Come and See (Иди и смотри)
I’ve heard producers and directors say that it’s nothing short of a miracle when any film is made, but within the realm of films that had to fight uphill battles to make it to the screen, Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece takes the cake. Klimov wrote the script with Ales Adamovich in 1977, but production could not begin until 1984 because the Soviet censors repeatedly rejected the screenplay. Klimov remained steadfast and refused to make any of the changes proposed by the censorship board with the exception of the title—originally named Kill Hitler, Klimov retitled the film with a reference to the book of Revelation: Come and See.
What makes this Soviet film stand out from other war films is its ability to defy the genre of war films altogether, venturing so far into the anti-war subgenre that many cinephiles (and yes, cinefreaks too) consider it not to be a war film, but a horror. Certainly the technical elements of Come and See are more aligned with the horror genre: diffused natural lighting, almost exclusively from grey, cloudy skies; long takes from a handheld camera; a score that mostly consists of sounds instead of music; muted colors and a sound design replete with eerie, droning noises. These are just the technical details of the film. The acting and the subject matter, in my view, clearly cement this film’s place in the genre of horror.
Mass murder, graphic violence, senseless brutality—they all mar the screen with their grotesque natures and dare us to look on, to behold them in their horrid entireties as Flyora stumbles and wanders through the hideous world that grows uglier and uglier with each passing day and each village massacre.
The ugliness is not the point, lest this film be mistaken for some sort of torture porn, with its only purpose being to plunge its audience into the depths of despair by showing them the horrible depravities of the Nazis during their invasion of the Soviet Union. The film begs a series of questions to its viewers through the actions and decisions of the main character, Flyora. Initially excited to go to war, Flyora notifies the army after he digs up a rifle, but his mother warns him that he doesn’t know what he is getting himself into. His act of defiance against his mother in joining the Red Army against her protests takes him away from his village, leaving his family defenseless when the Nazis attack. Although at first he’s so excited to be a part of the Red Army that he thanks a commander for reprimanding him by making him keep watch over the camp for longer, he’s reduced to tears when he’s told to stay behind and guard the encampment rather than joining the other soldiers for his first battle. By the end of the film, despite the numerous heinous, torturous acts he’s witnessed, he’s lost any sort of a home or a family worth protecting, and runs after the battalion to join their fight against the Nazis. At the film’s emotional climax, Flyora repeatedly shoots at a portrait of Adolf Hitler, and the bloodiest war in human history rewinds before him, Hitler growing younger and younger until finally he once again reaches his infancy, but Flyora freezes instead of firing.
Many men who join the army during times of war, especially those being fought against invading forces, fight not only to protect their homeland, but because the war has often destroyed their homes, their villages, their families—any and all traces of their former lives have been swallowed by the creeping monster of war, and the only option left to them is to enlist, thus growing the very monster that destroyed their lives and the lives of so many others. To add insult to injury (often literally), the newer recruits wish not only to expunge the invading enemy, but also to execute their own personal revenge against its men for destroying everyone and everything they once held dear. The fighting then takes on a cruelty, which inspires a reactive cruelty from the invading army, which inspires even more cruelty from the homeland’s army; a horrible feedback loop that only ends when all of one side is entirely exterminated.
We see this escalation unfold before us, before Flyora, as the army camp is bombed and then his village is shot up, then another village is burned alive inside a church, a woman is gang-raped, and finally the Nazi officers are doused with gasoline and psychologically tortured. Flyora tries to destroy the ideology of the Nazis by shooting the image of Hitler, but even he cannot carry this action to its logical conclusion. He can kill the Führer earlier and earlier in the war, he can shoot Hitler even before his rise to official government power, during his days as an obscure Austrian political ne’er-do-well, even during his time serving in WWI, but when he sees young Adolf as a child, standing with his friends in school and sitting on his mother’s lap, even Flyora cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. An editing detail that stood out to me is that during this sequence, the camera cuts from the rewinding documentary footage to Flyora twelve times.
The title of the film, as I mentioned earlier, is a reference to the book of Revelation. When the first four seals are opened, the four living creatures tell John, “Come and see” as each of the four horsemen of the apocalypse are let loose upon the earth. Amid the death and destruction of the second world war, how it must have seemed like the apocalypse had finally arrived—the extermination of the Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies; the advancing Nazi army that swept across every country it declared war against like the biblical rider atop a bright red horse; bombs falling like stars from the sky over every nation. And wasn’t WWII itself a continuation of WWI, brought about by the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed economic ruin upon the German people, begging for a political force to unify the Volk against their globalist oppressors. And that political force was headed by a man who grew up in a violent home under an abusive bureaucratic father; a man who wound up homeless after numerous rejections from an elite Viennese art school, who nearly lost his life in the earlier half of the conflict only to feel as though he and his countrymen had been betrayed by the armistice agreements. He reminds me of the Kid, the main character from Cormac McCarthy’s incredibly dark and violent western novel Blood Meridian. Perhaps that’s an apt comparison, as Hitler was inspired by America’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century and the Trail of Tears, later using it as a rough model for the Third Reich’s eastern expansion into the Slavic states and eventually the Soviet Union, which, as we know, was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of the native populations.
Caught in the midst of the sweeping forces that appeared to be the end of the world, what is a young Belarusian boy to do? With no village to return to and no family to protect, has he any other choice but to join in the destruction and hope his side wins? To hope that the monster that has invaded, burned, raped, and murdered will not swallow him whole as well, will not pervert him into the very type of man he seeks to fight? He stares into the eyes of the child Adolf and he cannot bring himself to fire. Will he hesitate next time? Or will another few months of the war make him as jaded and cynical as the commander who punished him? Will he too gaze into the eyes of his fellow man and see nothing? When the abyss stares at us and we stare back, what is it that keeps us from falling in?
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