Come and See
Encyclopedia
Come and See directed by Elem Klimov
, is a 1985 Soviet war movie and psychological horror
drama about and occurring during the Nazi German occupation of the Byelorussian SSR
. Aleksei Kravchenko
and Olga Mironova star as the protagonists Florya and Glasha. The screenplay is by Ales Adamovich
and Elem Klimov. The script had to wait eight years for approval; the film was finally produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War II
, and was a large box-office hit, with 28,900,000 admissions in the Soviet Union
alone.
The film's title derives from Chapter 6 of The Apocalypse of John
, in which "Come and see" is said in the first, third, fifth and seventh verses as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
. Chapter 6, verses 7-8 has been cited as being particularly relevant to the film:
"And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."
Florya goes temporarily deaf from the explosions and, after hiding out in the forest, returns to his home village with Glasha. He does not find his family at home, but his sisters' dolls are lined up on the floor and the house is overrun by flies. After sitting down to eat the still-warm dinner from the oven, Glasha vomits. Denying what he and Glasha both suspect, Florya decides that his family must be hiding on an nearby island across a bog. As they run from the village, Glasha turns and sees a huge pile of dead bodies stacked behind Florya's house. Unable to accept that his family is dead, Florya becomes hysterical as he and Glasha painstakingly wade through the bog. When they make it to the island, they meet a resistance fighter, Roubej. Glasha tells Roubej that Florya is mad. Roubej takes the pair to a large number of other villagers who have fled the Nazis. Florya sees the old man who warned Florya not to dig, now doused in gasoline and burnt by the Nazis. Florya finally understands that his family did not survive.
Roubej takes Florya under his wing. Florya, Roubej, and two other resistance fighters leave to find food for the starving villagers, and find the SS engaged in anti-Partisan and Einsatzgruppen
killing activities. The food store is too well-defended to be raided, and Florya and Roubej's two companions are blown up after Florya mistakenly leads them through a minefield. At dusk, Roubej and Florya sneak up to an occupied town and manage to steal a cow from a Nazi-collaborating farmer, but as they flee across the fields, they are shot at. Both Roubej and the cow are killed. The next morning, Florya, unable to move the dead cow, finds a horse and cart. He decides to take the horse back to the villagers. The owner of the horse attempts to stop Florya but, shortly after, they hear the sound of the approaching mass of German soldiers. The farmer helps Florya hide his partisan jacket and rifle in the field, and takes him to his village of Perekhody, where they hurriedly discuss a fake identity for him. A Nazi Einsatzkommando
unit moves into the village and herds everyone into a wooden church, locking them all inside. The German Sturmbannführer
announces to the terrified people that anyone will be allowed to climb out of the church through a side window, as long as they leave their children behind. No one moves, but Florya takes up their offer and climbs out. Shortly after, a woman attempts to climb out with her child, but she is dragged away by her hair and the toddler is thrown back through the window. Grenade
s are thrown into the church, which is then set on fire and shot at; Florya watches the inferno of burning Byelorussian peasants while the Nazis stand and applaud, taking photographs and laughing, and listening to music. The woman who escaped the church is put into a moving truck with a group of soldiers and group-raped.
Florya wanders out of the village, where he sees that the partisan soldiers have ambushed the Germans as they fled from the burning village. He then goes to recover his rifle and jacket from the field where he had hid them earlier. As he turns to leave, Florya comes across a girl who has been raped and is in a fugue state
; he initially mistakes her for Glasha, repeating the words she told him about dreams of love and children. Florya returns to the destroyed village, picking up a can of gasoline on his way. He finds that his fellow partisan soldiers have captured a small group of the attackers, along with their Byelorussian collaborators and the German SS commander. The main collaborator, insisting that they are not to blame for the slaughter, translates the words of the German commander, who claims to be a good man and a doting grandfather. The Sturmbannführer is disgusted by his commander's cowardice, and tells his captors that they, as an inferior race
and communist sympathisers, will eventually be exterminated. He also explains that he did not allow children to come out of the church because "the trouble starts with children." Following orders given by the leader of the partisans, the collaborator douses the prisoners with the can of petrol Florya brought, but the crowd, disgusted by the sight, shoot them all down before they can be set on fire, ending their lives relatively painlessly.
