Come and See: Klimov's Unbearable War Nightmare

The title is a quotation, and it is worth knowing before you sit down. In the sixth chapter of Revelation, the seals are broken one at a time, and at each of the first four a voice says two words to the narrator: come and see. Then a horseman rides out. Conquest, war, famine, death — the summons is issued four times, and each time what follows is worse than what preceded it. The phrase is an invitation to look at something that is going to be shown to you regardless.

Elem Klimov made Idi i smotri in 1985. He spent roughly eight years getting the script past Soviet censors, who understood perfectly well what was in it; the original title was blunter and involved Hitler by name. Approval finally came in time for the fortieth anniversary of the victory, which is the sort of bureaucratic irony that produces masterpieces. It won the top prize at the Moscow International Film Festival that year. Klimov, who was fifty-two and at the height of his powers, never directed another feature. He lived another eighteen years and said, in substance, that he had already put everything he had into it and that there was nothing further he wished to film.

The setup

Byelorussia, 1943. The territory is under German occupation and it is being subjected to what the occupiers termed anti-partisan operations, which in practice meant the systematic destruction of rural populations. Belarus lost something on the order of a quarter of its people. The end title of Klimov’s film gives the number of villages burned along with the human beings inside them: six hundred and twenty-eight.

Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko) is about fourteen. He digs a rifle out of the sand where the dead were left, because a rifle is the entry requirement, and the partisans take him. He is thrilled. He has waited his entire short life to be a man in a forest with a gun, and Klimov gives him that first afternoon in full — the camaraderie, the group photograph, the swagger.

Then the unit moves out and leaves him behind, because he is a child and they know what is coming. And the film begins.

The screenplay is by Klimov and Ales Adamovich, and Adamovich is the reason it carries the authority it does. He had been a teenage partisan in these forests himself, and he spent years afterwards collecting the testimony of survivors of the village burnings — going door to door with a tape recorder, writing down what people said had been done to them. Come and See is built from that material. Every atrocity in it is somebody’s account.

Why the face is the film

Kravchenko was a schoolboy with no acting experience, and what happens to him across the running time is the most extraordinary sustained effect in war cinema. He arrives with a round, open, eager face. He leaves with something that belongs on a much older man — hollowed, grey, the eyes set too far back. It is partly makeup and it is mostly not. Klimov shot in sequence and put the boy through a production that has passed into legend: live rounds fired over the actors’ heads on Klimov’s own instruction, so the flinches would be real; a hypnotist involved, by several accounts, to shield the child from what he was being asked to inhabit.

You can object to all of that, and I will get to it. What is beyond argument is the result. Klimov’s camera spends the film in close on Kravchenko, frequently head-on, frequently for a long time, and often the boy is looking directly into the lens. That last decision is the one that does the damage. Cinema’s oldest rule is that the actor does not look at you. Klimov breaks it repeatedly and without warning, so at intervals across two hours a child stops being a character in a story and starts being a person in a room, addressing you, having just seen something.

The sound design is the other engine. Early on, Florya is caught in a bombardment and loses most of his hearing, and the soundtrack goes with him — for long stretches you are listening through a boy’s ruined ears, a high whine over everything, distant voices coming through wool. Klimov never restores it fully. The film has made you deaf and declines to fix it, and by an hour in you are straining to hear, which is exactly the posture of an animal in a forest.

Aleksei Rodionov’s camera moves like something stalking. Steadicam was still relatively young, and Klimov uses it to abolish the safe distance that war films traditionally maintain — no map shots, no generals, no cutaways to strategy. You are at the height of a boy, in the mud, and the frame follows him wherever he stumbles.

The ancestor

The forebear of Come and See is Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent, from 1977, and there is no way to discuss the connection without discussing the marriage.

Shepitko was one of the great Soviet directors and she was Klimov’s wife. The Ascent is her masterpiece: two partisans in the Belarusian winter, captured, interrogated, and made to choose — a film of blinding white snow and moral extremity that won the Golden Bear in Berlin. Same war, same forests, same testimony, filmed with an austerity Klimov never attempted. In 1979 Shepitko was killed in a car crash while shooting her next picture. Klimov finished that film himself, then made a short elegy for her, and then made Come and See.

So the film is the second half of a conversation. Shepitko’s Belarus is a moral test, cold and spiritual and lit like a passion play, and Klimov’s Belarus is a slaughterhouse with no test in it whatsoever. He answers her spiritual severity with mud and noise, and he does it about her country, in her forests, six years after she died in one. Watch The Ascent and then this, and Come and See stops being a monument and becomes something more painful — an argument with a woman who is no longer there to reply.

