Almost 35 years after its release this movie is still known for its most visceral depictions of war and lingering impact on human lives.
SUMIT DASGUPTA
When Elem Klimov, the director of the film Come and See was nine, his family ran away from Stalingrad for the Ural Mountains. It was 1942 and Hitler’s Nazi army had pushed the Eastern Front deep into Soviet territory. Klimov poked his head out from under the blankets as his family crossed the Volga river.
One of the bloodiest battles in human history raged behind him. The city of his birth burnt to a crisp. Fire consumed the streets, buildings and even the Volga river. He had never seen anything like it, but the worst was yet to come.
A thousand miles away, teenager and co-writer of the film, Ales Adamovich aided his partisan family in Byelorussia. Nazi Germany wanted the territory to be a new frontier for ethnic Germans, but millions already lived there. The Nazis had a solution to that problem. They tortured, brutalised and killed people from around 628 villages.
40 years later, on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph over the Third Reich, the two men made a film about their experiences called Come and See, a Russian language film formally known as Kill Hitler in 1985. It’s one of the most devastating, haunting and surreal (anti) war movies you will ever see. Klimov post the release of the film never made another one and went on record saying he had said what needed to be said through Come and See. Lead actors Olga Mironova never returned to celluloid after the film and went on to become an art director for a national funded theatre in Russia. She was 16 at the time of the film. Aleksei Kravenchko, 14 in the time of filming did not return to acting until a decade later because he was deeply impacted by the filmmaking process.
Come and See is one of those movies that comes up late at night when fans of grotesque cinema gather to trade favourites. It’s whispered about in the same hushed tones that follow Cannibal Holocaust, Hostel trilogy, The Sinful Dwarf and A Serbian Film. But Come and See is different. It has the cinematic grammar of an art film and the tone of an exploitation movie. The violence is terrible, but less overt than I expected, and less cartoony than the exploitation work of the Italian exploitation filmmakers.
No one eats flesh, intestines don’t explode and there’s no close-ups of bullet wounds or heads being chopped off. Yet the film haunts the viewer in ways the most sordid grindhouse celluloid show can’t. I can probably say this because I watched the film thrice in one month to write something meaningful about it. So maybe I got used to all the grotesque violence.
What is a war film?
I cannot think of many film-related subjects that comes with as much complexity as that of the cinematic depiction of war. Between the contradictory statements of famous directors, Francois Truffaut saying that every film about war ends up being pro-war, and Spielberg claiming that every war film, good or bad, is anti-war, there appears to be a lot of ambiguity about what it is that war films actually communicate.
Definitions of what it really means to make an anti-war film therefore also remain vague and inconclusive. In an article from the BBC, California State University professor of philosophy Dennis Rothermel said that anti-war films must at least portray a nuanced view of deadly combat, one that depicts the infliction of lethal violence as a norm of behaviour, and as a force striking down randomly. In the same article, New York University film professor Sheril Antonio said that they have to show both sides, they have to ask if war is just a national tragedy for the victor, or if it is terrible for everybody. There are plenty of war films that meet these criteria, but for many of them, they are not enough to definitively label them as anti-war.
One complicating factor is that making a film with certain intentions doesn’t mean it will be perceived accordingly. Apocalypse Now for example is a slow-burning journey into a heart of darkness that comments on the dehumanising effects of war, but also contains some isolated scenes, most notably; the Ride of Valkyries, that communicate the excitement of warfare so effectively that the larger context it is placed in is easily forgotten.
One complicating factor is that making a film with certain intentions doesn’t mean it will be perceived accordingly. Apocalypse Now for example is a slow-burning journey into a heart of darkness that comments on the dehumanising effects of war, but also contains some isolated scenes, most notably; the Ride of Valkyries, that communicate the excitement of warfare so effectively that the larger context it is placed in is easily forgotten.
While such misreading is bound to happen as filmmakers can never fully control the reactions of their work, nor can they account for every worldview that is projected onto it, they can definitely muddle their own message by not thoroughly considering the effect their images really have. Look at Pearl Harbour, Michael Bay shot a devastating sequence in his film with the same cinematic spectacle that is also seen in fictional blockbuster adventures, and he later recreated this cinematic spectacle in his visual assault of a film called Transformers which I will be honest, little Sumit enjoyed a lot because it made him feel like he was looking at “realistic cartoons” as I had described it. Later it is repeated in 13 hours and the live action film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This same heroic spectacle can be seen in L.O.C: Kargil or in Uri: The surgical strike.