As the partisans leave, Florya notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler
in a puddle and shoots it - the first time Florya has actually used his rifle. After each shot, there is a sequence of montages that play in reverse and regress in time, depicting the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich backwards: corpses at a concentration camp; Hitler congratulating a German boy; Nazi armies marching, Nazi armies advancing in Blitzkrieg
s, Kriegsmarine
operations in the Battle of the Atlantic, book-burnings and Jewish persecution, singings of the "Horst-Wessel-Lied
", scenes from the 1934 Nazi Party congresses extracted from Triumph of the Will
, 1930s Nazi party congresses, Nazi stormtroopers
marching, rivalry between the German Communists and the Nazi Party, unrest between Weimar Gonvernment
-opposing German civilians and the German police, corruption of the Weimar Government
, images of Hitler's combat service in World War I
, images of Hitler as a schoolboy; and finally a picture of the infant Adolf in his mother
's lap. Each montage ends with a still photograph, which Florya shoots — yet he does not fire at the still shot of the final montage, the picture of the baby Hitler. A title card states that "628 villages in Byelorussia were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants."
In the final scene, Florya catches up with, and blends in with, his partisan comrades marching through the woods. They are seen marching away into the dark of the trees; afterwards, the camera rises to the sky.
, who fought with the Belarussian partisans as a teenager. According to the director's recollections, work on the film began in 1977:
For a long time, filming couldn't begin. Goskino wouldn't accept the screenplay, considering it a propaganda for the "aesthetics of dirtiness" and "naturalism". In the end, Klimov was able to start filming in 1984 without having compromised to any censorship at all. The only change became the name of the film itself, which was changed to Come and See from the original title, Kill Hitler (Elem Klimov also says this in the 2006 UK DVD release).
The film was shot in chronological order over a period of nine months. Aleksey Kravchenko says 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." The 2006 UK DVD sleeve states that the guns in the film were often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks, for realism. Aleksei Kravchenko mentions in interviews that bullets sometimes passed just 4 inches (10 centimeters) above his head (such as in the cow scene).
Other notes:
). At the end, during the montage, music by Richard Wagner
is used, most notably the Tannhäuser
Overture and the Ride from Die Walküre
. The conclusion of the film uses the Lacrimosa
from Mozart's Requiem
. The Soviet marching song "The Sacred War" is also played in the movie once.
, writing for The New York Times
, dismissed the ending as "a dose of instant inspirationalism," but concedes 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 and Sound (03/01/1987) that Come and See is a "powerful war film....The director has elicited an excellent performance form his central actor Kravchenko." Writing about Come and See, Walter Goodman
of the New York Times (02/06/1987) claimed that "The history is harrowing and the presentation is graphic....Powerful material, powerfully rendered..." Daneet Steffens of Entertainment Weekly
(11/02/2001) 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." Geoffrey Macnab of Sight and Sound (05/01/2006) wrote that "Klimov's astonishing war movie combines intense lyricism with the kind of violent bloodletting that would make even Sam Peckinpah
pause."
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 Alexei Kravchenko's fear-petrified expression. By some accounts the boy was hypnotized for the movie's final scenes — most viewers will be as well.
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".
The film was placed at #60 on Empire
magazines "The 500 Greatest Movies of all Time" in 2008. Come and See was also included in Channel 4
's list of 50 Films to See Before You Die
and was ranked #24 in Empire
magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. Phil de Semlyen of Empire has described Come and See as "Elim Klimov’s seriously influential, deeply unsettling Belarussian opus. No film – not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket – spells out the dehumanising impact of conflict more vividly, or ferociously...An impressionist masterpiece and possibly the worst date movie ever."