Behind both stands Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood from 1962, the first Soviet film to put a child’s ruined face at the centre of the Great Patriotic War and refuse to make him a mascot. Klimov’s line back into the Soviet fantastic runs through work as strange as Viy and as rigorous as Solaris; this desk’s argument that Eastern European art cinema and horror cinema are the same tradition wearing different jackets gets its best evidence here.

The case for calling it horror

It gets filed under war, and the filing is a category error that costs the film its readers. Come and See has no strategy, no objective, no unit cohesion, no arc of competence, and no victory that anyone in it can use. It has a boy in a forest, a monster that arrives by lorry, and a structure of escalating exposure to something that cannot be fought.

That is a horror structure. It is the structure of every folk-horror film about an outsider walking into a landscape that has plans for him, and the mechanics are horror mechanics: subjective sound, an untrustworthy frame, dread generated by duration, a face held too long. The Devil’s Backbone reaches for ghosts to say what a war did to children; Klimov worked out that he did not require the ghost. The occupiers arrive with a loudspeaker van and a lorry full of people who are enjoying their afternoon, and they are more frightening than anything in the genre because they have a lunch break.

The case against

The production is indefensible by any standard applied to a child today, and the standard is not anachronistic — Klimov knew what he was doing to Kravchenko and considered the boy’s damage part of the budget. The result is authentic in a way that no directed performance could be, and it is authentic because a fourteen-year-old was genuinely frightened for months. Admiring the effect means accepting how it was obtained. I have never found a comfortable position on this and I distrust critics who have.

There is a second objection, and it is more serious than the squeamishness about length that this film usually attracts. Klimov’s Germans are, almost without exception, laughing grotesques — drunk, giggling, filmed like carnival masks. The atrocity is real and the historical record is not in dispute, and yet a film that renders the perpetrators as gargoyles has quietly told you that ordinary people could not do this. Shepitko’s The Ascent is braver on exactly that point, and so, for that matter, is the testimony Adamovich collected. The monsters had names and paperwork.

And the film’s final movement is a rhetorical flight that some viewers find sublime and others find a cop-out. I go back and forth on it annually.

The verdict

Come and See is the greatest film ever made about what happens to a person who survives, and its subject is the survival rather than the war. Klimov gives you no lesson, no consolation, no scene in which a wise elder explains the meaning, and no shot of a flag. He gives you a boy’s face at the start, a boy’s face at the end, and two hours of the process that converted one into the other, and then he stops making films forever, which is the only review of it that has ever mattered.

The 2020 restoration is superb and it plays repertory regularly, generally to rooms that leave in silence. Watch it once. Watch it with nothing scheduled afterwards. Do not watch it in pieces.

Spoilers below

Florya goes home. He finds his village empty, the houses standing, the food still on the table, and he tells Glasha that his family are hiding at the island in the marsh. They run for it, and as they run she looks back over his shoulder and sees the pile of bodies stacked against the wall of his house, and he does not turn round.

That is the film’s cruellest engineering. Klimov shows the audience the thing the boy will not look at, and then makes us carry it for another twenty minutes while Florya insists on his story. When he finally understands, he is already in the swamp, up to his neck, and there is nowhere to put it.

The last act is the village of Perekhody. The occupiers arrive, herd the population into a barn, offer to let the adults out if they leave the children behind, and burn it with everyone inside while a photographer works the crowd and an officer holds a small animal. Florya survives because he is outside the barn, and he is made to watch, and Klimov keeps the camera on his face rather than the fire. Everything Adamovich’s survivors described is in that sequence and none of it is invented.

Then, in the mud afterwards, Florya finds a framed portrait of Hitler in a puddle, and he begins to shoot it. And with each shot, Klimov cuts to newsreel running backwards — the war unmaking itself, the rallies reversing, the crowds unassembling, the man getting younger, the years peeling off. Florya fires and fires and history rewinds under his bullets, all the way back to a photograph of an infant on his mother’s knee.

Florya stops. He cannot shoot the baby. And that is the film’s final proposition, delivered without a word of dialogue: that there was a point at which none of this had happened yet, that the point was a child, and that the boy holding the rifle is also a child, and that the machine which turned one of them into what he became is still running. He picks up his gun and goes back into the forest to join the partisans, and the film gives him no music and no absolution.

The end title counts the villages. Six hundred and twenty-eight, burned with their people inside. Klimov puts the number on the screen after two hours of showing you what one of them was like, and the arithmetic that follows is the reason he never made another film.