Document Your Own War Crimes
Elem Klimov’s "Come and See" (1985)
What I remember about the photos that came out of Abu Ghraib are the soldiers smiling. There’s one photo in particular: Iraqi prisoners in tarp hoods are piled up in a pyramid, and a soldier crouches behind them, her head tilted, her teeth flashing. Another American stands upright in the back, with his hands in bright hospital gloves, giving a thumbs up. The smile is not worse than the crime (what could be worse than human torture?) but it makes for a particular kind of offense. Among the prisoners naked and blindfolded, the men violated and smeared with shit, there the soldiers stood, not ashamed of their descent, but proud. Someone, of course, had to take the photo. That may be the strangest note of all. The pictures look somewhat like those taken by hunters and fishermen, showing off their catch, or the pictures from fraternity rituals. Evidence of one’s exploits.
That smile, that thumb’s up, and the fact of the photograph: these are the territory of Come and See, a 1985 film by the Soviet director Elem Klimov. The movie tells the history of the Nazi occupation of Belarus, showing us the destruction of one village, a fraction of the three-year genocide. It is a movie about looking, as the Biblical title suggests, specifically what it means to look at death. So much of the film consists of frontal close-ups, centered portraits, with a character staring us right down. There are a hundred variations of the same pose: You could stitch together a story from these shots alone, changing the character and the backdrop, as the faces turn from pristine to dirt-caked and tattered. The protagonist, a teenage boy named Flyora, has a face that keeps the score, as he joins the Belarusian partisans fighting the Nazis and watches horrors that should not be known to the young.
It has been a long time since a film so wrecked me, although I will say that I used to find something vulgar in that manner of response: as if the relevant point were how difficult the history is for us to see now, rather than how brutal it was for those who lived and died in it. But Klimov tells us, through Flyora’s face, that it is a burden to look, and that we are not wrong to speak about the demands of having to “come and see.” Looking ages and harrows us. Certainly, it ages Flyora. For the history of the dead, looking is the least we can do; but it is no small act.
Six hundred twenty-eight villages were massacred in Belarus, as a title card flashes. The massacre in the depicted village, told closely from the stories of survivors, went like this: the villagers—men, women, and children—were corralled into a wooden building. The adults were told that if they left their children behind them, they could walk out and be saved. Very few left. The building was shut and then doused with gasoline and set on fire by Molotov cocktails thrown one after another, with barbaric redundancy. Interviews with the filmmakers describe the building as a shed or a meeting hall, but its high architecture recalls a steeple, and the fire evokes not just the primitive horror of a barn burning but the bombing of churches.
War movies are risky aesthetic objects, especially when they have grand scenes of destruction. They tend to simplify and glamorize. Big-budget directors produce spectacles of battle that we enjoy like fireworks. Or else they tell a single story, turning what is a mass phenomenon into one person’s compelling narrative. Critics have often suggested that it is impossible to make an anti-war movie, because films always argue, in a way, for what they show. Being represented is itself a kind of distinction. The antidote, in some recent successful movies about war and political violence, is to avoid showing at all, to suggest and imply the violence off-stage (as in, for example, Christian Petzold’s Transit).
Come and See pursues a different approach. It finds a balance between restraint and immersion; it makes us shudder to think of what has happened off-screen, or what is glimpsed for a moment, and then it makes us bear the whole fact of a village dying. The first violence is displaced, intimated by dolls with X-ed out eyes on the floor (a symbol of Flyora’s dead family). For much of the movie we don’t see the worst of it, the shooting, the pillaging. It is shown obliquely, through the eyes of one character, in a perfectly controlled scene: Flyora and a girl run past tens of bodies stacked like firewood behind a house, and he misses them, but she looks. The camera cuts to the bodies for a moment, still in running motion, before the girl turns her head away again in terror.
The technical aspects of the film advance those dual approaches. Klimov often has the blank acting found in Bresson, where the audience is left to provide what the actors leave out; but he also indulges Tarkovsky’s cinematic lyricism, with shots of forests and landscapes as stirring as anything in the Zone. The camera is stationary and locks off sometimes, but in other moments it moves with the eerie fly-through effect of a Steadicam. Opposites are mustered for the sake of conveying war’s strangeness. Surreal moments when exotic birds wander through the forest; frightening realism in the flesh wounds. There will be spectacle and noise, because those belong to horror. And there will be quiet, because that belongs, too. Horror is sometimes screaming and sometimes muteness.
