Kravchenko".
According to Klimov, the film was so shocking for audiences that ambulances were sometimes called in to take away particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad.
Come and See was selected as the Soviet entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 58th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
The film has since been widely praised in later decades. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 89%, based on 57 reviews, with an average rating of 8.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "As effectively anti-war as movies can be, Come and See is a harrowing odyssey through the worst that humanity is capable of, directed with bravura intensity by Elem Klimov."
In 2001, Daneet Steffens of Entertainment Weekly wrote that "Klimov alternates the horrors of war with occasional fairy tale-like images; together they imbue the film with an unapologetically disturbing quality that persists long after the credits roll."
In 2001, J. Hoberman of The Village Voice reviewed Come and See, writing the following: "Directed for baroque intensity, Come and See is a robust art film with aspirations to the visionary – not so much graphic as leisurely literal-minded in its representation of mass murder. (The movie has been compared both to Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, and it would not be surprising to learn that Steven Spielberg had screened it before making either of these.) The film's central atrocity is a barbaric circus of blaring music and barking dogs in which a squadron of drunken German soldiers round up and parade the peasants to their fiery doom ... The bit of actual death-camp corpse footage that Klimov uses is doubly disturbing in that it retrospectively diminishes the care with which he orchestrates the town's destruction. For the most part, he prefers to show the Gorgon as reflected in Perseus's shield. There are few images more indelible than the sight of young Aleksei Kravchenko's fear-petrified expression." In the same publication in 2009, Elliott Stein described Come and See as "a startling mixture of lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare."
In 2002, Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club wrote that Klimov's "impressions are unforgettable: the screaming cacophony of a bombing run broken up by the faint sound of a Mozart fugue, a dark, arid field suddenly lit up by eerily beautiful orange flares, German troops appearing like ghosts out of the heavy morning fog. A product of the glasnost era, Come and See is far from a patriotic memorial of Russia's hard-won victory. Instead, it's a chilling reminder of that victory's terrible costs." British magazine The Word wrote that "Come and See is widely regarded as the finest war film ever made, though possibly not by Great Escape fans." Tim Lott wrote in 2009 that the film "makes Apocalypse Now look lightweight".
In 2006, Geoffrey Macnab of Sight & Sound wrote: "Klimov's astonishing war movie combines intense lyricism with the kind of violent bloodletting that would make even Sam Peckinpah pause".
On 16 June 2010, Roger Ebert posted a review of Come and See as part of his "Great Movies" series, describing it as "one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead ... The film depicts brutality and is occasionally very realistic, but there's an overlay of muted nightmarish exaggeration ... I must not describe the famous sequence at the end. It must unfold as a surprise for you. It pretends to roll back history. You will see how. It is unutterably depressing, because history can never undo itself, and is with us forever."
Come and See appears on many lists of films considered the best. In 2008, Come and See was placed at number 60 on Empire magazine's "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". It also made Channel 4's list of 50 Films to See Before You Die and was ranked number 24 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. Phil de Semlyen of Empire has described the work as "Elim [sic] Klimov’s seriously influential, deeply unsettling Belarusian opus. No film – not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket – spells out the dehumanizing impact of conflict more vividly, or ferociously ... An impressionist masterpiece and possibly the worst date movie ever." It ranked 154 among critics, and 30 among directors, in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, while it ranked 104 among critics, and 41 among directors, in the 2022 Sight & Sound polls. The film is generally considered one of the greatest anti-war movies ever made, and one with the most historically accurate depictions of the crimes on the Eastern Front.
Klimov did not make any more films after Come and See, leading some critics to speculate as to why. In 2001, Klimov said, "I lost interest in making films ... Everything that was possible I felt I had already done."
In 2001 the film was released on DVD in the United States by Kino Lorber. This release is currently out-of-print. The film became available on FilmStruck, the streaming service for the Criterion Collection from its opening on 1 November 2016 to its closing on 29 November 2018, and from November 2019 on the new Criterion Channel service. On 18 December 2019, Janus Films released a trailer for a 2k-restoration that premiered at the Film Forum in New York City on 21 February 2020 with a theatrical run and then a home media release through Criterion was released on 30 June 2020.