Come and See is a 1985 Soviet epic historical anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov and starring Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. Its screenplay, written by Klimov and Ales Adamovich, is based on the 1971 novel Khatyn (), and the 1977 collection of survivor testimonies I Am from the Fiery Village (), of which Adamovich was a co-author. Klimov had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before he was allowed to produce the film in its entirety.
The film's plot focuses on the German occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, and the events as witnessed by a young Belarusian teenager named Flyora, who joins a partisan unit, and thereafter depicts the Nazi atrocities and human suffering inflicted upon the populace. The film mixes hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and philosophical existentialism with poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes. The film received positive reviews during its initial release and received the FIPRESCI prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. Come and See was the final film that Klimov directed before his death in 2003.
In the decades since its release, Come and See has received widespread acclaim. The portrayal of the horror, brutality, and psychological damage caused by Nazi atrocities was praised by critics, and Kravchenko's performance has been lauded. In 2022, it was ranked the 41st greatest film of all time in the Sight & Sound directors' poll and 104th in their critics' poll.
Plot
In 1943, Flyora and another Belarusian boy dig up a rifle from a trench to join the Soviet partisans. They do so in defiance of their village elder, who warns them that this would arouse the suspicions of the occupying Germans. The boys' activities are noticed by a reconnaissance aircraft.
The next day, partisans arrive at Flyora's house to conscript him against his mother's wishes. He is taken to a partisan camp in the forest, where he becomes a low-rank militiaman who performs menial tasks. When the trained partisans leave to fight, their commander, Kosach, orders Flyora and several other men to remain behind at the camp. Bitterly disappointed, Flyora walks into the forest weeping. He comes across Glasha, an emotionally unstable adolescent girl working as a partisan nurse. The forest is suddenly attacked by dive bombers and German paratroopers, forcing the duo to flee. They hide from German officers passing through the forest and sleep under a tree for the night.
Glasha travels with Flyora to his village, only to find his home deserted. In denial that his family is dead, Flyora believes they are hiding on a nearby island across a bog and runs off. Glasha follows, by chance seeing a pile of executed villagers behind his house, before yelling at Flyora to leave quickly. They become hysterical after wading through the bog, where Glasha screams at Flyora that his family is dead. Rubezh, a partisan fighter, rescues them and takes them to meet the surviving villagers. The village elder, severely burned by gasoline, tells Flyora of his family's deaths and repeats his warning about digging up the rifle. Horrified, Flyora attempts suicide by submerging his head in the bog, but Glasha and the villagers stop him.
Rubezh takes Flyora and two other men to raid a warehouse for food. The group find the warehouse unexpectedly guarded by German troops and are forced to retreat, during which two of their comrades are killed by a land mine. Rubezh and Flyora coerce a Nazi-collaborating farmer to hand over his cow, but a German machine gunner kills Rubezh and the cow. Flyora attempts to steal a horse and cart from another man to transport the cow, but he convinces Flyora to hide his gun and Red Army jacket as SS troops appear. He takes Flyora to his house in Perekhody village.
German troops and collaborators surround and occupy the village. Flyora runs outside and sees women, children, and the elderly being forcibly marched down the street and warns them that they are being herded to their deaths, but he is forced into a barn church with them. He and a young woman with a child manage to escape, but the woman's child is thrown back in while she is dragged off to be gang raped. The Germans barricade the doors and windows before incinerating the church, killing everyone inside. While celebrating the massacre, a German officer holds a pistol to Flyora's head to pose for a picture, then abandons him as the soldiers leave.
Flyora wanders away from the scorched village, finding the aftermath of a partisan ambush on the escaping Germans. He recovers his jacket and rifle, only to spot the gang-raped woman bleeding and stumbling in a fugue state. He finds Kosach and the partisans nearby, having captured some of the Germans and their collaborators responsible for the church fire. They plead for their lives, blaming a fanatical and unapologetic , who informs the Belarusians that their nation has no right to a future due to their "inferior race" spreading the "communist contagion". Kosach suggests that one collaborator douses the others with petrol; he willingly does so, but the partisans shoot them all before they can be immolated.
As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a boy looking at a painting of Hitler in a puddle. When the boy leaves, Flyora repeatedly shoots the portrait; a montage of clips from Hitler's life plays in reverse, but when Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother's lap, Flyora ceases shooting and cries. A title card reads, "628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants". Flyora rushes to rejoin his comrades as they march through the woodland.
