"And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say 'Come and See', and I looked and beheld a pale horse: And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed 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." - King James Bible, Revelations Ch. 6 Verse 7-8
Today I did something that I've not done in quite a long time; I watched a movie. The movie's name is "Come and See", a biblical reference to witnessing hell unleashed on earth. At the end of this post, I will add a YouTube box for watching the movie, but first some background about the movie itself.
Steven Spielberg screened this movie before he made Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's list - two enormous Hollywood blockbusters. This movie, which I believe inspired the two more famous films, is barely known. It's one of the first films to use the hand-held camera to follow events - something that is so common now that we barely notice it any longer. The film is partly autobiographical. One of the two scriptwriters (Ales Adamovich) survived the events depicted in the film, and wrote about it in a book titled "Khatyn", and a memoir "I am from a fiery village". The books begat the film. The director, Elem Klimov, never made another film after this one.
The movie was filmed on the location of actual historical events in Belurus. It was made during the Soviet era, and it took the director 8 years to get past censors and make the uncensored film. There are no special effects in this movie. The gunfire is real, the sounds of the gunfire are real, and the explosions are real. The main character is a 14 year old boy who was not a trained actor, although he later became one. 'Come and See' takes a lot of its nuance from the Ingmar Bergman expressionist Swedish film genre, while at the same time confronting the harsh and ugly brutality of war.
The film begins in 1943, when the German army was moving through Belarus, rounding up civilians, and more or less culling them as vermin. Over 600 Belarussian villages were destroyed by the Nazis during WWII, along with their inhabitants. Harmless non-combatant civilians were targeted in a vicious program of human extermination. Everyone knows about the death camps - it's required education. Not everyone knows about this. I did not, anyway.
Initially I had a difficult time wrapping my head around the plot of the film, because I'm not well-versed on WWII history - especially on Germany's eastern front. To better understand the movie, I had to read up on what the film was trying to depict. So without exposing the entire plot of the film, I'll just explain the opening scene.
The village elder is calling for two boys to stop what they are doing and come out of hiding. The boys have been digging through an old battlefield, looking for weapons. The older boy wishes to find a weapon and become a "partisan" - a member of an irregular militia, or freedom fighter. Eventually he locates a buried rifle. This event is spotted by a Nazi surveillance plane, which has repurcussions for his village. In addition, the local freedom fighters learn of this, and they recruit him away to their camp.
Over the course of the film, the stress of events rapidly ages the boy. The movie has subtitles, but the dialog isn't what makes the movie work. Come and See is simply sad and horrific - if only because it all really happened. You must watch to the very end though. You might find yourself in tears at that point.
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