No matter how horrific we find reports from Ukraine, we see – in the literal sense of the word – only a small proportion of what’s going on. Media organisations pixellate parts of pictures they deem too graphic and cut video clips off before they become too horrific.
There are, of course, ways round this (social media links, unregulated websites) for those sufficiently determined and tech-savvy, but if you are a "normal" consumer of news then what you see is, for many obvious and usually sensible reasons, tightly packaged and controlled.
So too with war dramas. Very few films or TV series have managed to properly capture conflict in all its myriad horror. Heroism, redemption, courage, sacrifice and camaraderie: these are the tropes we understand and demand, but they are only the surface of war.
There is, however, a point where the two strands collide: a film which unflinchingly shows the reality of war in eastern Europe. It is called Come and See, and it is one of the most extraordinary movies ever made. Despite its title it seems at times to be bypass the normal methods of viewing (eyes, ears and brain), instead worming its way directly into your cells and central nervous system.
The title itself gives a clue as to what lies within. "Come and see" is taken from the Book of Revelation and appears four times in succession, once for each of the four horsemen. The last of these is the 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."
Made in 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and began a programme of reforms which would in time ensure the USSR’s demise, Come and See is set in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of Belarus. Its protagonist – there are emphatically no heroes in this movie – is a teenage boy named Flyora who is recruited into the partisan resistance movement and witnesses atrocity after atrocity perpetrated by the Nazis on his countrymen: a bombing attack on the camp which leaves him partially deaf, the discovery of his family’s bodies, the gang rape of a teenage girl, and finally the massacre of villagers forced into a meeting hall which is then set alight.
These, horrific as they are, represent merely the bare bones of the story. What makes Come and See such important viewing – and it’s a film you endure rather than enjoy – is the way in which the director Elen Klimov chose to shoot it. There are repeated shots of Flyora and other characters staring not so much into the camera as through it, giving the unsettling impression that there is no barrier between us and them.
Long Steadicam shots put us at the heart of the action rather than at a distance from it. The violence is graphic and at times stomach-churning, but feels always necessary and never gratuitous. There are passages of surrealism, existentialism and even beauty – snatched moments of bucolic bliss before the storm, German soldiers materialising from the fog like wraiths – but overall the journey is a blood-soaked, mud-drenched, flame-singed descent into madness. It's Apocalypse Now dialled up to maximum, where every soldier is a Kurtz.
Most of all, perhaps, in the space of two-and-a-half hours Flyora ages decades, from a bright-eyed innocent boy to a haggard wreck who has witnessed more than any man should be forced to endure. The shoot took nine months, with scenes filmed in chronological order (unusual but not unknown). Alexei Kravchenko, who played the boy, said that he underwent ‘the most debilitating fatigue and hunger. I kept a most severe diet, and after the filming was over I returned to school not only thin, but grey-haired.’
Kravchenko is now a successful and popular actor, but this was his first role and he had no experience worth the name when he took it on. Klimov’s decision to cast an unknown was deliberate: he did not want "a professional actor who upon immersion into a difficult role could have protected himself psychologically with his accumulated acting experience, technique and skill. I wanted to find a simple boy, 14 years of age, and I had to inject him with content which he did not possess. This is an age when a boy does not know what true hatred is, what true love is. We had to prepare him for the most difficult experiences, then capture them on film. And at the same time, we had to protect him from the stresses so that he wasn’t left in the asylum after filming was over."
Klimov and his co-writer Ales Adamovich knew how quickly such experiences could tip over into something unhealthy. For both men, the war wasn’t something abstract or remote: it had been an integral part of their formative years. Klimov had been only nine years old when he and his family had escaped Stalingrad, the Volga aflame from a burning oil depot. Adamovich’s experiences were even more relevant to the movie: just like Flyora, he had been a teenage Belarussian partisan fighter.
So they knew exactly what they were making. "I perfectly understood that the film would end up a harsh one, very brutal," Klimov said, "and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to Adamovich, and he replied: ‘Let them not watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war, and as a plea for peace.'"
The French director François Truffaut said "there’s no such thing as an antiwar film" – that is, every war movie to some extent glorifies and glamorises war, even if it doesn’t intend to, by showing that conflict carries its own thrills. Come and See is surely the exception which proves the rule, a movie where the survivors envy the dead.
Klimov and Adamovich were at pains to make the movie as realistic as possible. Real bullets rather than blanks were used in a scene where shots are fired over the characters’ heads, and a cow seen dying in crossfire was actually killed by the production crew. All the events depicted actually happened: Klimov and Adamovich would not and did not make anything up. After one screening, an elderly German man stood up and said "I was an officer of the Wehrmacht. I travelled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth."
The final massacre of the villagers, for example, is based on events that took place in the village of Khatyn on March 22, 1943. By a coincidence of names – Khatyn being homonymous with Katyn, the forest where the Soviets themselves had murdered more than 20,000 Poles three years previously – Come and See shows that such violence is never the preserve of just one nation or creed.
It was the Nazis in Belarus, but it could just as easily have been the Red Army in Poland. Every Soviet citizen was aware of their own regime’s capacity for cruelty, and many secretly wondered whether Hitler could be any worse than Stalin: the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, for example, was careful to say that his Leningrad Symphony was against state terror and totalitarianism in all its forms.
And the aggressors could equally, of course, have been the Russian army in Ukraine right now. Come and See may be rooted in a time and place (ironically, its local Soviet collaborators with the Nazis are the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police), but it is also universal. The parallels with places like Bucha and Mariupol are not just clear: they were made explicit by Bucha’s mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk, who said "we see all the horrors we heard about as crimes committed by the Nazis during the Second World War."
Mutilated, tortured and burned bodies, women raped and killed, indiscriminate terror against civilians: for 1943 Belarus, read 2022 Ukraine. A card over the film’s closing titles tells us that the Nazis burned 628 Belarussian villages: how many Ukrainian ones will Putin’s army have burned before this war is through?
Come and See ends with a bravura sequence where Flyora comes across a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler on the ground and starts to shoot at it. With every shot, we see history running in reverse – bombs and paratroopers leaping back into their planes, German soldiers retreating, Hitler walking briskly away from a podium, Jewish windows repairing themselves on Kristallnacht – until finally we are back with a picture of the infant Hitler on his mother’s knee, and Flyora can bring himself to shoot no more.
It is devastating precisely because it is impossible. Hitler could no more have been unwound than Vladimir Putin can be. Time marches only one way, and our basest desires are always with us. The film’s working title was Kill Hitler: not a literal exhortation, Klimov said, but a more general imperative to eradicate the propensity for genocide which lurks in the darkness of the unlikeliest hearts. We kid ourselves that these atrocities are things of the past or take place only in faraway lands, but every day in Ukraine proves that they are neither.
Klimov lived another 18 years after Come and See, but it was his final movie. "I lost interest in making films," he said. "Everything that was possible, I felt I had already done. And had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it." As a monument to his talent, few film-makers have ever had better. It is not merely the greatest war film ever made: it is one of the greatest movies ever made, full stop. Come and see, the title exhorts us. Go and watch.
Come and See is showing at the Prince Charles Cinema, London WC2, from April 30
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