On June 16, 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."
Elem 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." Klimov died on 26 October 2003.
Elem Klimov
Elem Germanovich Klimov was a Soviet Russian film director. He studied at VGIK, and was married to film director Larisa Shepitko. He is best known in the West for his final film, 1985's Come and See , a powerful tale of a teenage boy in German-occupied Byelorussia during the German-Soviet War,...
, is a 1985 Soviet war movie and psychological horror
Psychological horror
Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction that relies on character fears, guilt, beliefs, eerie sound effects, relevant music and emotional instability to build tension and further the plot...
drama about and occurring during the Nazi German occupation of the Byelorussian SSR
Byelorussian SSR
The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was one of fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union. It was one of the four original founding members of the Soviet Union in 1922, together with the Ukrainian SSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...
. Aleksei Kravchenko
Aleksei Kravchenko
Aleksei Yevgenyevich Kravchenko is an actor perhaps best known for his role in the 1985 film Come and See as a young boy in the resistance army. He was 14 when filming started. He applied to the Shchukin Theatre School in 1991 and graduated in 1995...
and Olga Mironova star as the protagonists Florya and Glasha. The screenplay is by Ales Adamovich
Ales Adamovich
Ales Adamovich was a Soviet writer and a critic, Professor and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Doctor of Philosophy in philology, Doctorate in 1962 ; the people's deputy...
and Elem Klimov. The script had to wait eight years for approval; the film was finally produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and was a large box-office hit, with 28,900,000 admissions in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
alone.
The film's title derives from Chapter 6 of The Apocalypse of John
Book of Revelation
The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...
, in which "Come and see" is said in the first, third, fifth and seventh verses as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are described in the last book of the New Testament of the Bible, called the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ to Saint John the Evangelist at 6:1-8. The chapter tells of a "'book'/'scroll' in God's right hand that is sealed with seven seals"...
. Chapter 6, verses 7-8 has been cited as being particularly relevant to the film:
"And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."
Plot
In 1943, two Byelorussian boys are digging in a sand field looking for abandoned rifles, in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. An old farmer warns them not to dig. One of the boys, Florian (or Florya, the familiar form of the name), finds an SVT-40 rifle. The next day, partisans arrive at his house and take Florya with them, to the dismay of Florya's mother. She fears that the loss of her son, like his father before him, will lessen her and her daughters' chances of survival. The partisans converge in a forest and prepare to confront the Nazis, but the partisan commander, Kosach, orders Florya to remain behind at the camp in reserve. Disappointed, Florya walks into the forest, weeping, and comes across someone else who has been left behind - Glasha, a beautiful girl in love with Kosach. Suddenly, German aeroplanes appear and begin to drop German parachutists, and the camp comes under heavy artillery fire.Florya goes temporarily deaf from the explosions and, after hiding out in the forest, returns to his home village with Glasha. He does not find his family at home, but his sisters' dolls are lined up on the floor and the house is overrun by flies. After sitting down to eat the still-warm dinner from the oven, Glasha vomits. Denying what he and Glasha both suspect, Florya decides that his family must be hiding on an nearby island across a bog. As they run from the village, Glasha turns and sees a huge pile of dead bodies stacked behind Florya's house. Unable to accept that his family is dead, Florya becomes hysterical as he and Glasha painstakingly wade through the bog. When they make it to the island, they meet a resistance fighter, Roubej. Glasha tells Roubej that Florya is mad. Roubej takes the pair to a large number of other villagers who have fled the Nazis. Florya sees the old man who warned Florya not to dig, now doused in gasoline and burnt by the Nazis. Florya finally understands that his family did not survive.
