Rating: 4.5/5
Criterion Challenge 2023 | 47/52 | 1980s
628 Belorussian villages were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants
In 1977, Larisa Shepitko directed The Ascent — one of the great poetic war films from the Soviet Union. That same year, her husband, Elem Klimov, began working on his final film, Come and See (then called Kill Hilter). During the eight years before Come and See’s release, he dealt with not just Soviet censorship but Shepitko’s death in 1979.
What makes this film worth talking about is not the content of this film — it is the story of its making. It is the landslide that it commenced, with the aid of perestroika, that exposed the Soviet Union’s stringent censorship, both in its art and in its manifest reality. This transparency (glasnost) was a significant platform for Gorbachev. With it came a loud wave of previously silenced voices.
The production of this film was grueling and dangerous. The use of live ammunition is insane. Detonating live bombs with limited protection is wild. The use of 14-year-old Aleksei Kravchenko, who had no film experience so he “could [not] have protected himself psychologically with his accumulated acting experience, technique, and skill,” is a bizarre cruelty. The filmmakers claim they hypnotized the kid. Not to help him but to “inject him with content, which he did not possess.”
And yet, it’s all effective. If the goal was to render the atrocities they experienced as realistically as they could manage, they did it.
This film isn’t a story of heroism, betrayal, morality, or ambiguity. It’s all chaos. Every moment left alive is an accident of circumstance. For every tragic moment, nothing can happen but witness it. By the time any partisans arrive, the village is engulfed in flames.
Of all the reasons to make a war movie, this one makes the most sense to me. The filmmakers witnessed these things, and few people knew about it. This film was their sole means of telling this story.