It is a film of continuing bleakness, the only mood accurate to Belarusian history. The partisans steal a cow, but three of the four die, and then the cow dies, and no food is brought back. Tracer bullets from the Nazis streak red over the field, with video game pews, terrifying and modern. In one farcical scene, the soldiers build an effigy of Hitler and deliver it to the Germans. Flyora is made to contribute. “Soft hair—as soft as a child’s,” one man says, cutting Flyora’s hair, which becomes Hitler’s. I thought in that moment of how powerful tautology can be in metaphor. “Y por las calles la sangre de los niños / corría simplemente, como sangre de niños,” Neruda writes. “And through the streets the blood of these children / ran simply, like the blood of children.” There are things so awful that they can only be referred back to themselves. When the writer Ales Abramovich, on whose work this film is based, discussed the true massacre, he turned to comparisons: this is our Belorusian Hiroshima, our Belorusian Lidice, and our Belorusian Oradour. The claim is made by analogy to other insufficiently understood events. But each massacre is really its own; this, Khatyn, is the Belorusian Khatyn. Soft hair—as soft as a child’s.
“Come and see,” that moral imperative. Also, as in Abu Ghraib, our debasement: the excitement to advertise one’s crimes. There are two scenes of photography in this film, with the first mocking, hideously, the second. In that first one, the partisans, at their camp in the woods, outfitted for war, take a group photo. One partisan walks a cow over—let’s get it in frame—and on the cow’s hide, we read in white paint: “eat me before the Germans do.” The film roll has been used already, and the photographer has a Hitler mustache. It’s a whimsical mockery. The second photograph comes near the end of the film. By this point, the village has been set on fire. Flyora is standing outside. The Germans pull him over, like an animal or a prop, and take their picture with him. They then drop him, miraculously, alive. But the point of the first mockery is only then realized: It existed to tell us that the partisans know the Germans are keeping a record.
The moment of Flyora’s portrait prepares us for the montage that closes the film. Klimov’s great stroke was to switch, abruptly, in the closing scenes, to archival footage from the Eastern Front. In the first picture from the montage, we see a mangled face with blank eyes and mouth black and agape. There are flies on the face, and they start jumping and crawling. It is a video, not a photograph. The killers have filmed their holocaust. You have not seen the half of it, the montage says, just when I believed that there could be nothing worse than what Klimov staged.
Then the whole history of Nazi Germany plays onscreen. Famous reels of film—Hitler’s crowds, tanks on fields, airplanes overhead—all the way back, finally, to a composite picture of Hitler sitting on his mother’s lap, as a baby. Everything plays in reverse, with people marching backwards, and it goes quickly. The playing-in-reverse is not a gimmick; it is an unwinding of history, and a reminder of what can still be done with film. Come and See has breaks in editing, “errors,” perhaps, of continuity, when the light changes between shots in a single scene. Its editing suggests that film has unused resources—that the old Russian experiments in montage, from the 1920s, could be put to use again. Violence is often disjunct, not continuous with what we understand as reality, and its representation needs ways of replicating, through editing, that disjunction.
This is not a war movie, but a genocide movie. It tells us that the Nazis, at least in the East, were not efficient and civilized; they moved like marauding gangs. They were proud of their cruelty. They wanted a record of it. It remains a strange fact that people document their own war crimes. Strange, and true. “I have seen the executioners singing joyfully,” a Polish poet wrote. That is what Klimov understands: the pride, frenzy, and glee in a genocide—not worse than the killing itself, but disturbing for what is says about the human soul.
The next few posts will be a round-up of recent films: Wang Bing’s Youth (a masterpiece), Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (a mediocrity, alas), and Koreeda Hirokazu’s Monster (somewhere in between those two, I think). And then a return to form in 2024, with some good classics again. Thanks again to everybody for reading. — Matthew