Come and See.

David G. Smith

David G. Smith

Steak Knife Member
I just finished watching the Russian movie "Come and See", from a for s*%t quality DVD version, for the first time. I can definitely say that it is not the last time I will watch the film. It is very rare that I say that a movie blew me away, but "Come and See" absolutely did that. It is amazing and, IMHO, is one of the most important films in the history of Cinema. I have never experienced war but I have never felt the totality of the brutality of what war must be like this film showed. I highly recommend "Come and See" to anyone who has an appreciation for the power of Cinema.


"Come and See" at Wikipedia.

It is available from Netflix DVD and, apparently, from Amazon Instant.

95% at Rotten Tomatoes.

Roger Ebert's take.
 
Not forgetting "The Thin Red Line", "Johnny Got His Gun" and "Path of Glory" - but this is about the most gruesome study about war I've come across. It's also a high-point of a certain eastern European style of film making. Thank you for the reminder.
 
I have to admit, the narrative style took a little bit to get used to but as the story unfolds it turned out to be perfect for the tale.
 
Yeah - it's one of the great film - I've watched it many times and plan to watch many times more. There's a great interview with the director - somewhere - I'm sure it's on youtube.
As a director I've always been fascinated by how he hypnotized the boy and the girl in the film. I've heard Herzog did this as well in his film, heart of glass.
 
David G. Smith said:
I have to admit, the narrative style took a little bit to get used to but as the story unfolds it turned out to be perfect for the tale.
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Yep.... quite unusual. Klimov used story-telling techniques that had a tradition build from the great Russian films in the 20s but also from a metaphor-heavy approach in the Slavic cultural tradition - in painting, writing, theatre - and a tendency to stage great tragedies also as festivities of the absurd. So the "eastern" style allowed to work the material in an associative way, bordering into the surreal. And while being loosely based on a real event the movie transcends this into this Walpurgis-night.

Love a more "catholic/orthodox" iconography in movie-making.
 
David G. Smith said:
It is very rare that I say that a movie blew me away, but "Come and See" absolutely did that. It is amazing and, IMHO, is one of the most important films in the history of Cinema.
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Couldn't agree more! that's actually the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the headline of this thread: "Come and see is on of the most important films in the history of cinema".

I was lucky enough to watch a pretty good 35mm print of this film in the Cinema, it looks beautiful on the big screen, those old Russian optics give the all film somewhat a soft look which is great, the optical sound track is another thing that is very nice to listen to in the cinema.

I think back in the day in Communist Russia, some great films had been made. directors really had the chance to deeply research the essence of Cinema and the way one could tell a story, whiteout having the commercial restrictions that was imposed on filmmakers in the west (and now imposed in modern Russian cinema).
 
Watched this on the Criterion Channel. Devastating movie. Makes Schindler's List look like a Disney movie by comparison. The new HD transfer is beautiful and it's an amazingly well shot film. I can see why Roger Deakins lists it as one of his favourite movies. I can see its influence on 1917. This film is better though, a truly unflinching depiction of genocide and ethnic cleansing and what it does to people who live through it.
 
mail4joeg said:
It's on my list of greatest war movies of all time
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Indeed. Discovered this fifteen years ago and have made it a point to recommend it to everyone I know who cares about film. Glad to hear there's a new transfer, although with advancing age I find it more difficult to rewatch. It is a painfully successful example of cinematic art.
 
Ed Farnsworth said:
Indeed. Discovered this fifteen years ago and have made it a point to recommend it to everyone I know who cares about film. Glad to hear there's a new transfer, although with advancing age I find it more difficult to rewatch. It is a painfully successful example of cinematic art.
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Why is it more difficult to rewatch with advancing age?
 
I find I have less stomach for violence the older I get. The new transfer looks like it could have been shot recently. The lighting and shooting style is kind of ahead of its time. If I knew nothing about the movie, and you told me it was made five, ten years ago, I would believe it.
 
FWIW, I hate it. It's made on the orders of the Soviet propaganda of the day and is generally a complete fake ... aside of being generically true.

The director of the film Elem Klimov was basically allowed to make the film due to death of his director wife Larisa Shepit'ko in a car crash a few years earlier. Shepit'ko made the best Soviet era film - it was so good, the Soviets banned it - on the partisans and the civilians under the German occupation called "The Ascent". "The Ascent" was based on several stories by Vassily Bykov, an ex-front line combat soldier himself and an author of the most brutally realistic depictions of WWII from the Soviet side.

