Come and See

[norwie2010]

I just watched "Come and See" ("Иди и смотри") by Elim Klimov.

Has anyone seen this movie? Please? I'd like to talk about it...

Comments

[beer_good_foamy]

YES. One of the greatest films ever made, and I say that despite only having seen it once - because that once hurt so much that I haven't been able to see it again, but nevermind because much of it is just etched into my soul. It's one of those movis where I just had to watch the extras on the DVD - not because I wanted to know how they made it, but because I needed to see the actor who played Florya and see that he actually survived the shoot. It's just that fucking brutal. The way he starts out as a cheerful, naive young boy with roses on his cheeks and is then over the next 2 1/2 hours reduced to a spectre of a human being, everything that's shown, everything that happens to him and to the viewer (the bombing! The tinnitus HOWL that drowns out everything! the torching of the church!)... and then that furious execution of Hitler that DOESN'T HELP and the swooping one-shot take of the faceless ghostlike partisans running through the forest... Goddamn, just thinking about that movie has me in tears.

Through the graves the wind is

[norwie2010]

Oh yes. It hurts. Since watching it i wander around my home in a daze, and, while i didn't watch the extras (no DVD) - i read any and all interviews and reviews i could find, to know what it was like to make this film, and - as you say - to know what became of the actor.

And, it is the whole experience of it - the sounds, oh the sounds. There is so much in the little scenes, the nest of the crane he tramples on (and the cranes are the image of the souls of the dead soldiers in so many of the soviet war literature, movies and songs...).

I always thought that i had seen enough bloodshed and violence in real life - but then i could always turn my back on it, always return to the relative safety of petty bourgeois German society.

But with this, i felt a bit like Alex from "A Clockwork Orange" being forced to go through his conditioning via drugs and films.

It has been a long time since i cried while watching a movie. But this has really left me torn and tattered.

Dos Lid geschribn is mit Blut un nit mit Bley

[beer_good_foamy]

Oh yes. I watched this as a double bill with Ballad of a Soldier - both are Soviet movies about WWII that don't just toe the party line but look at the human cost instead, and yet they couldn't be more different. One (Ballad) hope- and wistful, and the other (Come And See) a descent into hell that never lets up.

BTW, have you ever read Isaak Babel? If not, look up a short story collection called Red Cavalry, which he wrote about his experience during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 and reads a lot like Come And See, if not quite as bleak. Babel was a Jewish bolshevik intellectual, which as it turned out, wasn't an entirely unconflicted role in the 1920s ("Was it the revolutionaries or the counterrevolutionaries who burned this synagogue?"). Or indeed later; he was executed in one of Stalin's labour camps.

(Also, I meant to link this queer feminist kraut version of "The Partisan" since I'm a bit drunk and un-watching the Eurovision with as much noise as I can.)

[norwie2010]

No, i haven't read Babel (but of course i immediately ran and looked him up and read stuff and... well, at least i don't have to listen to the Eurovision. :D ).

That seems to be something worth reading, i will look for it on Tuesday. Also thanks for the song! Yes, that's good stuff!

Interestingly, "Ballad of the Soldier" is next on my list of "what to watch". I just don't know if i can do this right now. I feel as if i need another lifetime without war movies first...