Roubej takes Florya under his wing. Florya, Roubej, and two other resistance fighters leave to find food for the starving villagers, and find the SS engaged in anti-Partisan and Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories...
killing activities. The food store is too well-defended to be raided, and Florya and Roubej's two companions are blown up after Florya mistakenly leads them through a minefield. At dusk, Roubej and Florya sneak up to an occupied town and manage to steal a cow from a Nazi-collaborating farmer, but as they flee across the fields, they are shot at. Both Roubej and the cow are killed. The next morning, Florya, unable to move the dead cow, finds a horse and cart. He decides to take the horse back to the villagers. The owner of the horse attempts to stop Florya but, shortly after, they hear the sound of the approaching mass of German soldiers. The farmer helps Florya hide his partisan jacket and rifle in the field, and takes him to his village of Perekhody, where they hurriedly discuss a fake identity for him. A Nazi Einsatzkommando
Einsatzkommando
During World War II, the Nazi German Einsatzkommandos were a sub-group of five Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads—up to 3,000 men each—usually composed of 500-1,000 functionaries of the SS and Gestapo, whose mission was to kill Jews, Romani, communists and the NKVD collaborators in the captured...
unit moves into the village and herds everyone into a wooden church, locking them all inside. The German Sturmbannführer
Sturmbannführer
Sturmbannführer was a paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party equivalent to major, used both in the Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel...
announces to the terrified people that anyone will be allowed to climb out of the church through a side window, as long as they leave their children behind. No one moves, but Florya takes up their offer and climbs out. Shortly after, a woman attempts to climb out with her child, but she is dragged away by her hair and the toddler is thrown back through the window. Grenade
Grenade
A grenade is a small explosive device that is projected a safe distance away by its user. Soldiers called grenadiers specialize in the use of grenades. The term hand grenade refers any grenade designed to be hand thrown. Grenade Launchers are firearms designed to fire explosive projectile grenades...
s are thrown into the church, which is then set on fire and shot at; Florya watches the inferno of burning Byelorussian peasants while the Nazis stand and applaud, taking photographs and laughing, and listening to music. The woman who escaped the church is put into a moving truck with a group of soldiers and group-raped.
Florya wanders out of the village, where he sees that the partisan soldiers have ambushed the Germans as they fled from the burning village. He then goes to recover his rifle and jacket from the field where he had hid them earlier. As he turns to leave, Florya comes across a girl who has been raped and is in a fugue state
Fugue state
A fugue state, formally dissociative fugue or psychogenic fugue , is a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of individuality...
; he initially mistakes her for Glasha, repeating the words she told him about dreams of love and children. Florya returns to the destroyed village, picking up a can of gasoline on his way. He finds that his fellow partisan soldiers have captured a small group of the attackers, along with their Byelorussian collaborators and the German SS commander. The main collaborator, insisting that they are not to blame for the slaughter, translates the words of the German commander, who claims to be a good man and a doting grandfather. The Sturmbannführer is disgusted by his commander's cowardice, and tells his captors that they, as an inferior race
Untermensch
Untermensch is a term that became infamous when the Nazi racial ideology used it to describe "inferior people", especially "the masses from the East," that is Jews, Gypsies, Poles along with other Slavic people like the Russians, Serbs, Belarussians and Ukrainians...
and communist sympathisers, will eventually be exterminated. He also explains that he did not allow children to come out of the church because "the trouble starts with children." Following orders given by the leader of the partisans, the collaborator douses the prisoners with the can of petrol Florya brought, but the crowd, disgusted by the sight, shoot them all down before they can be set on fire, ending their lives relatively painlessly.