The Ascent is also available via Criterion. Here''s its Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent#Release

Side note - Klimov made a very sweet and mostly unknown "Adventures of a Dentist" (1965) (with music by Alfred Schnittke). Also available on Critetion.
 
More like an amateur WWII historian. The film is built around a real massacre - the March, 22, 1943 destruction of Khatyn village just outside of Minsk - by the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118. The anti-partisan detachment had a German commander, Hauptsturmführer Hans Woellke but was mostly staffed by the Ukrainian volunteers, including former POW's. 32 year old Woellke, a 1936 Olympic shot-put champion, and several of his men were ambushed by the partisans (aka guerilla fighters) a day earlier and killed in the battle. The reprisal action saw 149 village residents shot or burned alive. A famous memorial in that village opened in 1969.
 
DLD said:
is generally a complete fake ... aside of being generically true.
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That pretty much describes any movie based on true events. I didn't think I was watching a documentary, but a fictional narrative inspired by things that happened. It's not about literal factual truth but human, emotional truth.
 
Another great WWII movie not widely known these days is "The Seven Beauties" by Lina Wertmuller. It came to mind because it also features a massacre on the Eastern Front -- a small part of the movie, but quite vivid. It's really a masterpiece of a movie with great evocative power but also has a comic touch.
 
I used to be a great fan of seven beauties - not sure when you saw it last - but except for the amazing opening - it just didn't hold up at all. It seemed very silly actually. My 2 cents. But glad ya still like it :)
 
Well, it was a rather long time ago... but it's possible that if I saw it now, the opening up until he is conscripted might be the best part. So funny... but that makes the rest of it so stark.
 
Batutta said:
That pretty much describes any movie based on true events. I didn't think I was watching a documentary, but a fictional narrative inspired by things that happened. It's not about literal factual truth but human, emotional truth.
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Here's a rough historical summary of what happened far behind the front lines in Belarus.

The war started on June, 22 and the Red Army began to suffer horrific casualties. Officially, the Germans took about three million POW's in the first six months (July-Dec, 1941). Hundreds of thousands of the Soviet soldiers simply deserted during the same time frame. They drifted from forest to forest, from village to village. Very soon, their food supplies were exhausted. They could hunt and gather among the wilderness but, by the winter, the pickings were very slim indeed. In order to save themselves, the semi-organized groups turned into bandits and began to extort food from the farmers. They had no money to give in exchange, so food acquisition was entirely based on threats. Threats quickly turned into murders, as the villagers themselves were not exactly wealthy and many were missing their breadwinners.

In response, the Germans provided arms - there were plenty of the Soviet rifles around - to the villagers, so they could protect themselves. On top of that, they also formed the security detachments/battalions from the local volunteers, ex-Soviet soldiers, etc. In Belarus, in order to maintain some form of order and sympathy to the new regime, the top German official Wilhelm Kube also brought in a lot of the anti-communist Belorussian immigrants from Germany. Kube was the personal appointee of Hitler's and often even disregarded directions given to him by his nominal superior Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.

As the war went on, many farmers in the countryside had to make a choice. If they didn't provide food to the partisans, they got killed by the partisans. If they had aided and abetted the partisans, they got killed in reprisals by the SS security forces. About 20,000 in total, these security forces constantly conducted the anti-partisan operations. As the partisan totals got bigger and bigger, these operations also required the regular front lines troops during the lulls in fighting and the available aviation resources. If a region was inundated by the guesilla fighters, a typical response was to burn all the villages in the area and to remove livestock and any food available. The population was moved into larger villages and towns or was taken to Germany proper as slave and, sometimes, hired labor. The extreme punitive action such as Khatyn was reserved for the extreme cases. Unfortunately, there were a lot of those.

If that's the impression the movie has left, then it was historically accurate.

Larisa Shepit'ko's "The Ascent" was historically accurate.
 
Again, to be clear, when I watch a narrative film, I am never under the delusion that I'm watching something that is historically very accurate. I assume the characters may be fictional or composites of several people, events may be combined or compressed, and some things made up for the sake of narrative expediency. I watch to have an experience, to have an understanding of someone's emotional truth, and for themes and big picture ideas. If I want the facts of what really happened, I'll watch a documentary or read a book. Come and See didn't come off to me as being concerned about one specific historical massacre, but as a general representation of what human beings go through in this kind of trauma.
 
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