Cast Aleksei Kravchenko as Flyora/Florian Gaishun Olga Mironova as Glasha/Glafira Liubomiras Laucevičius as Kosach (voiced by Valery Kravchenko) Vladas Bagdonas as Rubezh Tatyana Shestakova as Flyora's mother Yevgeny Tilicheyev as Gezhel the main collaborator Viktors Lorents as Walter Stein the German commander Jüri Lumiste as the fanatical German officer
Production Development Klimov co-wrote the screenplay with Ales Adamovich, who fought with the Belarusian partisans as a teenager. According to the director's recollections, work on the film began in 1977:
The original Belarusian and Russian title of the film derives from Chapter 6 of the Book of Revelation, as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
To prepare the 14-year-old Kravchenko for the role, Klimov called a hypnotist with autogenic training. "[Kravchenko's acting] could have had a very sad ending. He could have landed in an insane asylum," Klimov said. "I realized 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." "In the end, Mr. Kravchenko was able to concentrate so intensely that it seemed as if he had hypnotized himself for the role."
Filming For eight years, filming could not begin because the State Committee for Cinematography () would not accept the screenplay, considering it too realistic, calling it propaganda for the "aesthetics of dirtiness" and "naturalism". Alongside this, the death of Klimov's wife Larisa Shepitko, also a filmmaker, in 1979 forced him to first complete the work she began on what was to be her next film, Farewell; it would finally be released in 1983. Eventually in 1984, Klimov was able to start filming without having compromised to any censorship at all. The only change became the name of the film itself, to Come and See from the original, Kill Hitler (Klimov also says this in the 2006 UK DVD release).
The film was shot in chronological order over nine months. Kravchenko 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." Contrary to what some rumors suggest, though, Kravchenko's hair did not turn permanently grey. In fact, a special silver Interferenz greasepaint, alongside a thin layer of actual silver, was used to dye his hair. This made it difficult to get it back to normal, so Kravchenko had to live with his hair like this for some time after shooting the film.
To create the maximum sense of immediacy, realism, hyperrealism, and surrealism operating in equal measure, Klimov and his cameraman Aleksei Rodionov employed naturalistic colors and lots of Steadicam shots; the film is full of extreme close-ups of faces, does not flinch from the unpleasant details of burnt flesh and bloodied corpses, and the guns were often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks. Kravchenko mentioned in interviews that bullets sometimes passed just 4 inches (10 centimeters) above his head (such as in the cow scene). Very little protection was provided on the set. When the dive bombs were detonated the camera crew only had a concrete slab 1.5 meters tall and 5 meters wide () to protect them. At the same time the is fragmentary and disjointed: there are discontinuities between shots as characters appear in close up and then disappear off camera. Elsewhere, the moment of revelation is marked by a disorienting zoom-in/dolly-out shot.
Music The original soundtrack is rhythmically amorphous music composed by Oleg Yanchenko. At a few key points in the film, classical music from mainly German or Austrian composers are used, such as The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II. The Soviet marching song "The Sacred War" and Russian folk song "Korobeiniki" (Vadim Kozin) () are played in the movie once. During the scene where Glasha dances, the background music is some fragments of Mary Dixon's song from Grigori Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. Richard Wagner's overture to Tannhäuser and, notably, Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre are both used during the climactic reverse montage of historical footage.
At the end of the film, the partisans pass through a forest, while in the meantime a season passes and snow blankets the ground, to the sound of Mozart's Lacrimosa before the camera tilts towards the sky and the ending credits appear. Film critic Roger Ebert commented on this scene as follows:
Release Come and See had its world premiere in the competition program at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival on 9 July 1985. It was theatrically released on 17 October 1985, drawing 28.9 million viewers and ranking sixth at the box office of 1986. It grossed $71,909 in the United States and Canada, and $20.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of nearly $21 million, plus $1.3 million with home video sales.
2017 restoration In 2017, the film received an official restoration overseen by Karen Shakhnazarov. It won the Venice Classics Award for Best Restored Film, and was also shown in several European independent cinemas again.
Home media In Q3 2001, the film saw its initial DVD release by Russian company RusCiCo, with the film being split across two discs, featuring a new 5.1 remix (albeit omitting the original mono mix), optional voice-overs in English and Arabic, and subtitles in 13 languages. The contents of the release were licensed to various international distributors, including, but not limited to Kino International in the United States, Nouveaux Pictures in the United Kingdom, Njutafilms in Sweden,, IVC in Japan and Spectrum in South Korea.
The film became available on FilmStruck, the streaming service for the Criterion Collection from its launch on 1 November 2016 to its closure on 29 November 2018, and on the new Criterion Channel service from November 2019. On 18 December 2019, Janus Films released a trailer for a 2K restoration that premiered at the Film Forum in New York City on 21 February 2020, followed by a theatrical run, and then a home media release through Criterion on 30 June 2020.
Reception