As the partisans leave, Florya notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
in a puddle and shoots it - the first time Florya has actually used his rifle. After each shot, there is a sequence of montages that play in reverse and regress in time, depicting the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich backwards: corpses at a concentration camp; Hitler congratulating a German boy; Nazi armies marching, Nazi armies advancing in Blitzkrieg
Blitzkrieg
For other uses of the word, see: Blitzkrieg Blitzkrieg is an anglicized word describing all-motorised force concentration of tanks, infantry, artillery, combat engineers and air power, concentrating overwhelming force at high speed to break through enemy lines, and, once the lines are broken,...
s, Kriegsmarine
Kriegsmarine
The Kriegsmarine was the name of the German Navy during the Nazi regime . It superseded the Kaiserliche Marine of World War I and the post-war Reichsmarine. The Kriegsmarine was one of three official branches of the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany.The Kriegsmarine grew rapidly...
operations in the Battle of the Atlantic, book-burnings and Jewish persecution, singings of the "Horst-Wessel-Lied
Horst-Wessel-Lied
The Horst-Wessel-Lied , also known as Die Fahne hoch from its opening line, was the anthem of the Nazi Party from 1930 to 1945...
", scenes from the 1934 Nazi Party congresses extracted from Triumph of the Will
Triumph of the Will
Triumph of the Will is a propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl. It chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. The film contains excerpts from speeches given by various Nazi leaders at the Congress, including portions of...
, 1930s Nazi party congresses, Nazi stormtroopers
Sturmabteilung
The Sturmabteilung functioned as a paramilitary organization of the National Socialist German Workers' Party . It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s...
marching, rivalry between the German Communists and the Nazi Party, unrest between Weimar Gonvernment
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
-opposing German civilians and the German police, corruption of the Weimar Government
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
, images of Hitler's combat service in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, images of Hitler as a schoolboy; and finally a picture of the infant Adolf in his mother
Klara Hitler
Klara Hitler née Pölzl was an Austrian woman, the wife of Alois Hitler and the mother of Adolf Hitler.-Family background and marriage:...
's lap. Each montage ends with a still photograph, which Florya shoots — yet he does not fire at the still shot of the final montage, the picture of the baby Hitler. A title card states that "628 villages in Byelorussia were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants."
In the final scene, Florya catches up with, and blends in with, his partisan comrades marching through the woods. They are seen marching away into the dark of the trees; afterwards, the camera rises to the sky.
Production
Klimov co-wrote the screenplay with Ales AdamovichAles Adamovich
Ales Adamovich was a Soviet writer and a critic, Professor and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Doctor of Philosophy in philology, Doctorate in 1962 ; the people's deputy...
, who fought with the Belarussian partisans as a teenager. According to the director's recollections, work on the film began in 1977:
For a long time, filming couldn't begin. Goskino wouldn't accept the screenplay, considering it a propaganda for the "aesthetics of dirtiness" and "naturalism". In the end, Klimov was able to start filming in 1984 without having compromised to any censorship at all. The only change became the name of the film itself, which was changed to Come and See from the original title, Kill Hitler (Elem Klimov also says this in the 2006 UK DVD release).
The film was shot in chronological order over a period of nine months. Aleksey Kravchenko says 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." The 2006 UK DVD sleeve states that the guns in the film were often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks, for realism. Aleksei Kravchenko mentions in interviews that bullets sometimes passed just 4 inches (10 centimeters) above his head (such as in the cow scene).
Other notes:
- Much of the footage was shot with SteadicamSteadicamA Steadicam is a stabilizing mount for a motion picture camera that mechanically isolates it from the operator's movement, allowing a smooth shot even when moving quickly over an uneven surface...
. - The prosimianProsimianProsimians are a grouping of mammals defined as being primates, but not monkeys or apes. They include, among others, lemurs, bushbabies, and tarsiers. They are considered to have characteristics that are more primitive than those of monkeys and apes. Prosimians are the only primates native to...
that is seen as the pet of the German SS Major (Sturmbannführer) is called the Red Slender LorisRed Slender LorisThe red slender loris is a small, nocturnal prosimian native to the rainforests of Sri Lanka. This is #6 of the 10 focal species and #22 of the 100 EDGE mammal species worldwide considered the most Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered. Two subspecies have been identified, L. t....
