war moive: Come And See

from the wiki

According to Klimov, the film was so shocking for audiences, however, that ambulances were sometimes called in to take away particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Also according to Klimov, during one of the after-the-film discussions, an elderly German stood up and said: “I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren”.

Retrospective assessments

The film has since been widely acclaimed in the 21st century. In 2001 Daneet Steffens of Entertainment Weekly wrote that “Klimov alternates the horrors of war with occasional fairy tale-like images; together they imbue the film with an unapologetically disturbing quality that persists long after the credits roll.”

In 2001, J. Hoberman of The Village Voice reviewed Come and See, writing the following: “Directed for baroque intensity, Come and See is a robust art film with aspirations to the visionary – not so much graphic as leisurely literal-minded in its representation of mass murder. (The movie has been compared both to Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, and it would not be surprising to learn that Steven Spielberg had screened it before making either of these.) The film’s central atrocity is a barbaric circus of blaring music and barking dogs in which a squadron of drunken German soldiers round up and parade the peasants to their fiery doom … The bit of actual death-camp corpse footage that Klimov uses is doubly disturbing in that it retrospectively diminishes the care with which he orchestrates the town’s destruction. For the most part, he prefers to show the Gorgon as reflected in Perseus’s shield. There are few images more indelible than the sight of young Alexei Kravchenko’s fear-petrified expression.” In the same publication in 2009, Elliott Stein described Come and See as “a startling mixture of lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare.”

In 2002, Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club wrote that Klimov’s “impressions are unforgettable: the screaming cacophony of a bombing run broken up by the faint sound of a Mozart fugue, a dark, arid field suddenly lit up by eerily beautiful orange flares, German troops appearing like ghosts out of the heavy morning fog. A product of the glasnost era, Come and See is far from a patriotic memorial of Russia’s hard-won victory. Instead, it’s a chilling reminder of that victory’s terrible costs.” British magazine The Word wrote that “Come and See is widely regarded as the finest war film ever made, though possibly not by Great Escape fans.” Tim Lott wrote in 2009 that the film “makes Apocalypse Now look lightweight”. In 2006, Geoffrey Macnab of Sight & Sound opined, “Klimov’s astonishing war movie combines intense lyricism with the kind of violent bloodletting that would make even Sam Peckinpah pause.”

On 16 June 2010, Roger Ebert posted a review of Come and See as part of his “Great Movies” series, describing it as “one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead … The film depicts brutality and is occasionally very realistic, but there’s an overlay of muted nightmarish exaggeration … I must not describe the famous sequence at the end. It must unfold as a surprise for you. It pretends to roll back history. You will see how. It is unutterably depressing, because history can never undo itself, and is with us forever.”

Come and See appears on many lists of films considered the best. In 2008, Come and See was placed at number 60 on Empire magazine’s “The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time” in 2008. It also made Channel 4’s list of 50 Films to See Before You Die and was ranked number 24 in Empire magazine’s “The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema” in 2010. Phil de Semlyen of Empire has described the work as “Klimov’s seriously influential, deeply unsettling Belarusian opus. No film – not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket – spells out the dehumanising impact of conflict more vividly, or ferociously … An impressionist masterpiece and possibly the worst date movie ever.” It ranked 154 among critics, and 30 among directors, in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made. The film is generally considered one of the greatest anti-war movies ever made, and one with the most historically accurate depictions of the crimes on the Eastern Front.

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 97%, based on 31 reviews, and an average rating of 8.4/10. The website’s critics consensus reads, “As effectively anti-war as movies can be, Come and See is a harrowing odyssey through the worst that humanity is capable of, directed with bravura intensity by Elem Klimov.”

Klimov did not make any more films after Come and See, leading some critics to speculate as to why. In 2001, Klimov said, “I lost interest in making films … Everything that was possible I felt I had already done.”