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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 Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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)
Иди и смотри
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
"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.”
Come and see (Effed UP Movies) >>>
Elem Germanovich Klimov (July 9, 1933 – October 26, 2003) was one of the most distinctive and influential Soviet film directors. Best known internationally for his 1985 anti-war masterpiece Come and See (Иди и смотри), Klimov’s career spanned sharp political satire, historical drama, and profound tragedy. As the head of the Union of Soviet Filmmakers during the Perestroika era, he also played a pivotal role in liberating unreleased and banned Soviet cinema.
1. Early Life and Background
Origins: Born in Stalingrad (now Volgograd), USSR. His first name, Elem, was an acronym formed by his parents from Elektorisation, Engels, and Marx/Lenin.
Childhood Experience: As a child, he experienced the brutal Siege of Stalingrad firsthand—an ordeal that deeply shaped his worldview and his later masterpiece, Come and See.
Transition to Film: Before entering cinema, Klimov graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1957. He later attended the prestigious Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), studying under Efim Dzigan.
Personal Life: He was married to the acclaimed filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, whose tragic death in a car crash in 1979 profoundly altered Klimov’s life and artistic trajectory.
2. Key Filmography
Welcome, or No Trespassing (Добро пожаловать, или Посторонним вход воспрещён, 1964)
Adventures of a Dentist (Похождения зубного врача, 1965)
Genre: Comedy / Satire
Overview: A surreal story about a dentist who discovers he can pull teeth painlessly without anesthesia, only to face jealousy and ostracization from his peers. Censored and given extremely limited distribution due to its allegorical commentary on Soviet society's intolerance toward talent and individuality.
Agony (Агония, filmed 1975, released 1981/1985)
Genre: Historical Drama
Overview: A sprawling, decadent portrayal of the final days of Imperial Russia, focusing on Grigori Rasputin and Tsar Nicholas II. Celebrated for its bold visual style and intense performance by Alexei Petrenko as Rasputin, the film was heavily suppressed and shelved by Soviet censors for years due to its unorthodox depiction of the monarchy.
Farewell (Прощание, 1983)
Genre: Drama
Overview: Originally a project helmed by Klimov's wife, Larisa Shepitko. After her tragic death during pre-production, Klimov completed the film as a tribute to her. It depicts the destruction of a traditional Siberian island village to make way for a hydroelectric dam, reflecting themes of lost heritage and modernization.
Come and See (Иди и смотри, 1985)
Genre: War / Psychological Horror
Overview: Klimov’s final and most celebrated film. Set during the Nazi occupation of Belorussia in 1943, it follows a young boy named Flyora who joins the Soviet partisans.
Impact: Unflinching, nightmare-inducing, and deeply psychological, Come and See is widely regarded as one of the greatest war films ever made. It won the Golden Prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival.
3. Cinematic Style and Themes
Visceral Realism: Klimov used hyper-detailed sound design, naturalistic lighting, and Steadicam long takes to immerse the audience directly into his characters' mental states.
Psychological & Physical Trauma: Characters in Klimov’s films often undergo extreme psychological transformations, reflected in close-up shot compositions (most famously, Flyora's aging face in Come and See).
Subversive Allegory: Even in his early comedies, Klimov embedded sharp critiques of bureaucracy, conformity, and totalitarian social structures.
Later Years and Legacy
After Come and See, Klimov never completed another feature film, feeling that he had said everything he could through cinema. He spent years trying to adapt Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but financial and logistical barriers prevented production.
Elem Klimov passed away in Moscow in 2003 at the age of 70. His legacy endures as a titan of Soviet cinema who bridged uncompromising artistic vision with historical truth.
Plot Summary
The film follows Flyora, a young Belarusian boy who eagerly digs up a discarded rifle to join the Soviet partisans. His initial excitement for "playing soldier" is quickly obliterated.
The Descent: After being left behind at a partisan camp, he meets a girl named Glasha. They survive a devastating German paratrooper attack and return to Flyora's village, only to find it deserted. In a haunting moment, Flyora refuses to believe his family is dead, while Glasha glimpses a pile of executed villagers behind a house.
The Nightmare: Flyora wanders through the scorched landscape, eventually ending up in the village of Perekhody. There, he witnesses a "punitive action" by the SS (modeled after the real Khatyn massacre). The villagers are rounded up into a barn and set on fire while the soldiers celebrate with music and alcohol.
The Ending: Flyora survives and joins a group of partisans who have captured some of the perpetrators. The film concludes with a famous "reverse-montage" sequence where Flyora fires his rifle at a portrait of Hitler, symbolically attempting to undo history until he reaches a photo of Hitler as an infant—at which point he stops, unable to kill an innocent.