. - The detachment of Einsatzgruppe that raids Perekhody is called the 15th EinsatzkommandoEinsatzkommandoDuring World War II, the Nazi German Einsatzkommandos were a sub-group of five Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads—up to 3,000 men each—usually composed of 500-1,000 functionaries of the SS and Gestapo, whose mission was to kill Jews, Romani, communists and the NKVD collaborators in the captured...
, a historically existing unit. - There is a town called Perekhody currently in Smolensk OblastSmolensk OblastSmolensk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . Its area is . Population: -Geography:The administrative center of Smolensk Oblast is the city of Smolensk. Other ancient towns include Vyazma and Dorogobuzh....
in Russia.
Cast
- Aleksey Kravchenko as Florya Gaishun
- Olga Mironova as Glasha
- Liubomiras Lauciavicius as Kosach
- Vladas Bagdonas
- Viktor Lorents
- Jüri Lumiste
- Kazimir Rabetsky
- Yevgeni Tilicheyev
Music
The original soundtrack is rhythmically amorphous music composed by Oleg Yanchenko. At a few key points in the film existing music is used, sometimes mixed in with Yanchenko's music (such as Johann Strauss Jr.'s Blue DanubeThe Blue Danube
The Blue Danube is the common English title of An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314 , a waltz by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II, composed in 1866...
). At the end, during the montage, music by Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
is used, most notably the Tannhäuser
Tannhäuser (opera)
Tannhäuser is an opera in three acts, music and text by Richard Wagner, based on the two German legends of Tannhäuser and the song contest at Wartburg...
Overture and the Ride from Die Walküre
Die Walküre
Die Walküre , WWV 86B, is the second of the four operas that form the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen , by Richard Wagner...
. The conclusion of the film uses the Lacrimosa
Lacrimosa (Requiem)
The Lacrimosa is part of the Dies Irae sequence in the Requiem mass. Its text comes from the 18th and 19th stanzas of the sequence. Many composers, including Mozart, Berlioz, and Verdi have set the text as a discrete movement of the Requiem.-Latin Text:...
from Mozart's Requiem
Requiem (Mozart)
The Requiem Mass in D minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was composed in Vienna in 1791 and left unfinished at the composer's death. A completion by Franz Xaver Süssmayr was delivered to Count Franz von Walsegg, who had anonymously commissioned the piece for a requiem Mass to commemorate the...
. The Soviet marching song "The Sacred War" is also played in the movie once.
Awards
- 1985—FIPRESCI prize at the Moscow International Film FestivalMoscow International Film FestivalMoscow International Film Festival , is the film festival first held in Moscow in 1959. From its inception to 1995 it was held every second year in July, alternating with the Karlovy Vary festival. The festival has been held annually since 1995....
. - 1985—Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film FestivalMoscow International Film FestivalMoscow International Film Festival , is the film festival first held in Moscow in 1959. From its inception to 1995 it was held every second year in July, alternating with the Karlovy Vary festival. The festival has been held annually since 1995....
Reception
Walter GoodmanWalter Goodman
Walter Goodman was a British painter, illustrator and author.The son of British portrait painter Julia Salaman and London linen draper and town councillor, Louis Goodman , he studied with J. M. Leigh and at the Royal Academy in London, where he was admitted as a student in 1851...
, writing for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, dismissed the ending as "a dose of instant inspirationalism," but concedes 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
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...
found in Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American war film set during the Vietnam War, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The central character is US Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard , of MACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insane Special Forces...
. 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
Andrei Konchalovsky
Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky is a Soviet-American and Russian film director, film producer and screenwriter....
's in his epic Siberiade
Siberiade
Siberiade is a 1979 epic Soviet film in four parts, spanning much of the 20th century. The leading roles were played by the celebrated Soviet actors Nikita Mikhalkov and Lyudmila Gurchenko...
