Come and See (Idi i smotri)

Elem Klimov and his wife Larisa Shepitko









COME AND SEE (Idi i smotri)                        A-                   

Russia  (140 mi)  1985  d:  Elem Klimov

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.
 
—Revelations 7-8

Both physically attractive and both filmmakers, Klimov and Larisa Shepitko were married shortly after film school where each were hailed as major new talents.  But after the post-Stalinist cultural thaw came to an end in the late 60’s, they found it increasingly difficult to find work, where there was a greater duration between films, which came under increasing scrutiny, with multiple demands for cuts and outright censorship.  When Shepitko’s film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976) won the Golden Bear 1st Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, she was on the verge of international recognition and acclaim, but unfortunately was killed in a car accident in 1979 while working on her next film (which Klimov completed), an exclamation point symbolizing the end of a remarkable generation of Soviet filmmakers.  Like Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov before him, Klimov was forced to leave the Soviet Union, spending more time battling the Soviet film authorities than making films, eventually driven away out of frustration, never making another film after COME AND SEE, which won the Moscow Festival Gold Prize Award in 1985.

Like The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), this is a painful and haunting film set during the 3-year Nazi occupation of Belarus in 1943, generally regarded as the most graphically realistic war film ever, bar none, especially vivid in depicting the atrocities of war, notable for its searing poetic intensity, which opens with an old man’s mystical declaration of impending doom, followed by a brief interlude of innocence between a young 12-year old boy and a young girl, Florya and Glasha (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova), but after a glimpse of a German bomber flying overhead, something like an angel of death, bombs drop, the earth explodes, the young boy temporarily loses his hearing and then bears witness to the horrors of war, joining the partisan resistance movement against the Nazi’s.  Adapting a screenplay by Ales Adamovich, the film plays out like a road movie taking us through the gates of Hell, given an autobiographical sense of immediacy and authenticity, where we witness the destruction of innocence by the devastation of war.

Initially the Nazi’s are nowhere to be seen, but their presence can be felt everywhere in the frequent eruptions of gunfire and in the death and destruction left in their wake.  Much of the imagery feels dreamlike or like nightmarish hallucinations, such as the slowly evolving scene where he and the girl fight their way through a muddy swamp that nearly engulfs them, the initial horror of seeing herded, starving people, his neighbors, with nowhere to go, seen almost as corpses or ghosts in a fog, as he wanders through the countryside in search of food, finding a cow, but the animal is shot and killed in the crossfire of stray bullets that appear as laser beams across an open field.  He discovers one house with all the neighboring people huddled inside, a shockingly dreadful scene of terror made even more horrible by the arrival of the Nazi’s who round up all the people in the countryside, herd them into a church, lock them inside, and then burn them alive while they feast and get drunk, even take photographs, like it’s a fully entertaining and festive occasion, the season of the sadists.  This film was produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Russian triumph over the Nazi’s, but in 1943 as the Nazi’s retreated from Ukraine and Belarus, they applied a scorched earth policy, burning 628 Belarussian villages to the ground, slaughtering all the inhabitants, literally trying to wipe these Russian people off the face of the earth, where it was impossible to view this film in 2001 and not think of the recent Serbian excursion into Kosovo.  Despite all efforts to teach and remember and learn, history repeats itself.     

A film of utter horror and confusion, the last hour of the film is truly mesmerizing and is a great cinematic exhibition, but there are also excessively agonizing moments where the director over accentuates the anguish and despair, including lingering shots of corpses in death camps and large, expressionist facial close-ups, where both Florya and Glasha’s childlike faces have evolved into grimy portraits revealing the shocking aftereffects of war, becoming brutalized masks of horror.  The images are powerful enough, but the silent over-acting depicting traumatizing moments of horror and grief only exaggerates the painstaking authenticity displayed in the earlier build up of the film.  While graphically intense, it lacks the inner psychological complexity of his wife’s film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), which examines not just the visualized outer horrors, but Shepitko uses equally searing images to reflect the insanity within.  Compare the faces of children in the two films, where Klimov dramatically shows the exterior tears and horror, while Shepitko on the other hand goes for that haunted, ghost-like look, finding poetry in the faces of the walking dead, contrasting those about to die with those forced to bear witness, where an underlying hatred seems to be spawning in the next generation.  The ending of The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye), which doesn’t spare the lives of children, is literally unbearable, and is a beautiful companion to this film, which feels more like an apocalyptic wrath of God where the beasts of the earth are unleashed.   

