It is often believed that no war film can be an anti-war film. While Steven Spielberg is a rare exception who sees all war films as anti-war, a majority of film doyens such as François Truffaut have held that every war film is inadvertently a pro-war film. It is believed that war films do not succeed at being anti-war because their craft as a medium fails to convey the horror that is war. There is however an exception that puts aside all contestation.
This year, the Russian film Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, completes 35 years. Often considered to be the only real anti-war movie in all of cinema, Come and See, is centred on the Nazi German occupation of Belarus during World War II, and the events which are witnessed by a young Belarusian teenager called Flyora, who against his mother’s wishes, partakes in the Belarusian resistance movement, and thereafter witnesses the human condition of war.
It is remarkably documented that after watching Full Metal Jacket (1987) a young audience came out of the theatre enticed by the idea of war. In Come and See no such sequence or shot exists that will want you to take a piece of that world for your mind’s souvenir. It is not just the superiority of its realism that makes Come and See the only anti-war film. It is the quality of truth that makes it a one-of-a-kind film – a war film of the horror genre.
The film begins as Flyora digs up a rifle so that he can join the resistance movement. In doing so, he is spotted by a reconnaissance aircraft. Shot entirely in natural lighting, the film’s screenplay writer Ales Adamovich influences the character of Flyora as Adamovich was the same age as Flyora when his family fought alongside the partisans in World War II.
Soon, Flyora is conscripted as a low–ranking militiaman in the resistance and he meets Glasha, a nurse in the resistance camp. Around then, the camp is attacked by German dive bombers. It’s a fact that in all of the second World War, Belarus was the worst-hit country in the whole world. The raid which interrupts the bonhomie between Glasha and Flyora is a masterful sequence that has made use of sound like few movies ever have.
Escaping the camp, Glasha and Flyora go to Flyora’s village to look for his family. Here, the craft of director Klimov rises in one of the most important conflict scenes ever. While Glasha and Flyora fail to locate his family or any of the villagers, what Glasha discovers is a pile of dead bodies behind the village. Horrified, she begins to run faster than Flyora, and Flyora runs after her shouting, “Glasha! Glasha!”
Like this, she takes them both away from the horrifying truth that his family is dead.
Come and See manages the rare stream of metaphysical consciousness found in the works of Tarkvosky and carries it along a linear layered narrative. Having become hysterical with fear, Flyora and Glasha manage to reach a camp where Flyora comes across the village elder badly burnt by the Germans. The elder tells him that he witnessed Flyora’s family getting executed and that he should not have dug up the rifle. Flyora then attempts suicide out of guilt, but people save and comfort him.
It should be noted that the realism in the movie flows with such surreal beauty because Come and See is the mother of all Steadicam films. Invented just ten years before, the Steadicam revolutionised cinema in how the audience moved through space. Come and See made use of the Steadicam like no movie had before or since.
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Soon Flyora loses companions to minefields as they sneak up to an occupied village and manage to steal a cow for food. As they escape across an open field, his companion and the cow are shot and killed by a German machine gun. The next morning, Flyora hides with a family as SS troops arrive. Living up to the newfound powers of Gorbachev’s Glasnost, the director shot this sequence and all sequences using live ammunition to bring to the audience’s psyche, the surreal truth of war, free from years of state control.
Come and See discusses the lies of heroism like no other movie. It does so by bringing heroism in close proximity to horror and then letting the audience evaluate. Also, how the meaning of one powerful scene is found in subsequent scenes will give the finest of content today a lesson or two in film editing. In one scene, the Germans tell civilian prisoners to leave their children inside and step out of the church. No one comes out and a lone prisoner mutters an abuse. The meaning of it becomes clear when after several scenes, a woman crawls out with her child. The child is thrown back and the woman is dragged away to be gangraped. The burning of the wooden church with villagers inside and the rape of women is one among many stories of the brutalities that occurred in villages across Belurussia during the war. The film only revisits the chapter with a tender heart and detailed eye.
One of the best sequences happens after the climax. Having overpowered the Germans and killed them, the partisans proceed to pick up the broken shards of their lives. This is when Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle. As he begins to shoot the portrait, each bullet fired causes a rollback to take place in the damage done by Hitler. Flyora keeps shooting and undoing the damage, taking us through Hitler’s life in reverse.
Flyora stops shooting only when Hitler becomes a baby in his mother’s arms. Only then does Flyora stop and begin to cry. His mother and young sisters are dead. Glasha had been gangraped.
The only film Elim Klimov ever directed, Come and See has become exponentially important with every passing decade. In this hour of rabid political sport, everyone should watch Come and See in a single sitting.
‘Come and See’ is available on YouTube with English subtitles.
Ali Kirmani is a film creative based out of Mumbai. He contributes on cinema and culture to the EPW, The Citizen and Indian Express.
Featured image: A still from ‘Come and See’