Come and See

Come and See
File:Comeandsee3.jpg Come and See DVD cover (Kino Video)
Directed by	Elem Klimov
Written by	Ales Adamovich Elem Klimov
Produced by	Mosfilm Belarusfilm
Starring	Aleksei Kravchenko as Florya Gaishun
Cinematography	Alexei Rodionov
Edited by	Valeriya Belova
Music by	Oleg Yanchenko
Distributed by	Kino Video (DVD) Ruscico (DVD)
Release dates	September 27?, 1985 (USSR)
Running time	146 minutes
Languages	Russian German

Come and See (Иди и смотри transliterated "Idi i smotri") is a 1985 Soviet/Belarusian film (Mosfilm/Belarusfilm coproduction), directed by Elem Klimov and starring Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova in the leading roles. The film is set in 1943 in various villages in Belarus during the Nazi occupation.

The sreenplay was written by Ales Adamovich in collaboration with Elem Klimov. The words Come and See ("Иди и смотри" in Russian) quote from The Apocalypse of John, chapter 6, ...and I heard one of the four living creatures saying, as with a voice of thunder, "Come and see! (In Russian: "...и я услышал одно из четырех животных, говорящее как бы громовым голосом: иди и смотри.")

Plot summary

The film begins with two young boys digging around a sand field looking for rifles.

Template:Spoiler One of the boys, Florya, finds a rifle, and the next day partisan fighters arrive at his house, taking Florya with them. The militia prepares to confront the Nazis, but at the last minute the commander decides Florya will stay behind in the partisans' camp, which rather disappoints the boy. He meets Glasha, a girl who is also staying behind. Suddenly, German airplanes appear and bombard the nearly abandoned camp.

Florya loses his hearing and returns to his village, certain that his family hid on an out-of-the-way island. There, he meets many villagers who fled the Nazis and eventually realizes that his family did not survive. He and three resistance fighters leave to find food for the starving villagers who are hiding on the island, but they find that the Germans are advancing far faster than they had anticipated and that storehouses of food are nowhere to be found. One by one they die from enemy fire until Florya is once again left by himself. They manage to steal a cow from a local farmer, but the cow dies in a battlefield during the night before Florya can walk it back to the hungry villagers.

Morning finds Florya in a farm field, near a village that is close to being occupied by the Nazis. An old man takes Florya and gives him the identity of one of his grandchildren, telling him to hide his rifle in a haystack so that the Germans do not suspect him. The Germans move into the village and herd all of the people into the wooden church until it is filled wall-to-wall with families. German propaganda vans drive throughout the village while the villagers are being rounded up, their loudspeakers making announcements such as "Germany is a civilized country". Once nearly all of the villagers are inside, the church is set ablaze. Florya escapes this fate - the only people whom the Nazis do not kill in the village are the childless and the very old.

Florya recovers his rifle and meets up again with the resistance fighters, who have somehow managed to capture the Nazis. The Nazi leaders are given a chance to justify their actions, and they do this in different ways; that they were either following orders or sincerely believe that Russians carry the disease of communism. In the end, Florya douses the Nazis with gasoline and the other resistance fighters shoot at them. A man holding a torch decides not to use it and extinguishes it in the water.

As the resistance fighters begin to march after the retreating German army, Florya notices a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the bank of a river. What follows is perhaps the most famous scene from the film:

Florya starts shooting at the portrait. Each shot, separated by about 15 seconds, is interleaved with a montage that goes backwards through time: We see corpses at a concentration camp, Hitler congratulating a young German boy, some Nazi party congresses during the 1930s, stills from Hitler's service in World War I, stills of Hitler in school, and ending with a picture of Hitler as a baby on his mother's lap. After each of those scenes Florya shoots at the picture again, symbolically undoing those images, but Florya does not make the final shot which would have symbolically destroyed Hitler as an innocent baby.

The final scene in the film is of Florya catching up to the partisan column, and after following him, the camera lifts up to the sky. There is no closure - even after all of the horrible things that the protagonist has witnessed, he is not given any reprieve. It is implied that the war will go on forever.

Production

File:Adamovich and Klimov in Berlin.jpg

Ales Adamovich and Elem Klimov at 1987's Berlin's preview of film

• Much of the footage was shot with Steadicam.

• The prosimian that is seen as the pet of a German SS Officer is called the Red Slender Loris.

• The 2006 UK DVD sleeve states that the guns in the film were often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks, for added realism. Aleksei Kravchenko mentions in interviews that bullets sometimes passed just a foot (30 centimeters) above his head (such as in the cow scene).

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 Danube). At the end, during the montage, music by Richard Wagner is used, most notably the Ride from Die Walküre. The conclusion of the film uses the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem.

Awards

• 1985—FIPRESCI prize at the Moscow International Film Festival.
• 1985—Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival

Criticism

Walter Goodman, writing for the New York Times, dismissed the ending as "a dose of instant inspirationalism," but concedes to Klimov's "unquestionable talent."

Some IMDB members who've seen this film say that if it was intended to be Soviet propaganda, a charge that it has been accused of by some Western reviewers, Florya would have made the final shot after the baby picture of Hitler is shown. The scene ends on a distinctly unsettling note, suggesting that all of us have the capacity to do what Hitler did.

References

• Goodman, Walter. “Film: ‘Come and See’”. The New York Times 6 Feb. 1987.