You Love to See It: Come and See (Patreon)

Elem Klimov’s Come and See ends with a grief-stricken and traumatized Belarusian boy, Flyora, shooting at a picture of Adolf Hitler he finds lying in a puddle. The scene is intercut and overlapped with footage — both real and fabricated — of Hitler’s life, which plays in reverse until the dictator appears as an infant in his mother’s arms. Flyora ceases shooting. He starts to cry, misery and frustration twisting his chapped and weathered features. What are we meant to realize in this moment? What has the film — the most brutal and relentless fictional chronicle of war ever made — prepared us to see, and to understand? That Flyora is reminded of Hitler’s humanity is clear, but beneath that is the more profound despair of coming to understand that there is no catharsis for the trauma of war, that victory and revenge are as fundamentally hollow as the senseless violence we see sweep back and forth over the Belarusian countryside.

The film’s many crisis images — to borrow a phrase from my dear friend Julia Gfrörer — reinforce this idea in brutal silence. A cow butchered by machine gun fire. A burning church full of screaming villagers. Flyora forced to pose at gunpoint for a Nazi group portrait. Only memory can reach into the past, and its comforts are cold and bitter, undoing nothing. Saving no one. There is no healing in war. There is no forgetting. Bomber planes scrawl lines of fire and blasted earth across vast forests. Petrol glistens as it soaks into heavy wool and drips from sunburned skin. This violence is a language, and like any language it may be forgotten but its influence can never be escaped — ten thousand, thousand thoughts have already plowed deep channels through the soft gray matter of the speaker’s mind. The experience of war is inescapable and vast, a secret country with no borders but the limits of flesh’s endurance.

And what else, in that terrible moment where violence reveals its ultimate impotence to make whole and to satisfy? The baby’s awful vulnerability. His mother’s sheltering love. Archetypal cultural axioms swept away on a billowing black wind heavy with the stench of burning flesh. The despair of it is almost too much to withstand, the anchor of harsh realism pinning even the most lunatic flights of fantastical viciousness directly to the viewer’s chest. Ales Adamovich, Klimov’s co-writer, was himself a survivor of the Belarusian massacres — the burning church is drawn directly from his own experiences — and it his his words, framed first by Klimov’s with which I’ll leave you: “I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to my screenplay coauthor, the writer Ales Adamovich. But he replied: "Let them not watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war, and as a plea for peace."”

— Elem Klimov