Historical Context: The War in Belarus
The film is based on the book I Am from the Fiery Village by Ales Adamovich, which collected firsthand accounts of survivors.
The "Dead Zones": During the German occupation, over 600 Belarusian villages were burned along with their entire populations.
The Dirlewanger Brigade: The SS unit depicted in the film is widely believed to be based on the SS-Sondereinheit Dirlewanger, a unit composed of convicted criminals known for extreme cruelty and lack of discipline.
Casualties: Belarus suffered more than almost any other nation proportionally; roughly 25% of its entire population (over 2 million people) was killed during the war.
Elem Klimov’s Come and See (Idi i smotri) is widely regarded as one of the most devastating anti-war films ever made. Moving away from the traditional, heroic Soviet narrative of the "Great Patriotic War," Klimov approaches the Nazi occupation of Belarus through a lens of raw, hallucinatory psychological horror.
The film’s power lies heavily in its distinct formal techniques and thematic depth:
1. The Auditory and Visual Nightmare
The Steadicam and the Gaze: Klimov and cinematographer Alexei Rodionov heavily utilize the Steadicam to glide through swamps, forests, and burning villages, trapping the viewer in a floating, dreamlike state. The frequent use of extreme close-ups—where characters stare directly into the lens—forces an uncomfortable, unblinking confrontation with the audience.
Subjective Sound Design: Following an artillery blast early in the film, the audio track shifts into a dull, high-pitched ringing. For vast stretches of the movie, the soundscape is intentionally distorted, muffled, or layered with disparate noises, mirroring Flyora's physiological trauma and growing deafness.
2. Physical and Psychological Metamorphosis
The arc of the young protagonist, Flyora (played with startling intensity by Alexei Kravchenko), is tracked entirely on his face. Over the course of a few days, his features physically transform from an idealistic, smiling boy into a wrinkled, hollow-eyed husk. It remains one of cinema's most visceral depictions of accelerated aging due to severe psychological trauma.
3. The Reverse Chronology of Evil
In the climax, Flyora repeatedly shoots a portrait of Adolf Hitler half-submerged in a mud puddle. With every shot, Klimov edits in historical documentary footage running backward: Nazi rallies dissolve, the Third Reich collapses in reverse, and Hitler ages backward from a dictator to a young soldier, a boy, and finally, an innocent infant in his mother's arms. When faced with the image of the infant, Flyora stops shooting—highlighting the tragic boundary between an innate human conscience and the cyclical nature of historical atrocity.
"I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that anyone would be able to watch it... But I said to myself: this is their memory. If they don't look at it now, they will forget everything."
— Elem Klimov
To understand why Come and See leaves such an indelible psychological mark, it helps to look at how Klimov and his co-writer, Ales Adamovich, anchored the film in historical truth and pushed the physical limits of cinema.
1. The Roots in Reality: Ales Adamovich
The film is not a Hollywood-style dramatization; it is based on the real-world experiences of co-writer Ales Adamovich, who fought as a teenager with the Belarusian partisans. The script draws heavily from his 1971 book I Am from the Fiery Village, a collection of raw, first-hand testimonies from survivors of the Nazi "scorched earth" campaign. During the occupation, over 600 villages in Belarus were burned alive along with their entire populations. The terrifying church sequence in the film's final act is a direct, unsparing reconstruction of those massacres.
2. Hypnotic Realism and Danger on Set
Klimov’s dedication to what he called "hyper-realism" meant avoiding standard cinematic illusions wherever possible. This created an incredibly intense, high-stakes environment for the cast and crew:
Live Ammunition: To capture genuine terror, real bullets were frequently swept over the actors' heads. In the famous scene where Flyora and Glasha dodge machine-gun fire in the forest, the tracer rounds slicing through the trees were completely real.
The Cow Scene: When a tracer round kills a cow right next to Flyora, the heavy machine-gun fire was real, and the animal was killed on camera, narrowly missing the young actor.
Hypnosis: Fearing that the intense psychological weight of the role might permanently damage the 14-year-old Alexei Kravchenko, Klimov brought a professional hypnotist to the set before the most harrowing scenes to help the young actor enter deep states of emotional distress without internalizing the trauma.
3. The Symbolism of the Bog
Water, mud, and swamps act as central metaphors throughout the journey. The agonizing sequence where Flyora and Glasha wade through a deep, suffocating peat bog is filmed in long, exhausting takes.
The mud represents a physical manifestation of the eastern front's brutality—a literal and figurative quagmire that swallows youth, innocence, and sanity. Emerging from the mire, the characters are permanently caked in the earth, stripped of their individual identities and transformed into historical ghosts.
