Come and See



Come and See (Russian: Иди и смотри, Idi i smotri; Belarusian: Ідзі і глядзі, Idzi i hlyadzi) directed by Elem Klimov, is a 1985 Soviet war drama and psychological thriller film about and occurring during the Nazi German occupation of the Byelorussian SSR. Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova star as the protagonists Flyora and Glasha.The screenplay is by Ales Adamovich and Elem Klimov. The script had to wait eight years for approval; the film was finally produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War II, and was a large box-office hit, with 28,900,000 admissions in the Soviet Union alone.

The film's title derives from Chapter 6 of The Apocalypse of John, in which "Come and see" is said in the first, third, fifth and seventh verses[Rev 6:1,3,5,7]  as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Chapter 6, verses 7-8[Rev 6:7-8]  has been cited as being particularly relevant to the film: ''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.''

==Plot [edit] == In 1943, two Belarusian boys are digging in a sand field looking for abandoned rifles, in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. Yustin, an old man warns them not to dig (using sarcasm and reverse psychology). One of the boys, Flyora, finds an SVT-40 rifle. The next day, partisans arrive at his house and take Flyora with them, to the dismay of Flyora's mother. She fears that the loss of her son, like his father before him, will lessen her and her daughters' chances of survival.

The partisans converge in a forest and prepare to confront the Nazis. Flyora joins their forces as a low-rank militiaman and is ordered to do all the labor in the detachment. Finally, when the partisans are ready to move on, the partisan commander, Kosach, orders Flyora to remain behind at the camp in reserve and exchange boots with one of his fellows. Bitterly disappointed, Flyora walks into the forest, weeping and comes across someone else who has been left behind – Glafira (or Glasha), a beautiful girl infatuated with Kosach. The girl confuses Flyora with Kosach and mistakenly kisses him. Suddenly, German aeroplanes appear and begin to drop German parachutists, and the camp comes under heavy artillery fire.

Flyora goes temporarily deaf from the explosions and, after hiding out in the forest, returns to his home village with Glasha. He does not find his family at home, but his sisters' dolls are lined up on the floor and the house is overrun by flies. After sitting down to eat the still-warm dinner from the oven, Glasha vomits. Denying that his family was killed, Flyora believes that his family must be hiding on a nearby island across a bog. As they run from the village, Glasha turns and sees a huge pile of dead bodies stacked behind Flyora's house. Unable to accept that his family is dead, Flyora becomes hysterical as he and Glasha painstakingly wade through the bog. When they make it to the island, they meet a resistance fighter, Roubej. Glasha tells Roubej that Flyora is mad. Roubej takes the pair to a large number of other villagers who have fled the Nazis. Flyora sees Yustin doused in petrol and burnt by the Nazis, and accepts that his family did not survive.

Roubej takes Flyora and two others to find food. They run into SS activity and the food stored is too well-defended to be raided. Flyora unknowingly leads the group through a minefield in which two of the companions are killed. A German aeroplane drops empty liquor bottles. At dusk, Roubej and Flyora sneak up to an occupied town and manage to steal a cow from a Nazi-collaborating farmer, but as they flee across the fields, they are shot at. Both Roubej and the cow are killed. The next morning, Flyora, unable to move the dead cow, finds a horse and cart. He attempts to take the horse at the dismay of the owner who stops Flyora. They hear the sound of approaching German soldiers. The farmer helps Flyora hide his partisan jacket and rifle in the field, and takes him to his village of Perekhody, where they hurriedly discuss a fake identity for him.

A Nazi Einsatzkommando unit moves into the village and herds everyone into a wooden church, locking them all inside. The German Obersturmführer announces to the terrified people that anyone will be allowed to climb out of the church through a side window, as long as they leave their children behind. No one moves, but Flyora takes up their offer and climbs out. Shortly after, a woman attempts to climb out with her child, but she is dragged away by her hair and the toddler is thrown back through the window. Grenades are thrown into the church, which is then set on fire and shot at; Flyora watches the inferno of burning Byelorussian peasants while the Nazis stand and applaud, taking photographs and laughing, and listening to music. The woman who escaped the church is put into a moving truck with a group of soldiers and gang-raped.

Flyora wanders out of the village, where he sees that the partisan soldiers have ambushed the Germans as they fled from the burning village. He then goes to recover his rifle and jacket from the field where he had hid them earlier. As he turns to leave, Flyora comes across the woman who tried to escape from the church with her child who has been raped and is in a fugue state; he initially mistakes her for Glasha. Flyora returns to the destroyed village and finds that his fellow partisans have captured a small group of the attackers, along with their Byelorussian collaborators and the German SS commander. The main collaborator, insisting that they are not to blame for the slaughter, translates the words of the German commander, who claims to be a good man and a doting grandfather. The Obersturmführer is disgusted and angered by his commander's cowardice, and tells his captors that they, as an inferior race and communistsympathisers, will eventually be exterminated. The collaborator douses the prisoners with the can of petrol Flyora brought, but the crowd, disgusted by the sight, shoot them all down before they can be set on fire, ending their lives relatively painlessly.

As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle and shoots it - the first time he has actually used his rifle. After each shot, there is a sequence of montages that play in reverse and regress in time, depicting the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich backwards from corpses at a concentration camp to images of Hitler as a schoolboy; and finally a picture of the infant Adolf in his mother's lap. Flyora shoots at each of the images – yet he cannot bring himself to fire at the still shot of baby Hitler. A title card states that "628 villages in Byelorussia were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants."

In the film's final scene, Flyora catches up with and blends in with his partisan comrades marching through the woods, away into the dark of the trees. ==Production [edit] == <p style="line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">Klimov co-wrote the screenplay with Ales Adamovich, who fought with the Belarussian partisans as a teenager. According to the director's recollections, work on the film began in 1977: <p style="line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">For a long time, filming could not begin. Goskino would not accept the screenplay, considering it a propaganda for the "aesthetics of dirtiness" and "naturalism". In the end, Klimov was able to start filming in 1984 without having compromised to any censorship at all. The only change became the name of the film itself, which was changed to Come and See from the original title, Kill Hitler (Elem Klimov also says this in the 2006 UK DVD release).

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">The film was shot in chronological order over a period of nine months. Aleksey Kravchenko says that he underwent "the most debilitating fatigue and hunger. I kept a most severe diet, and after the filming was over I returned to school not only thin, but grey-haired." The 2006 UK DVD sleeve states that the guns in the film were often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks, for realism. Aleksey Kravchenko mentions in interviews that bullets sometimes passed just 4 inches (10 centimeters) above his head (such as in the cow scene).

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">Other notes:


 * Much of the footage was shot with Steadicam.
 * The prosimian that is seen as the pet of the German SS Major (Sturmbannführer) is called the Red Slender Loris.
 * The detachment of Einsatzgruppe that raids Perekhody is called the 15th Einsatzkommando, a historically existing unit.
 * There is a town called Perekhody currently in Smolensk Oblast in Russia.