Elem Klimov's "Come and See'

Once upon a time, when St. Petersburg was Leningrad, I was entertained by a local Russian mafioso. Falling into a reminiscent mood, he told me about commanding a platoon that had camped outside an East German village in the last days of World War II. He told me he had instructed his soldiers to rape every German woman they could find the next day.

"It wasn't permission," he said. "It was an order."

I asked him why he had done such a thing.

I received a look equally measured between pity and contempt. "If you had seen what they did to our women," he replied, "you wouldn't ask such a question."

After seeing Come and See, Elem Klimov's film about the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia, I reached my own conclusion.

The Germans got off easy.

Klimov (1933-2003), a contemporary of the great director Andrei Tarkovsky, made his films in the same leisurely fashion, but without Tarkovsky's studied framing and brooding atmosphere. In Klimov, the camera seems to be taking in the world in great, unwieldy gulps, moving here and there to see what will turn up. There's a touch of documentary-style improvisation to the effect (Klimov used a Steadicam in Come and See), but this is deceptive: The result is more like a violent, unstable hyperrealism: a massacre viewed by a horse.

Genocide, win or lose

Byelorussia, once also known as White Russia and today the nasty, post-Soviet autocracy of Belarus, was a chaotic battleground in the spring of 1943. Although the remnants of the German Sixth Army had just surrendered at Stalingrad, the war would drag on for two more years, and the liberation of Byelorussia was yet to come, with resistance in rural areas only from lightly armed partisans.

It is part of Come and See's narrative strategy to give no particular idea of how the wider war is going. It sets out to depict a killing field, and the point it makes is blunt: Win or lose, the Germans were bent on genocide.

The film begins with two young boys digging up a rifle in a field. The rifle is necessary if one is to join the partisans, whose recruits must bring their own weapons. For the boys, the rifle is a fascinating object, the ticket of entry for manhood.

The camera starts from far back, revealing the empty, nondescript landscape with its concealed secret. A contest between children for a gun: This is the Great Patriotic War in all its glory.

War as adventure

Flyora, one of the boys, finds the gun and, to the horror of his mother, runs off to join the nearest partisan band, leaving her defenseless with two small girls. But Flyora's 14, and he doesn't think strategically; besides, with or without a gun, he wouldn't really be of much use if the Germans came. He doesn't make this calculation either, however. The war is an adventure, and he wants to be part of it.

What he finds first, however, is Glasha, a girl a bit older and considerably bigger than himself and out for adventures of her own. This idyll doesn't last long, however, before the war erupts quite literally around them as bombs flatten the forest they're approaching. There doesn't appear to be any target other than the land itself as we watch trees explode and fall forward; partisans might be hiding there, or believed to be, or perhaps the invisible bombardier simply wants to leave a calling card. From ground zero, it's impossible to say.

Flyora decides to return home with Glasha, only to find an empty house with discarded dolls, around which flies buzz ominously. This picture lingers longer in the mind than the stripped and stacked bodies behind the house that Glasha sees as she and Flyora flee.

Flyora leads her through a thick bog to an island where, he is convinced, his mother and sisters have found safety. But a hideously burned neighbor, Yustin, finally persuades him that the massacre has been complete.

Death of a cow

Flyora now joins the partisans in earnest. He is sent foraging with a companion, Roubej. They steal a cow from a peasant, whom they force to roll in manure before driving him out into his pasture. Here, the peasant, the cow and Roubej are all killed by strafing fire that, again, appears to materialize out of nowhere. The cow thrashes in its death agony, the camera closing in on its frantically rolling eye.

All of this is only the innocent preamble to the film's main sequence. Flyora tries to seize a horse and cart, but its owner stops him and brings him instead to the local village, Perekhody, where he promises to hide him. Cut off from his partisan unit and half-berserk with the horror into which he has been flung, Flyora consents.

But an SS brigade occupies the town, herds the population into the barn-like assembly house that is evidently its former church, and sets it ablaze along with everything else, as if to raze the very memory of its existence. Flyora manages to escape, coming afterwards on a young woman who has been dragged by the hair aboard a truck, gang-raped, and cast onto the road with blood streaming down both her legs and spilling along the sides of her mouth, from which a penny-whistle protrudes that sounds when she walks and breathes like a belled cow.

Shooting Hitler

The destruction of Perekhody takes the better part of an hour. The viewer is spared no conceivable horror, except those that are even worse when left to the imagination. What we don't see registers in the face and eyes of Flyora, who looks about 40 by the time the film ends.

In the film's penultimate scene, he finds a picture of Hitler in a ditch that a villager has carried to curry favor with the Germans. He fires his gun into it repeatedly, and as the bullets strike, a black-and-white montage of Hitler's career runs backward, ending finally with the earliest photograph of the Führer as a baby. Flyora sees this infant Hitler image in the ditch, but can't bring himself to fire at it.

Is this gesture, perhaps, Klimov's suggestion that humanity can, at some point, resume? But Flyora goes to rejoin the partisans, and— who knows?— perhaps wind up in the platoon that my Russian host would tell me about over excellent vodka and caviar years later.

Prophecy of evil

Come and See was originally titled Killing Hitler, perhaps with this climactic scene in mind. The ultimate title, from chapter 6 of Revelation, suits it better, however: "I heard the voice of the beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and beheld a pale horse and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth . . ."

If ever a prophecy of evil came true, it was 70 years ago on the Russian steppe (a symbolic Jew is also dragged to his death). A postscript informs us that Perekhody was one of 628 towns in Byelorussia alone that were methodically destroyed with their inhabitants by German forces.

The Germans are played, as are other roles in the film, by locally recruited nonprofessionals— that is, by survivors and descendants of the victims it portrays. One wonders how they felt to impersonate their persecutors— very convincingly, as it turns out.

German perspective

By the same token, one tries to imagine the Germans themselves as they went about their killing work, some methodically, some drunkenly. The film depicts a group of them, including the commander and his Sturmbannführer, who are taken prisoner after the massacre. The commander begs pitifully for his life through local interpreters who are begging in turn for theirs, but his blond, blue-eyed, thoroughly Aryan-looking deputy will have none of that. He makes no apology for killing Russians because, as he tells his captors matter-of-factly, they are vermin unfit to live, and the task of his unit is to exterminate them.

One believes him, certainly, without knowing exactly what to make of a man who wishes to kill 170 million people (27 million of whom, by latest estimates, did die). His captors make no reply, and when they shoot him it is only along with the rest.

It is difficult to comment on a film such as this in conventional critical terms. I would have to say, simply, that there is no other such film. Klimov himself said of it, "I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to my screenplay co-author [himself a survivor] . . . But he replied, "'Let them not watch it, then'."

Near-death experience

The Soviet authorities held filming up for several years, in part perhaps because— as in Klimov's earlier film, Agony— its sole reference to Communism is brief and contemptuous. It was finally released on the 40th anniversary of the war. In the Soviet Union, nearly 29 million people saw it.

Come and See was a near-death experience for its young and amazing star, Aleksei Kravchenko, who has gone on to a professional acting career. Klimov insisted on using live ammunition in certain scenes, and in one a bullet reportedly came within four inches of Kravchenko's head. When he finished the film's nine-month shoot, he had turned partly gray.

Elem Klimov never made another film. There were no non-casualties of the Great Patriotic War.