The Title's Origin: The title Come and See is drawn directly from the Book of Revelation (Chapter 6), invoking the opening of the seals and the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: "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."
The Reverse Montage: This sequence is a masterclass in editing. As Flyora shoots the portrait of Hitler, newsreel footage plays backward—concentration camps are dismantled, Hitler's rise to power is reversed, and he becomes a child. The sequence suggests that even in the face of absolute evil, the human soul (represented by Flyora's hesitation to shoot the baby) can still recognize innocence.
Nature as Witness: Unlike many war films that take place in urban rubble, Come and See is set in lush forests and deep bogs. Nature is depicted as indifferent, beautiful, and eventually choked by the "unnatural" presence of war machines and toxic smoke.
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The journey to bring Come and See to the screen was a grueling, eight-year battle against Soviet bureaucracy, followed by a filming process so intense it physically altered its lead actor. Elem Klimov did not just want to direct a movie; he wanted to create a visceral, uncompromising monument to historical memory.
1. The Eight-Year Bureaucratic War
Klimov and co-writer Ales Adamovich finished the initial script in 1977 under the working title Kill Hitler. It was intended to mark the 35th anniversary of the partisan victory in Belarus. However, the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) and the Union of Filmmakers vehemently rejected it.
Soviet authorities favored idealized, heroic myths of the "Great Patriotic War" that emphasized collective triumph. Klimov’s script offered only unmitigated psychological horror, dirt, and existential dread. Censors demanded sweeping cuts, accusing the script of "naturalism" and "dirtiness." Klimov refused to compromise, later recalling that changing the script would mean betraying the millions who died.
The project was shelved for years, pushing Klimov into a deep depression. It was only in 1984, as the political landscape began to shift toward Glasnost (openness), that the film was greenlit with a change to its final, apocalyptic title.
2. Pushing the Limits of Realism on Set
When production finally began in Belarus, Klimov abandoned standard cinematic safety nets to achieve what he called "hyper-realism."
The Casting of Alexei Kravchenko: Klimov refused to hire a professional child actor, believing they would bring practiced, theatrical habits to the screen. Instead, he chose 14-year-old Alexei Kravchenko after an open audition where Kravchenko was asked to simulate intense grief. To prepare for the physical toll, Kravchenko went on a strict starvation diet, transforming into a gaunt, hollow figure before filming even began.
Psychological Protection via Hypnosis: Klimov was deeply concerned that the sheer brutality of the shoot would break the young actor's psyche. To protect him, a professional psychotherapist/hypnotist was kept on set. Before filming the most harrowing sequences—such as the burning of the village—Kravchenko was put into a deep hypnotic trance to insulate his actual mind from the horrific imagery he was forced to internalize for the camera.
The Toll of Chronological Filming: The film was shot in strict chronological order over nine months. The physical deterioration you see on Kravchenko’s face was completely real. By the end of the shoot, his hair had prematurely streaked with gray, and his face had drastically lined from sheer physical and emotional exhaustion. When he returned to school in Moscow, his classmates initially failed to recognize him.
3. The Technical Audacity of Alexei Rodionov
To capture this reality, cinematographer Alexei Rodionov relied on formal visual techniques that broke away from traditional Soviet filmmaking conventions:
The Steadicam as a Ghostly Presence: Come and See was one of the earliest Soviet films to extensively utilize the Steadicam. Instead of shaky, handheld camerawork (which can feel chaotic but artificial), the Steadicam glided smoothly through mud, swamps, and smoke. This creates a haunting, dreamlike fluidity—as if the camera is an unceasing, floating witness to the atrocities.
Natural Light and Extreme Close-ups: Rodionov avoided stylized Hollywood lighting. He relied almost entirely on the overcast, oppressive gray skies of Belarus, shooting on high-contrast film stock that emphasized the texture of mud, sweat, and tears. The frequent, unblinking close-ups of characters staring directly into the lens were achieved using a specialized wide-angle lens close to the actors' faces, forcing the audience into an inescapable eye-contact with trauma.
The Flak Jacket Prop: The extreme lengths for realism extended even to the background actors. For the burning of the village, Klimov cast actual survivors of the 1940s Belarusian massacres. Their tears, panic, and screams in the church sequence were fueled by genuine, unearthed trauma, blurring the line between cinematic performance and historical reenactment.
Why It Is Significant
Come and See is often cited as the "ultimate anti-war film" because it offers no catharsis. It strips away the "glory" of combat and replaces it with the primal reality of genocide. As Roger Ebert famously noted: "The survivors must envy the dead." It serves as a haunting historical document of the Eastern Front, a theatre of war often underrepresented in Western cinema. It remains a polarizing but essential viewing experience for understanding the psychological toll of total war.
