Come And See

Been A Long Time

Back in the day, one of the most traumatic films you could watch about the experience of World War II was 'Come And See' directed by Elim Klimov. This wasn't just any movie about the war, this was a film so graphic in its portrayal of the Einsatzgruppen - the SS paramilitary death squads - and their hideous modus operandi during their campaign in Byelorussia.

The first time I even heard about this film was in the late 1980s when a friend of the family told me about with much excitement. He described to me the climactic montage, which hardly made any sense because I don't think he understood what he was trying to describe, but it sounded really good. Later on, when i finally saw it, I understood it as well as the shear intellectual excitement of the family friend who just had to tell me all about it.

The film has a way of staying with you forever and for a long time I've wanted to get hold of this film on DVD so I can just watch it again and digest it; see if it matches up to the way I remember it.

What's Good About It

My old film school Screen Analysis teacher used to like talking about misc en scene and sense of place. Well, this film is dripping with a sense of what Byelorussia is like and the sorts of life they had in the 1940s as the Germans came in. As a Soviet era film, the film works through some interesting technical moves as well as a dialectical montage towards the end.

There is plenty of good old social realism to go around as we survey the Byelorussian village and roll around in the mud and laves, dance in the rain, as well as wade through the bog with the main character. The film conveys a fantastic tactile quality with the images on the screen, which later on turn to freak you out. It's got good directing and cinematography and you're never at a loss to understand the situation.

In one sense, the film remains a high watermark of films made under the auspices of the old Soviet regime even while Klimov may have struggled greatly in convincing the Soviet powers-that-be to let him make the film. It's an immensely ideological work as well as a very prosaically - almost pedantic - film that sets out to show what the Einsatzgruppen operation would have looked like. Put it this way, it's nothing like an American movie. This thing was not made to entertain you. It was meant to seer into your very consciousness the frightening terror and horror of the war on the Eastern Front.

What's Bad About It

It's been a long time since I've seen this film and I've possibly had too much time to digest the film. Watching it on DVD for the second time in my life had nowhere near the impact as seeing it the first time. Oddly enough there were whole sequences in the film that I'd forgotten about towards the beginning that are really tedious scenes to set up the central action of a boy going to war.

I probably shouldn't say it's bad as such but in the this viewing, I felt tedium. This is bad. Or maybe I'm just craving for more action on screen, but at the core of it I think Klimov is disinterested in what interests the audience, but very interested in what interests him. This results in a film whose emotional arc is so jagged that the crucially traumatic scene seems to pass over the main character early on all the while leading on to the church burning. It's an odd choice as to what Klimov wants to show up close and what he chooses to only glance at.

It's also not clear what happens to Glisha, the girl. I wasn't sure that the victim of mass rape actually was Glisha or the young mother who escaped from the church, leaving behind her child and then carted off on a "pack rape truck". The screenwriter in me sort of went, "hang a minute, what is this denouement?" The director in me actually went, "hang a minute, this is worth establishing, if you're going to be so prosaic about he rest of the war crime activity?"

What's Interesting About It

Quite by coincidence I saw this article in the Economist. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll see a spirited exchange of opinions as to whether Russia could have beaten NAZI Germany on its own.

I have no doubt that what the Russians endured in fighting NAZI Germany was much worse than anything else her allies had to live through. That's just the fact of it. The Einsatzgruppen didn't exactly tour an occupied New York or Washington DC, hunting for Jews and Romani and commissars. The film paints a fairly stark portrait of that very struggle by partisans facing off against the might of the German war machine.

What's interesting about it today is that in light of all the things that happened in the Balkans with their death squads and death camps, the film has actually lost something of its power through the intervening years. The two Gulf Wars by the two Bush Presidents have also changed the nature of how wars are conducted to the point where it seems quaint that the Germans would bother to round people up and burn them in a church. The contemporary American simply sends out a tomahawk cruise missile or carpet bombs a whole city.

Film As Ideological Artefact

Elim Klimov struggled mightily to make this film. I can't understand why, but then Tarkovsky struggled mightily to make his films as well. The Soviet film production approvals committee were apparently against making obscure films or difficult films. They wanted that old social realism, which of course goes back to Stalin. Stalin probably wasn't interested in the entertainment value of film but he sure was interested in propaganda value, so he wanted Soviet cinema to be the perspicacious to the extreme.

Now, I can understand Tarkovsky running into some flack with films like 'The Mirror' but Elim Klimov is nowhere near an obscurantist director as Tarkovsky. Watching the film today, you can get a pungent dose of the Soviet Realist school of film making. You just can't miss it. 20 odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Perestroika, the ideological garb of the film stands out more today than perhaps it did in 1986. The film it reminded me of the most was in fact Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will'. Maybe these films are mirror images of one another - one film about the glory of NAZI Germany, Klimov's film about the absolute hell it created. In other words, as fine a film as it is, today we can see it for the propaganda film it was.

Which is all the more reason why I wonder why Klimov struggled so much. He was certainly pitching fastballs high and inside just as he was meant to.

The Mosfilm Legacy

We used to get a steady diet of Mosfilm stuff at AFTRS. Such heavily ideological works as 'The Cranes Are Flying' and 'Alexander Nevsky' would get a screening and the student body would all sagely nod and say how wonderfully moving these films were. They're great films and I'm glad they got made, but to get them made, these film makers had to twist themselves to the yoke of Soviet ideology. You'd think AFTRS thought Mosfilm productions were the way to go in cinema.

In a world of global commercial cinema with America at the epicentre, it's very quaint how AFTRS was feeding this stuff to its students who would have to write essays about a deeper cinema. I dare say it contributed greatly to unrealistic expectations about the craft as well as the business. I think this strand of thinking has influenced the funding bodies that took on these graduates as its assessors and film bureaucrats. It has collectively contributed to the decimation of the Australian Film industry in the 1990s as well as the 2000s. It is as if the film bureaucrats who came out of AFTRS essentially locked up the film makers of this country in a church and burned them all down.

I remember piping up at the time 'Terminator 2' came out and asking how these Mosfilm films stood in relation to a US$120million action spectacle. I got frowned at and ridiculed, but really, where is Mosfilm now? On the other hand, Arnie's the governor of California and James Cameron did 'Avatar'. Looking back on it now, it seems really quaint that so much value was put into studying Mosfilm movies.

I like 'Come And See', but it fills me with a weird kind of angst that has nothing to with its content.