." Mark Le Fanu wrote in Sight and Sound (03/01/1987) that Come and See is a "powerful war film....The director has elicited an excellent performance form his central actor Kravchenko." Writing about Come and See, Walter Goodman
Walter Goodman
Walter Goodman was a British painter, illustrator and author.The son of British portrait painter Julia Salaman and London linen draper and town councillor, Louis Goodman , he studied with J. M. Leigh and at the Royal Academy in London, where he was admitted as a student in 1851...
of the New York Times (02/06/1987) claimed that "The history is harrowing and the presentation is graphic....Powerful material, powerfully rendered..." Daneet Steffens of Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
(11/02/2001) 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." Geoffrey Macnab of Sight and Sound (05/01/2006) wrote that "Klimov's astonishing war movie combines intense lyricism with the kind of violent bloodletting that would make even Sam Peckinpah
Sam Peckinpah
David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah was an American filmmaker and screenwriter who achieved prominence following the release of the Western epic The Wild Bunch...
pause."
In 2001, J. Hoberman
J. Hoberman
James Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
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
Schindler's List
Schindler's List is a 1993 American film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on the novel Schindler's Ark...
and Saving Private Ryan
Saving Private Ryan
Saving Private Ryan is a 1998 American war film set during the invasion of Normandy in World War II. It was directed by Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay by Robert Rodat. The film is notable for the intensity of its opening 27 minutes, which depicts the Omaha Beach assault of June 6, 1944....
, and it would not be surprising to learn that Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
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
Gorgon
In Greek mythology, the Gorgon was a terrifying female creature. The name derives from the Greek word gorgós, which means "dreadful." While descriptions of Gorgons vary across Greek literature, the term commonly refers to any of three sisters who had hair of living, venomous snakes, and a...
as reflected in Perseus
Perseus
Perseus ,Perseos and Perseas are not used in English. the legendary founder of Mycenae and of the Perseid dynasty of Danaans there, was the first of the mythic heroes of Greek mythology whose exploits in defeating various archaic monsters provided the founding myths of the Twelve Olympians...
's shield. There are few images more indelible than the sight of young Alexei Kravchenko's fear-petrified expression. By some accounts the boy was hypnotized for the movie's final scenes — most viewers will be as well.
In the same publication in 2009, Elliott Stein
Elliott Stein
Journalist, historian, the American born Elliott Stein was in the years 60-70, in Paris, the fim critic for the Financial Times and for Village Voice. . In the 50s he managed a literary review in Paris: "Janus"...
described Come and See as "a startling mixture of lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare."
In 2002, Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club
The A.V. Club
The A.V. Club is an entertainment newspaper and website published by The Onion. Its features include reviews of new films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. Unlike its...
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
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
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
The Great Escape (film)
The Great Escape is a 1963 American film about an escape by Allied prisoners of war from a German POW camp during World War II, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough...
fans." Tim Lott
Tim Lott
Tim Lott is a British author. After running his own magazine publishing business, he graduated from the London School of Economics in 1986....
wrote in 2009 that the film "makes Apocalypse Now look lightweight".
The film was placed at #60 on Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
magazines "The 500 Greatest Movies of all Time" in 2008. Come and See was also included in Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
's list of 50 Films to See Before You Die
50 Films to See Before You Die
50 Films to See Before You Die was a television programme first shown on Channel 4 on Saturday 22 July 2006, to celebrate the relaunch of Film4 as a free-to-air TV channel available to digital terrestrial homes in the United Kingdom. It consisted of a list of 50 films compiled by film critics,...
and was ranked #24 in Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. Phil de Semlyen of Empire has described Come and See as "Elim Klimov’s seriously influential, deeply unsettling Belarussian opus. No film – not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket – spells out the dehumanising impact of conflict more vividly, or ferociously...An impressionist masterpiece and possibly the worst date movie ever."
On June 16, 2010, Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
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."
Elem 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." Klimov died on 26 October 2003.