Both Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature debut Ivan’s Childhood (1962) stand as monumental achievements in Soviet cinema, both choosing to filter the devastation of the Eastern Front through the eyes of a child.
Yet, while they share the same tragic premise—the total annihilation of innocence—their formal, poetic, and psychological approaches to handling the loss of youth could not be more distinct.
1. The Structure of Loss: Linear Decay vs. Fragmented Memory
The two films track the destruction of childhood using entirely different narrative architectures.
Flyora (Come and See): A Linear Descent into Hell
Klimov structures Flyora’s journey chronologically. We witness the exact moment his childhood ends (digging up a rifle in the dirt) and track his rapid, linear physical and psychological decay day by day. There is no escape from the progression of reality. Once Flyora leaves his mother’s house, his world hardens permanently; the film offers no flashbacks, no pleasant daydreams, and no psychological reprieve. His trauma is cumulative, written directly onto his aging face.
Ivan (Ivan’s Childhood): A Psyche Split in Two
Tarkovsky approaches Ivan’s lost youth through juxtaposition, constantly shifting between the grim, muddy reality of the war and radiant, lyrical dream sequences. Ivan’s childhood is not merely decaying; it is a ghost that haunts him.
The Dreams: Ivan runs through sunlit woods, plays on a beach, and watches apples spill from a truck into the rain alongside a young girl.
The Reality: Ivan is a cold, hyper-focused 12-year-old scout who behaves like a hardened operative, utterly consumed by hatred and a desire for vengeance.
By juxtaposing these two states, Tarkovsky shows that war has violently bifurcated Ivan's soul: his physical body is an instrument of military intelligence, while his true childhood has been entirely exiled to his subconscious.
2. Visual Language: Visceral Realism vs. Transcendent Poetry
The visual strategies of cinematographers Alexei Rodionov (Come and See) and Vadim Yusov (Ivan’s Childhood) shape how we perceive the stolen innocence of these boys.
| Cinematic Element | Flyora (Come and See) | Ivan (Ivan’s Childhood) |
| The Camera's Role | The Unblinking Witness: Glides via Steadicam through suffocating mud and smoke. Forces direct, agonizing eye contact through extreme close-ups into the lens. | The Lyrical Observer: Utilizes stark, high-contrast chiaroscuro (light and shadow), low angles, and fluid, poetic camera movements through dead birch forests. |
| Nature as a Canvas | A Suffocating Mire: Nature is an active, hostile participant—thick peat bogs, swarming flies, and grey, overcast skies that offer no spiritual comfort. | A Haunted Sanctuary: Nature is deeply symbolic. Trees are charred skeletons, swamps are filled with flares, yet the water and light retain a spiritual, tactile beauty. |
3. The Rejection of Childhood vs. The Stolen Child
The psychological manifestations of their lost youth reveal the deep thematic differences between Klimov's and Tarkovsky's worldviews.
Flyora: The Child Who Resists the Void
Flyora does not want to lose his youth; it is violently stripped from him. Throughout Come and See, Flyora is largely a passive observer, swept up in a tidal wave of historical atrocity. He desperately tries to maintain human connections—clinging to Glasha, trying to return to his family, helping villagers. His psychological break occurs because his spirit fiercely resists the horrific reality forced upon him. When he stops shooting the portrait of infant Hitler at the end, it proves that despite his physical transformation into a hollowed husk, his core human conscience refused to die.
Ivan: The Child Who Chooses the Weapon
Ivan, conversely, actively rejects his own childhood because it is too painful to bear. He refuses to be treated like a child by the adult soldiers around him, rejecting their offers to send him to a safe military school. Ivan chooses the war. His innocence was murdered alongside his mother, and he has replaced it entirely with a pathological obsession with duty and revenge.
4. The Tragic Conclusion
Ultimately, the two films arrive at similarly devastating conclusions about what war does to the young, but they leave the viewer with entirely different emotional notes.
Tarkovsky ends Ivan's Childhood with historical finality. In the ruins of the Berlin Gestapo headquarters, the adult soldiers find Ivan's file: he was captured and executed. The film transitions one last time to a dream sequence—a young Ivan running endlessly along a beach toward a tree, chasing a girl into the water. Tarkovsky offers a tragic, transcendent release; Ivan is finally reunited with his childhood, but only in death.
Klimov offers no such release. Flyora survives. He does not die, nor does he dream. He marches off into the dark, snow-covered forest with the partisan unit, a child's mind trapped inside a withered, ancient face. He must continue to live, carrying the absolute weight of what he has seen.
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