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NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...

Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm



Come and See (1985)




"This 1985 film from Russia is one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead."

Elem Kilmov’s 1985 Soviet anti-war drama Come and See , adopted  from the 1978 book "I am from the Fiery Village", opens with teenage boy Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko) digging  a discarded gun out of a sandy trench with the intention of joining the Soviet partisans in Nazi occupied Byelorussia  . 
The film's title comes from Chapter 6 of The Apocalypse of John, in which "Come and see" is  an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and that is exactly what we are  going to witness throughout  this film and Flyora's  journey.




This  journey that is senses-shattering  depiction of loss of innocence, man's sadistic cruel nature and  dehumanizing horrors and brutality of war will be ending in inevitable destruction of this young man's soul and indeed survivors may envy the dead.
The lead performance of 13-year-old Alexei Kravchenko is a good part of what makes this film great (There are stories out there that much of his performance was done under the influence of hypnosis).
Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, Come and See is the best (anti-) war film ever made.
Is it true that audiences demand some kind of release or catharsis? That we cannot accept a film that leaves us with no hope? That we struggle to find uplift in the mire of malevolence? There's a curious scene here in a wood, the sun falling down through the leaves, when the soundtrack, which has been grim and mournful, suddenly breaks free into Mozart. And what does this signify? A fantasy, I believe, and not Florya's, who has probably never heard such music. The Mozart descends into the film like a deus ex-machina, to lift us from its despair. We can accept it if we want, but it changes nothing. It is like an ironic taunt.

 


“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.' And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” 









































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