Come and See waited eight years for Soviet censors, then refused to compromise
Elem Klimov wanted the world to know about the hundreds of Belarusian villages burned during the Nazi occupation. Soviet film bureaucrats blocked his script as too realistic for eight years. When he finally shot it in 1984, nothing had been cut except the title, which had originally been Kill Hitler.
The 1985 film grew from I Am from the Fiery Village, a 1977 collection of survivor testimony co-written by Ales Adamovich, who had fought with Belarusian partisans as a teenager and co-wrote the screenplay with Klimov. Klimov recalled being struck that audiences abroad knew of the Katyn massacre of Polish officers yet had never heard of Khatyn, one of more than 600 Belarusian villages destroyed. The final title comes from the sixth chapter of the Book of Revelation, where onlookers are invited to witness the ruin brought by the Four Horsemen.
Goskino, the state cinema committee, dismissed the screenplay as naturalism and an aesthetic of dirt. Delays deepened after Klimov's wife, the director Larisa Shepitko, died in 1979, and he first completed her unfinished project, Farewell, released in 1983. When cameras finally rolled, the story of the teenage villager Flyora, who digs up a rifle to join the partisans in 1943, was filmed in sequence over nine months.
Klimov cast a 14-year-old non-professional, Aleksei Kravchenko, reasoning that a trained actor could shield himself behind technique. A hypnotist trained in autogenic methods helped prepare him, and Klimov worried openly about the boy's mental health. Kravchenko described extreme fatigue and a harsh diet. The grey hair he returned to school with was not caused by stress, as rumour holds, but by silver greasepaint and a fine layer of real silver that took a while to remove. Live ammunition was sometimes used, with bullets passing about 4 inches over his head.
Cinematographer Aleksei Rodionov relied on natural colour, Steadicam and extreme close-ups, blending hyper-realism with dreamlike surrealism. At the 14th edition of the Moscow festival it took the critics' FIPRESCI award, and it was Klimov's last before his death in 2003. Its reputation has only climbed: in 2022 directors polled by Sight & Sound placed it 41st among the greatest films ever made.
Source: Come and See