A battle of attrition and a war for survival
Come and See—adapted by Klimov, with Ales Adamovich, from the 1978 book I Am from the Fiery Village—is a war narrative about a teenage boy, Florya who digs a discarded gun out of a sandy trench with the intention of joining the Soviet partisans gathering in his village against his mother’s wishes.
Elem Klimov tried to break the barrier of voyeurism by placing the audience in direct gaze of the characters and the action. It feels like we are being violated by the German soldiers. In Come and See the danger becomes a constantly ominous presence, and the spectacle of war, terrifying. The film takes us further by presenting a fully subjective experience from the point of view of important characters. This implies, among other things, that we not only hear the sounds he hears in the world around him, but also the sounds that are haunting his mind, thereby connecting us even closer to the traumatic effects war has on the human psyche.
People think it is difficult to make an effective anti-war film because war has in its nature is to excite the viewer because most of us have had the privilege of not experiencing brutal violence in the hands of the oppressor. In typical war films the movie ends in the hands of the survivors but Come and See is different. By the end of the film I was so drained that I, with the survivors in the film began to envy the dead.
The film begins with an ambiguous scene, as a man calls out commands to invisible others on a beach. Who is he? Who is he calling to? Why is he fed up with them? It's revealed that he's calling out to children who have concealed themselves among the reeds. They are playing games of war, and digging in the sand for weapons concealed or lost during some earlier conflict.
Florya (Aleksie Kravchenko) is still young. He seems younger than his years in early scenes, and much, much older in later ones. He meets a young girl, Glasha (Olga Mironova), innocent and warm, dreams of her future with the partisan soldiers’ Captain. They forge a bond of friendship.
The film follows him for its entire length, sometimes pausing to look aside at details of horror. One scene in particular I saw Florya and Gasha trudge through a swamp struggling to move and keep their heads above water symbolically suggesting their utter powerlessness. I feel that the one of the reasons he survived is because he is so powerless. It is an invitation for the privileged to show how powerless we can be in the face of actual war.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse
Come and See is neither triumphalist or propagandist. The film tries to examine the life of folks who being unarmed lack agency and also lack the luxury of their own self-determination in the face of great evil. Nazis in this film are not enemies to be killed and conquered but they are an inhuman presence, like malevolent ghosts, this looming fear that cloaked the hearts of millions with fear.
The film goes to unspeakable lengths in trying to capture the surreal atmosphere of war. The editing of the film is disjointed, as if it is designed to make you feel disoriented and uncomfortable. I neither know the time of day nor the day. All I know is that survival is a must.
The steady camera is a tool to show the chaos of what is happening, and this is why many of the shots are long, panning shots that highlight the mental and physical mutilation that is occurring in the film. The camera bears witness the surrealistic nature of war and violence through natural lighting and POV shots. Almost a quasi-breaking of the fourth wall when moments feel like they are stretched in time where no one is speaking into the camera but just staring into the void seemingly aware that we, the audience are watching them.
The sound design has a feverish pitch to it. The hum and drone never stop, the cries ebb and flow out of the trees and hills. It makes you feel like you have lost more than just your innocence and humanity in those rolling hills. One sequence that had me reeling comes at the end where Florya, dismayed and angry, shoots for the first time a portrait of Hitler as Mozart’s Requiem in D minor grows in intensity. A true feast of sight and sound that has to be seen.
This film sets itself apart from the rest of the war films because they tend to look away from the realities of war, and give the atrocities of war a redemptive arc. War films are not generally designed to desolate their viewers, and so in time and again, the unthinkable actions of war are structured in a palatable format of an action war film, typically seen in Uri or Pearl Harbour because they allow their audiences to make sense of what they have witnessed but Come and See refused to budge. Almost 35 years after the release of the film and the Klimov’s passing in 2003, this movie still stands as one of the most visceral depictions of war and its lingering impact on human lives. A true cinematic experience indeed albeit difficult to consume.∎