The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye)

Larisa Shepitko with cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov








THE ASCENT (Voskhozhdeniye)                    A                    

Russia  (111 mi)  1976  d:  Larisa Shepitko

Shepitko, who died in a car accident a few years after making this film, is the wife of Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov, who directed the more commercially known film Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1984), generally regarded the most graphically realistic war film ever, bar none, notable for its searing poetic intensity, but perhaps lacks the inner complexity of this even greater Russian film, arguably the best Soviet era war film ever made that examines not just the graphic outer horrors, but Shepitko finds truly inspiring images focusing on individuals or small groups of characters that reflect the absolute insanity taking place inside these human beings, the ending of which is simply awe-inspiring.  Set in Belarus, bullets are flying and bodies are dying in a gun skirmish over the opening credits, where the intensity of the film never lets up throughout the duration, focusing on grim faces, worn out soldiers with next to nothing to eat, a terrified population under occupation, starving children with petrified mothers, all cast in an immense landscape of endless white snow.  Like The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957), this features a Russian army in retreat, a traumatizing shock early in the war when they were nearly wiped out.  The Russian countryside has been overrun by German Nazi’s who are terrorizing the citizens, stealing what food they have, forcing them under duress to become their informant eyes and ears.  What Russian soldiers are left hide under cover of forests, but are forced to send food expeditions out to neighboring farms.  This film follows two soldiers that from the outset are on a near impossible mission, as there’s little food left anywhere in the dead of winter.  One is healthy and fit, Vladimir Gostyukhin as Rybak, while the other, Boris Plotnikov as Sotnikov, is slowed down by a tubercular sounding cough and eventually a bullet in his leg that nearly leaves him for dead, but his partner heroically rescues him.  As they step through knee deep snow drifts, crawling at some points with insufficient protection against the harsh elements, like so many other Russian films, nature itself becomes their toughest foe.  

Everything is reduced to a matter of survival.  When they reach their destination, the farm has been demolished and left in a state of rubble, pushing forward into German occupied territory where the next farm is manned by an elderly Soviet collaborator who fears Nazi retribution.  The partisan soldiers think him a coward but move on, where they are eventually captured and brought to a Nazi camp in a nearby town and held as prisoners, along with a proud and protective mother (Lyudmila Polyakova) who helped hide them.  Tarkovsky stalwart Anatoliy Solonitsyn appears as Portnov the interrogator, a Russian teacher from a nearby academy turned Nazi sympathizer.  Russians torturing and executing fellow Russians is the depth of war depravity and Solonitsyn is brilliant in a despicable role he’s perfectly suited for.  From what we can see, as Nazi officers chat jovially in close proximity to one another, he is an outsider even among this group, seen instead as a kind of gruesome black-cloaked undertaker who routinely sends men to their graves.  The audience is not spared from witnessing acts of torture to Sotnikov, who offers nothing but contempt, while Rybak speaks freely, hoping to save his life, but both are condemned to die, though Rybak is offered a chance to serve the German Reich as a police agent.  The mother, the elderly collaborator, and a child are added to this group, spending one last night together alive where together they discuss the merits of a soldier’s mission, of being a patriot, a mother, a coward, or a collaborator.  Each seems individually driven by a desperate need to survive, but Sotnikov offers himself as a selfless example, attempting to confess his guilt to spare the others, where the aptly chosen title reflects his (and his nation’s) spiritual redemption.

By the next morning, Portnov seems mildly amused, mocking them at their sudden willingness to talk, but spares no one except Rybak, who changes sides to keep his life, rationalizing in his thoughts that if he’s alive, at least he has a chance to escape.  But there is no escape—not from this torment.  What happens is shown with exquisite delicacy and poetic grace, an elegy, a remembrance of the dead, as we witness the treachery of war without a single shot being fired, as the execution by hanging is turned into a public spectacle, where the villagers at the point of a gun are forced to witness.  The pace and harrowing interior intensity of this film is relentless, as there is never a moment without impending menace, gorgeously shot by Vladimir Chukhnov (who died in the same tragic car accident as Shepitko), featuring perfectly composed landscapes and plenty of camera movement, much of it at close range showing the visceral physicality of exhaustive effort, such as the single extended take of Rybak’s rescue of Sotnikov, breath by breath, foot by foot, literally dragging him through the snow, but also using portraitures, especially that of a fierce young boy at the end who eyes the condemned men, the next generation making a surreal sympathetic connection without any words being spoken, accentuated by the psychologically horrific music of Alfred Shnittke which resembles the transcendent yet furiously disturbing monolith music from Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968).  The sound design of this film is highly advanced and uniquely modern, where the use of offscreen sound continually exposes the raw nerves of each moment, dogs barking, wind blowing, bullets firing, nearby Nazi’s chattering in untranslated German or laughing sadistically at their helplessness, which only ratchets up the hideous tension to insane heights.  In many ways resembling Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), utter insanity is exposed here, the relentless realization that you have no choice, yet you are forced to make one anyway.  The nightmarish inner thoughts at the end are expressed wordlessly, where the nobility of the dead speaks volumes, where voices continue to reverberate inside the heads of the living like an explosion of neverending echoes, yet only silence fills the crisp wintry air with a mournful reverence and a profound sense of loss.